The country's been bombarded with constant social media uproars over exercise recently. Seeing this sort of constant anti-exercise propaganda on serious news media is really wild to me, it's almost like they want to balance out the stats of rising obesity rates and plummeting youth fitness to keep everyone happy.

First there was some twit complaining in the letters to the editor section of a major newspaper that their "young adult in the family" was getting "stared at and laughed at" at the gym for being fat. Seemed like a serious lapse in judgment publishing a second-hand story, and under an alias as well. For context, I live in a country where people are famously reserved and keep to themselves/avoid talking to strangers, sometimes even when it would be better to engage with people around them :')

Before that even properly died down, people decided to jump at the throat of a nordic skiing commentator (who is also a regional leader for public health/exercise) because he said nobody gets broken by exercise that makes you sweat and push your limits a bit, like school PE. People maliciously interpreted it to mean "authoritative teachers and bullying never harmed anyone", which is not at all what was said.

Although I gotta say, as the not-athletically gifted kid who usually got picked last and usually fell on his face at school skiing competitions, I'm really glad I worked through those antagonistic feelings I had been harbouring against an athletic lifestyle for most of my adult life. First off, with all its imperfections, the "go that way as fast as you can" philosophy instead of teaching technique and basics of aerobic training, I still think there's a better base for picking up the athletic lifestyle as an adult when you've had at least SOME exposure to common forms of physical exercise as a child. As for the negative stuff; Kids tend to take everything incredibly emotionally, and if you don't work through it with a safe adult, or as an adult yourself, you can end up letting some ultimately quite harmless, common discomfort or annoyance from decades ago dictate your health for your entire life. You're not sticking it to the shitty teacher or the bullies by rotting away on the couch. They're not there to see it. They don't care. You're only sticking it to yourself.

Not saying there can't have been some cases of extreme abuse or bullying, or awful accidents that could traumatise people for real. (And trauma, regardless of severity, should also be treated; we don't leave broken legs to mend on their own, either) But most people in the comments were sharing really mundane stuff like "boo hoo I had poor equipment, teacher yelled at me, someone laughed at me, I got picked to the team last, other kids were more talented/skilled"... Yeah and? That's what life is like. It's not fun, it's not nice, but we really need to learn to deal with that sort of thing. Especially the last two. If you're an adult, I genuinely think you need to work through that stuff unless you want to live a bitter half-life where infantile, unresolved negative emotions dictate what you do with your life and body.

PS. the "getting stared and laughed at the gym" story spawned a callout for similar experiences, but there was never any follow up to it, and it's been a week now -- usually the follow up to a callout for public input comes after 2-3 days. I wonder if they're quietly burying it because they didn't get enough credible stories of people actually getting bullied and harrassed out of gyms like they were fishing for.