resistance training

I’m relatively new to resistance training. The stress of finishing graduate school and securing a job took its toll in my late 20s. I threw everything into work. I was overweight, over-caffeinated, drinking too much, sleeping too little, and my nerves and digestive system were constantly on the fritz. For a number reasons, thankfully, I started turning to fitness in my early 30s. I found weight rooms and weight lifters to be friendly and supportive. And, most importantly, through resistance training I finally felt in control of my health. Each week I could add weight, or add reps, and I could see the difference. “Whoa, I benched my bodyweight! Dips? Weighted pull-ups? I couldn’t even do 1 of either of those in my 20s!!” The physical gains had knock-on effects for my mental health.

The weight room, both then and now, feels to me to be the embodiment of self-help. Of merit. Of connecting action to impact. I’m certainly not alone. For many, the gym becomes the dominant conceptual metaphor they use to assess choice and responsibility. The barbell becomes a symbol of achievement ideology. The meritocratic ideal. I find myself sliding into this idiom at times. The slippage between weight room and life, however, creates problems. (And, to be blunt, I’m not convinced the weight room metaphor is an accurate account of actual weight rooms.) There is a chapter in Forrest Stuart’s (2016) excellent ethnography Down, Out, and Under Arrest that, I think, rewards a close read.

In chapter 3, “Training for Survival,” Stuart follows a men’s weightlifting group on Skid Row. Here’s his description:

This group of about thirteen men cleared debris from the sidewalk to perform physical exercises together three or four days a week. Through their workout routines, they carved out a small but cohesive community amid the turbulence of Skid Row. […]

When the men reflected on their former lives, they overwhelmingly described addiction in terms of an alienated and antagonistic relationship between their body, driven primarily by the need to satisfy physical sensations, and their mind, which became increasingly overpowered.

For its members, the group was a site of self-help and resistance to pervasive policing.

[…] they used their time together to formulate what we might think of as a folk ethnography of policing, in which they attempted to model police “psychology” — the general tendencies and considerations motivating officer behavior. By sharing these experiences, they built a collective repository of knowledge about precisely which characteristics make some individuals more likely than others to attract police scrutiny. Throughout these exchanges, the men tended to explain police intervention as determined primarily by a potential suspect’s outward appearances and associations.

Weight training was in significant part about becoming ‘copwise’. The men “collaborated to make seemingly unpredictable police interventions more legible and manipulable.” As Stuart memorably puts it, “getting ‘jacked’ at the weight pile thus constituted a means to better escape getting ‘jacked up’ by the police.”

This resistance strategy, however, has costs:

Their approach to surviving Skid Row involved actively reconstructing the defining conditions of incarceration, locking themselves away in their SRO [single room occupancy housing] “cells” save for a few hours in which they ventured outside to engage in recreation at the weight pile.

Likewise, territorial stigma encouraged the cultivation of ‘infra-differences’ that cut against a wider potential for solidarity against arbitrary policing:

They invested considerable energy in their performances of infra-differences, in hopes of escaping officers’ default assumptions of criminality. Specifically, they minimized the scrutiny and suspicion they might otherwise draw form officers by amplifying the symbolic and physical distance that separated them from those they viewed as “belonging” in Skid Row. While these efforts did provide some reprieve from police contact, and even reinforced the therapeutic capacity of the weight pile, they did so at the expense of validating and exacerbating the same territorial stigma pressing down on them.

Stepping back, a few limits of the ‘resistance training as training for resistance’ view come into focus. Many of us are set up to fail. Vitally, when we do in fact fail — whether or not we’re members of a literal weight pile — a narrow focus on liberation through the control of one’s body risks personalizing that failure and exonerating the wider institutions, political decisions, and non-decisions that all but guarantee a negative outcome.

I don’t mean to suggest it must be this way. But I see others, and myself, often subtly slide into this worldview, particularly when it comes to issues of addiction. To my mind, in short, Stuart’s chapter nicely expresses a few of the limits, possibilities, and messy politics of weight-room style solidarity.