The problem, of course, is that ‘exercise’ in popular culture has been deemed as a discipline in its own right, and, giving it more weight, it has been popularised as the discipline to increase health, fitness, and even performance. That wouldn’t be a problem if the ‘health and fitness’ industry actually sold half of what it claimed to. When it comes to human movement I’ve seen more impressive skill, control, ability, aesthetics, health, fitness and fun in dance studios, martial arts dojo’s, in skate-parks, in the street and parks and even in the sea than I ever have in any commercial, mainstream Globo-Gym.

But we can’t let it stop there – not with the disciplines. Disciplines are not invulnerable to poisoning and once the labels ‘health’, ‘fitness’ and ‘exercise’ start being used for promotion, the bullshit starts. In the worst-case scenarios, bastard children such as ‘Boxercise’, ‘YogaFit’ and ‘Zumba’ are born. With more and more people growing disillusioned toward the ‘health and fitness’ industry and the soul destroying offer of endless exercise, the business has done what any good business would to a slowly-dying cash cow; they’ve re-packaged it.

The truth is exercise will not cure your ailments. It’s scope is too small, its design for performance enhancement, not life change. And whilst regular, intense exercise does carry the ability to bring about drastic physical (and consequentially psychological) change for those who have really let shit hit the fan, if sedentary movement habits continue to dominate the remainder of their lives their progress will be marred, halted, even made worse further down the line. As Forencich reiterates in Exuberant Animal, ‘Movement is not something to be concentrated in a specialized location at a particular hour of the day. Rather, movement is a way of life.’

Whilst committing to exercise means changing your evening schedule, committing to movement means changing your lifestyle. It requires you not only to cultivate a new relationship with your body and your movement (in)ability, but also to let movement weave it’s way throughout the seams of your daily business, not for the sake of getting ‘fitter’ or ‘healthier’, but because this is what you can and are supposed to do: MOVE. By thwarting movement and synthesizing it into remedies such as ‘exercise’ to be packaged and sold by multi-billion dollar conglomerates, we are selling out not only on the animal nature of our corporeal existence, but also on the passion and joy – the exuberance – to be enjoyed in indulging in your bodies desire for physical activity and expression of all kinds.