Transcript: How Judgmental Fitness Content Hurts Beginners (Even When It's Not About Them)

And now it's time for something completely different. What's up, my movers and shakers? Famous Ashley Grant here. Welcome to More Movement, Please, the podcast where I hope to inspire you to move your body more. Just wanted to let you guys know that I am stepping back from the mic for a bit. Not because I'm done, far from it. I'm just gonna spend the next few weeks pouring my energy into building out the community so that you guys have more ways to move more often with more support.

While I do that, I've asked some folks that I trust to take over the show for a while. Today I'm handing things over to Dominic Angelino. Dominic has been on the show a couple of times, and he's lost over 130 pounds at the age of 14. He accidentally became his high school's go -to fitness advisor, and he turned all that into a double major in exercise science and psychology, plus two master's degrees. Today he works across research, content creation, and product design with one goal, helping as many people as possible at once. Let's get into today's episode. One thing I've been thinking about a lot lately is that a lot of fitness communities online are pretty intimidating to the average person who's just trying to explore fitness, wants to be a bit healthier, and is self -conscious and scared of being judged or what have you. It's something that I think matters, right? Because people feel

better. when they feel safe and people are more likely to succeed when they feel safe and when they feel like they're able to explore the things they want to explore to facilitate attainment of whatever their goals happen to be but there are a lot of fitness spaces online that are you know geared towards being very judgmental hypercritical and very rigid more focused on social signaling and posturing than being supportive and you know it's like fine for communities to exist that work with the audience that fits them however there is this kind of like interesting thing that happens when communities of that sort are fostered the members of that audience end up then being exposed to general fitness content pretty much anywhere and they translate the normalized behavior from like that parent community to new communities that they encounter like uh I guess, like, a less abstract example of what I mean

is, like, let's say person A watches a creator who's, like, super judgmental. Like, the vibe is just, like, everybody who does this is stupid. Or, like, this person's, like, super wrong, etc. And, like, takes a more, like, hostile, kind of, like, status -oriented approach than that. kind of framing becomes normalized and then the members of the audience when they consume other fitness content which they're likely to do you know just do like algorithms right like you watch one fitness video you're probably going to get another or some sort at some point um they are more likely to repeat that sort of framing or messaging when they leave comments which then kind of infects other fitness spaces and makes them less accessible and were intimidating for people who are newer to the space or who don't really, I guess, mesh with that type of content.

And it's interesting, right? Because that then creates an impression online for a lot of people where fitness is not welcoming. It is very judgmental. And there are people in the space who do adopt that sort of framing, which is a very real problem. So I guess what I'm really saying is that I feel like the downstream effect of creators being more judgmental condescending and kind of like taking that sort of approach can actually harm and negatively affect people outside of their primary audiences who are you know audiences that are looking for that approach but because those people then go out to other comment sections and have other conversations with people in their lives and that can inhibit healthy behaviors several steps removed from the creator so something that i imagine a lot of people aren't really like aware of like i know most creators won't be coming from a bad place or anything or actually

intend to do harm to somebody but it is something that does have a real effect on people out there downstream and i don't know it's just some sort of thing that i think is worth considering with responsible content creation in the fitness space that people just don't happen to consider and i also want to like point out like i know there are a lot of like welcoming and positive communities out there. And that's great. And those people don't necessarily have this sort of like negative impact downstream. It's just that the spaces that are a bit more rigid, more critical, more judgmental, et cetera, they do have an outsized impact from my understanding. Thanks for tuning in to More Movement, Please. I hope the messages from today's episode inspired you. If you'd like more content, check out our Patreon. And if you'd like to be on the show, head over to famousashleygrant.com backslash fitness. Onwards and upwards,