If you search for “fitness” or “self-improvement” on YouTube today, you will likely find two things. The first is generic advice on protein intake. The second is a pipeline to the far-right.

For too long, the Left has ceded the territory of physical fitness, discipline, and self-improvement to the Right. We have allowed far-right reactionaries to monopolise the concept of personal responsibility. We have let figures like Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson become the primary voices telling young men and women that they have the power to change their lives.

Politics is not just about debates over tax rates; it is about ideas, passions and identity.

The Right understands this. They offer young people, especially young men, a story about strength, overcoming adversity, and becoming a “better” version of themselves. The Right’s fitness aesthetic is to create “hardness”, a type of fetishisation of muscle as armour against weakness and femininity. Their fitness is competitive, hierarchical, and individualistic.

The Left, by contrast, often offers only critique. We tell people how the system is rigged, which is true, but we rarely tell them how to live within it while we fight to change it.

Young people seek fitness for identity, respect and meaning as much as they seek actual physical health. If the Left engages here, we can help turn that desire for respect into a desire for class dignity and collective strength, rather than right-wing hierarchy.

This is why I believe the Left must engage with fitness culture, as a core political battleground and an essential part of political materialism. We can promote healthiness, fitness that emphasises solidarity and interdependence rather than individual hardening. By engaging in fitness culture, we must change the mode of fitness to focus on team-building, community and agency.

Fitness as a form of “unalienated labour”

To understand why the gym appeals to millions of young people, we need to realise that under capitalism, we are alienated from what we produce at work.

When you work at a coffee shop, law firm or in an Amazon warehouse, you do not own the product of your work. The harder you work, the richer your boss gets, not you. You are separated (alienated) from the thing you create.

For gig workers and the precarious new petit-bourgeoisie this is even worse. A young person can work three jobs and still never afford a house.

Wealth is accumulated through inheritance and assets, not hard work. The link between effort and reward has been severed, although the culture-industry and prevailing neoliberal ideology pushes the powerful idea that we live in a free meritocracy.

Fitness is one of the few activities where the link between effort and reward remains real and tangible. There is a profound material reality to exercise: No one can lift the weights for you.

You cannot outsource a squat. You cannot inherit a deadlift. No manager can take the endurance you build through jogging and transfer it to their own bank account.

Through getting fit, you own the means of production (your body) and you own the product (your strength and health).

This is unalienated labour — or perhaps it could alternatively be understood as reclaiming the means of production. When you lift a weight, you feel a direct cause-and-effect relationship that the capitalist economy denies you. Under capitalism our bodies are the only tool we really possess — getting fit surrenders our main weapon of resistance and autonomy.

If the Left dismisses or ignores this, we are dismissing the only experience of fair labour many people, especially young people and men have ever had.

Escaping social infantilisation

There is a harder pill the Left needs to swallow. People who hold left-wing politics can be especially susceptible to “social infantilisation.”

The “administered world” of late capitalism turns us into passive consumers. We rely on the system for everything: our entertainment, our food, our comfort.

The food industry is a branch of this culture industry. Keeping the working class and everyday people addicted to sugar and ultra-processed food is a form of corporate and billionaire control. Reclaiming food and health is striking a blow against corporate power.

Neoliberalism and capitalism purposely depletes us, infantilises us. It steals our agency and siphons our energy.

On the Left, we often analyse the world through systems. We correctly identify that poverty is systemic, not a personal failing. However, there is a risk that this structural analysis creates a psychology of powerlessness. If everything is the system’s fault, then we have no agency.

Exercise can become a political corrective.

Exercise forces us to take personal responsibility. The barbell does not care about neoliberalism. The treadmill does not care about the decline of the unions. You either do the work, or you don’t.

Political struggle requires power. A frail working class cannot seize power. Celebrating weakness is a form of repressive tolerance that makes us neutralise ourselves, and makes us unable to challenge the status quo.

Engaging in fitness allows leftists to break the habit of learned helplessness. It reminds us that while we cannot individually fix capitalism, we can take charge of our own physical reality.

Furthermore, health is the most fundamental material need. By taking responsibility for it, we stop acting like passive subjects of neoliberalism and technofeudalism.

Yes, the exhaustion and physically draining nature of work is a designed feature of our economic system; this is precisely why we need to take that energy back from the boss.

Getting fit doesn’t require paying rent to a gym, and I am not suggesting getting fit so you can better refine your labour power to sell to your boss. Jogging, bodyweight exercises, animal flow movements require no equipment or gym, and you don’t need expensive shoes or clothes.

Of course, a significant barrier for many people is the time, and the environment that restricts access healthy food. Being required to work for 60 hours a week to pay the rent leaves little time for fitness. Non ultra-processed food is expensive. It is not a level playing field — gym culture is still part of the meritocracy lie of neoliberalism.

What next?

Beyond the personal benefits, here are two political reasons why we must engage in fitness culture.

Politics requires physical stamina

We often treat politics as a purely intellectual exercise, something that happens in university seminar rooms or on Twitter. But real political action is physically demanding. Strikes and picket lines require hours of physical activity, standing, walking, enduring the weather. Protests and rallies require walking and carrying material like banners, setting up stages and speakers. Community organising requires the stamina needed to knock on hundreds of doors, walk through neighbourhoods and travel long distances.

If our class (the working class) is physically exhausted, sick, and weak, we cannot fight.

The corporate CEOs and billionaires spend millions on personal trainers, nutritionists, and healthcare to extend their lives and vitality. They are fit for power. Why should we be content with being physically frail?

Building physical capacity is preparation. It is ensuring that when the moment comes to stand up, we have the back strength to stay standing.

Reclaiming agency

We live in a plutonomy, an economy entirely driven by and captured by the wealthy. In this system, corporations and the billionaires want us to be addicted, sluggish, and easily manipulated — just healthy enough to produce profit.

They want us eating ultra-processed food that spikes our dopamine. They want us scrolling TikTok for five hours a day until you are depressed. They want you sedated.

Getting fit is an act of rebellion against this consumerist imperative.

When we choose to cook a healthy meal instead of ordering UberEats, or go for a run instead of doom-scrolling, we are disrupting the extraction of profits to the corporate technofeudalists. We are reclaiming our attention and our bodies. We are redefining ourselves from weak or passive to active, capable, and strong.

New years resolution for 2026

We cannot afford to be a movement of brains on weakened, unhealthy bodies. We are materialists. We believe in the physical world.

Right-wing influencers are winning over young men and women because they acknowledge a fundamental truth: people want to feel strong. They want to feel useful. They want to feel like they are in the driver’s seat of their own lives.

We need to offer a counter-narrative.

We need to say: “Get fit, not to dominate, but to protect your community. Get strong, not to oppress, but to smash the patriarchy. Build endurance, not for Instagram clout, but because the protest is going to be long.”

In 2026, make exercise your practice of freedom in an unfree world.

It is the one place where you get exactly what you work for. The Left should be the natural home for that idea. Let’s stop ceding it to the Right.