Why Fitness Conquered the 21st Century (And What It Taught Me)

I got into lifting around 2004.

At the time, there were no fitness influencers. The concept didn’t exist. The most famous people in the industry were IFBB bodybuilders, a handful of coaches who had published books, and a few writers you knew only from their magazine bylines.

If you wanted to learn how to do an exercise, you read a written description with a few photos and figured it out. If you wanted to see how the pros trained, you ordered VHS tapes from the back of Muscular Development.

To be successful meant opening a gym. To be mega successful meant getting published in a magazine.

Personal training was considered a dead-end job for attractive idiots who couldn’t get real work. Or wannabe actors in LA killing time between auditions. I was in LA. I saw both.

There was nothing glamorous or aspirational about fitness then.

Fast forward to now.

Fitness is a multi-billion dollar industry. There are content creators with millions of followers. There are fitness entrepreneurs who are legitimate centimillionaires. Gymshark is a billion-dollar company. The category of “athleisure” didn’t exist twenty years ago. Now it dominates retail.

Practices that were underground are fully mainstream. There are teenagers openly documenting their steroid use to “looksmaxx” with zero hesitation. The old science is being rediscovered. Paleo, circadian health, peptides, EMFs…what was fringe is now cutting edge.

The question that nagged me for years: why?

Why did fitness explode when so many other industries contracted? Why did this particular domain produce so many successful creators when other fields struggle to sustain attention?

I recently read Dan Koe’s piece on the future of work. It crystallized something I’d intuited for a long time but never articulated cleanly.

The future of work when work is meaningless

The answer is simple. Fitness is innately meaningful.

In an increasingly digitized, abstracted, and commodified world, the mind-body experience is the last bastion of truth and reality. You cannot fake the weight on the bar. You cannot outsource the burn in your lungs. The qualia of lived experience runs soul deep.

People don’t train because exercise is interesting. Trainers might find programming fascinating, but regular people don’t care about periodization theory.

People train because they want progress. They want to see themselves change. They want to become someone they weren’t before.

Struggle. Overcoming limits you thought were fixed.

Progress. Measurable, undeniable, visible in the mirror.

Status. Becoming a version of yourself that others recognize and respect.

These aren’t fitness-specific desires. These are human desires. Fitness just happens to be one of the few remaining domains where you can pursue them directly, without institutional gatekeeping, without credentialism, without asking permission.

You can start tomorrow. You can measure your progress weekly. You can see the results in your own reflection.

In a world where most paths to meaning have been captured by bureaucracies and algorithms, the gym remains free.

I consider myself fortunate to have ridden this wave.

I’d like to claim I had exceptional foresight. I didn’t. Not in any way I could have articulated at the time.

What I had were two core beliefs.

First: people want to be healthy. Health is the foundation of everything. It’s the greatest form of wealth. Change someone’s health and you change their life.

Second: people will always struggle to be healthy. The same way they struggle to earn enough money or maintain good relationships. It’s part of the core trifecta of human needs.

The struggle is permanent because we are human.

In 2013, the editor of Muscle & Fitness contacted me to write articles. He found me on Facebook. I’d been posting daily training and philosophy updates for two years. He followed me and liked my writing.

A few months later, John Meadows reached out and asked if I’d work under him. Same story. He read my posts. He liked my thinking.

In 2017, I went all in on building a personal brand online.

People told me I was making a mistake. “You really want to be online this much?” “Building a business around posting seems like a waste of time.”

They didn’t understand the medium. They didn’t understand the message. They didn’t see where the future was heading.

The bet paid off.

Here’s what I learned.

The fitness creators who win are not the ones with the best information. Information is free. Any LLM can write you a program now. Any app can track your macros.

The creators who win are sense-makers. They help people understand what matters and what doesn’t. They have a philosophy, not just a method. They have taste, they can distinguish signal from noise when everyone else is drowning in content.

And they have narrative. They can answer the question that no algorithm can: why does this matter to me?

AI will make programming trivial. The scarce skill is meaning.

The industry is bifurcating. On one side, automated fitness services; cheap, efficient, commoditized.

On the other, meaning-centered experiences; expensive, personalized, narrative-rich, human.

The fitness professionals who will survive and thrive will be the ones who understand they’re not selling workouts. They’re selling transformation stories. They’re selling identity.

This is the part where most essays like this end with generic advice.

“Build community.”

“Focus on meaning.”

“Be human in an AI world.”

I’m not going to do that.

Instead I’ll tell you what I’m doing.

I spent a decade learning that embodiment is meaningful, that physical transformation changes people at the level of identity, that the domains which survive are the ones rooted in irreducible human experience.

Now I’m applying that lesson somewhere else.

Fitness taught me that the things which matter are the things you can’t abstract away. The body. The struggle. The visible proof that you showed up and did the work.

Manufacturing is the same.

A country that can’t build things is a country that has abstracted itself into irrelevance. Just like a person who never trains, never tests themselves, never confronts physical reality.

I’ve spent ten years telling men to build their bodies. Now I’m building something bigger.

American manufacturing is broken. I’m going to fix a piece of it.

More soon.