You do not talk about Fight Club (enough)


Pilates does seem to triple the price of any class it touches—true that. But we don't have to do pilates. We can join a club... Yulia did—and lived to tell the tale. The article was written by the wonderful Yulia Levina in my "Writing with The Guardian" course, but I can totally see it in the actual The Guardian.

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You do not talk about Fight Club (enough)

Every Tuesday and Thursday, at 6 pm a 30-year-old woman drops whatever it is that she is doing and heads for a run-down five-floor building. There, she makes a beeline for a cramped and cluttered room that smells like dirty socks, changes into cheap-looking shorts made of polyester (the kind that makes this annoying swishing sound when you rub it) and goes straight to the boxing ring.

Record scratch. Freeze frame. Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got here?

Just like all the other women I’ve ever met, I was traumatized by PE lessons at school. Subjecting myself to this torture again? No, thank you. And this seemed to be the dominating narrative—until recently.

One winter evening, as I was scrolling my Instagram feed, indulging in good old bedtime revenge procrastination, a shocking paradigm shift became obvious: trauma was out, and sport was in. Dozens of influencers suddenly took up pilates, praising its ability to ‘improve mental clarity and develop inner awareness’ (me neither).

Alongside this beautiful gibberish, they also mentioned freedom from back pain, which did sound tempting. However, I knew that pilates wasn’t for me because a) it’s so cliche b) I can’t afford it as this magic word alone seems to triple the price of any class it touches. Yoga, gym, running and the likes of them weren’t exactly my idea of fun, too, and I almost gave up… until I discovered that combat sports were an option.

My first time in the boxing gym seemed to be a disaster bingo: the place looked miserable, the coach too young, and the group too diverse, with surly middle-aged men, restless teenage boys, and even a tiny girl whose angelic pigtails stood in sharp contrast with the shabby punching bags and menacing-looking ring. However, it turned out that exercise doesn’t have to look pretty. It has to be effective and fun enough for you to want to go back next week, and the week after that, and the week after that… need I say that the class turned out to be both? Besides—newsflash—back pain does disappear if you spend at least two evenings away from your laptop, and so do low mood, chronic fatigue, brain fog, insomnia and poor posture.

Now, three years in the club, I’m grateful to the influencers that nudged me to reconsider the benefits of sport, but I’m not quite sure how I feel about the limited number of options they mention. It seems that in the world of social media, it’s not exercise itself that matters, but rather how Instagrammable it is. But why should the same principle apply to us, mere mortals, who don’t eat avocado toast for breakfast or spend their days lounging around in aesthetic spaces? After all, we just want our stupid backs to hurt less.

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Image credit: Yulia Levina

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