Fitness spaces should foster joy, strength, healing, and community. Yet people often come to me with experiences of feeling watched, measured, or left out when trying to access the care their body needs. Marginalized folks feel these impacts the most – and it’s why decolonizing societal norms and practices around health is essential for wellness spaces.
What People Mean By Decolonizing Fitness
When people talk about decolonizing fitness, they’re naming a shift away from systems that treat thinness, whiteness, productivity, and “discipline” as the default markers of health and worth. Instead, the goal of movement becomes something that affirms all body types, cultures, abilities, and identities.
This type of approach isn’t a single program or trend. It’s a lens – one that asks:
- Who is fitness designed for?
- Whose bodies are treated as the standard?
- Who gets labeled unhealthy, lazy, or “undesirable”?
- What gets ignored when we focus on appearance above everything else?
Decolonized movement centers function, access, autonomy, and dignity. It challenges “one right way” narratives and replaces them with: What helps you feel strong, supported, and at home in your body – today?
The “New Year, New Me” Context
From my work as a physical therapist and personal trainer in Austin, I often see the “New Year, New You” season as one of the loudest times of the year for fitness messaging, which can be energizing for a lot of people.
This framing also runs the risk of perpetuating racism, ableism, classism, fat phobia, and heteronormativity in health spaces – making decolonized approaches to fitness especially important.
Language couched in wellness speak is not exempt – its subtext often plays into beauty standards that historically center thinness, whiteness, youth, and physical ability as the ideal.
January Reveals Inaccessibility
The resolution season often assumes:
- you have time to workout
- you have money for a gym, childcare, and equipment
- you feel safe in public spaces
- your body tolerates high-intensity training
- you can recover without consequences
Those assumptions don’t hold for a lot of people – especially for folks navigating racism and economic stress, those living with disability, chronic pain, or chronic illness, and people in bigger bodies. When the plan collapses, the culture blames the individual, not the system.
An investigation into Austin’s urban green spaces highlights the inequalities we’re talking about. It found that predominantly white, higher-income neighborhoods with sustained civic engagement had the most access to urban green space – a trend that all too often presents itself in other areas of wellness access.
Reframe Wellness Resolutions
If you like the New Year energy, you don’t have to ditch it – reframe it:
- From “I need to get my body under control” to “I want to build capacity for my real life”
- From all-or-nothing to “I’m choosing movement that feels good”
- From “results by March” to “sustainable habits that help me manage stress, travel, flare-ups, and hard weeks”
- From discipline-as-punishment to support (community, coaching, access, and rest)
This keeps the hopeful part of resolutions – reflection, intention, and renewal – without recycling beauty standards and shame.
How White Supremacy Shows Up In Fitness Culture
When we say “white supremacy” in this context, we’re talking about broad, systemic norms that historically set white bodies, western aesthetics, and Eurocentric cultural values as the “neutral”, “ideal,” or “professional” standard for everyone.
In gyms and wellness spaces, that can look like:
Narrow “Ideal Body” Standards
Fitness marketing often spotlights a very specific body: thin, lean, able-bodied, youthful, conventionally attractive, usually white, usually cisgender, and often presented as the end goal – rather than one version of many.
Overreliance On Simplistic Metrics
BMI is a classic example: widely used, easy to calculate, and often treated like a verdict. But major medical organizations have highlighted its limitations and the harms of using BMI as a standalone measure.
Hyper-Control and Moralizing Health
Colonial systems prize control, productivity, and compliance. In fitness spaces, that shows up in workout programming with rigid rules, shame-based coaching, and approaching bodies as projects to manage. Moralizing health with language like “clean eating,” “earn your meal,” “no excuses,” or “burn it off” uses shame to drive compliance – which especially harms people with a history of disordered eating, food insecurity, and chronic illness.
Beauty Standards, Weight Stigma, and Racism
Another one of the biggest traps in fitness culture is the shortcut:
“You look a certain way” → “You must be healthy (or unhealthy).”
Appearance tells you very little about someone’s blood pressure, lab results, sleep, stress load, access to care, strength, or cardio fitness.
And when fitness centers appearance, it often leads to:
- shame-driven behavior changes (which rarely last)
- higher injury rates (pushing through pain to “prove” discipline)
- avoidance of gyms and healthcare (especially for marginalized folks)
- constant sense of failure – even when gaining strength and capability
It’s also important to note that beauty standards develop alongside racialized and misogynistic hierarchies. Fat phobia is not neutral and did not emerge by accident. To learn more, explore the work of scholars like Sabrina Strings, who connects societal fears of fat Black women to the development of modern America’s fat phobia.
In the same vein, research on weight stigma demonstrates how fat phobia worsens physical health outcomes. Shame and fear, the opposite of what healthcare should look like, leads to people in bigger bodies experiencing more stress from discrimination and receiving poorer quality of care due to systemic anti-fat bias.
Decolonizing With Inclusive Fitness
This isn’t just theory. It shows up in everyday choices – how we coach, cue, program, and talk.
Language Without Shame
You don’t need a weight-loss goal to justify moving your body.
Try functional goals like:
- “I want my knees to feel better on stairs”
- “I want to carry groceries without my back flaring up”
- “I want to feel steadier on my feet”
You can also try replacing loaded terms like “earn your food” and “no excuses” with kinder language. Food can nourish and fuel your life. Movement should support your body for where it’s at in the moment.
Building Sustainable Fitness
A decolonized approach to fitness respects that barriers are real, which includes: money, time, childcare, disability, chronic illness, dysphoria, safety, transportation, work schedules, fatigue, and trauma history.
“Meet people where they are” isn’t a slogan – it’s the plan.
Coaching With Consent And Autonomy
Coaching can be direct and also respectful.
That means:
- offering options (instead of one “right” version)
- explaining the why behind care practices
- checking in about pain, dizziness, breath, and overwhelm
- treating “no” as valid data
Accessible Gym Space
True inclusion at the gym shows up in equipment variety. That looks like: supportive benches for all body types, a spectrum of strength training equipment (including kettlebells, resistance bands, and barbells), and weights with enough range to meet everyone’s capacity.
It also comes from utilizing gender affirming policies and signage, having trauma-informed class structures, and training staff to embody inclusive values.
Our Approach At OutWellness
At OutWellness, we treat movement as a health support – not a morality test.
If you want to explore what inclusive wellness looks like for you, here are a few ways to plug in:
- Find out about us and how we approach inclusive care
- Build strength and community at our classes and events
- Use physical therapy or personal training to build capacity, manage pain, and heal in a 1-on-1 setting
- Keep learning in our Resource Hub
- When you’re ready, you can schedule with us
You Deserve Affirming Care
Decolonizing fitness means a return to function, joy, sustainability, and respect. It’s movement that doesn’t ask you to disappear parts of yourself to belong.
You don’t have to “fix” your body or chase an aesthetic to be worthy of care. You get to define what health means in your life – and what kind of movement feels affirming.
