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If you have spent most of your life being able to move a certain way and then, suddenly, you can’t, it can feel like you’ve been robbed of fitness forever. This is the myth of fitness culture—that training belongs to people who are able-bodied, thin, strong, and pain-free.

As someone dealing with an injury, particularly a complex or treatment-resistant condition, it can be incredibly difficult to reset your relationship with your training practice. The way we used to do things just doesn’t work anymore and we don’t know where to start or what “progress” looks like.

At the same time we know that it is more important than ever to move and take care of our bodies. Whatever recovery looks like, it’s going to take movement to get there.

Last week I offered my go-to strategies for preventing future injuries. If this re-calibration of fitness resonated for you, you’re in luck. There is an entire community of fitness professionals who are doing the work of re-imagining fitness culture to center the unique needs of the individual over external standards of performance and aesthetics.

People with disabilities know well what it feels like to be on the outside of the dominant fitness culture. Many gyms, studios, and classes do not know how to work with people who don’t fit the textbook descriptions, so they necessarily exclude millions of aspiring athletes who are just as capable and deserving of movement as anyone else.

Fortunately, there is a growing movement of coaches, trainers, and teachers, many of who have disabilities themselves, leading the way with Adaptive Fitness.

Many of the best athletes and trainers in the world have disabilities. They have pioneered approaches to fitness that don’t exclude people based on externally conceived ideals of what it means to be an athlete.

Like physical therapy, Adaptive Fitness first came into wider use in the aftermath of World War II when veterans were returning home with life-changing injuries. It was recognized that, while a disability may change the way that a person moves, that person’s body retains the fundamental need for fitness, for both the physical and psychological benefits.

When the Disabilities Education Act passed in 1975, Adaptive Physical Education was introduced to schools in order to give all children the ability to engage in sports and PE.

These breakthroughs in recognition and rights for people with disabilities have opened up a new methodology for training and coaching that acknowledges the breadth of what is possible in fitness. Adaptive Fitness challenges the kind of perfect-or-nothing mindset that can destroy our desire to keep moving.

Adaptive Fitness and Adaptive Sports are an approach to fitness designed to serve people with physical, sensory, or cognitive disabilities. The range of programs and activities includes every physical pursuit you could desire and has driven new approaches and technologies along the way. The leaders of Adaptive Fitness have already learned that fitness needs to serve the body, rather than dictate to the body.

In an interview with Shape Magazine Chelsie Hill, founder of the Rollettes wheelchair dance team , says “adaptive fitness is not about a one-size-fits-all approach, but more about tailoring workouts to the unique needs and goals of each individual. It's about making fitness inclusive and accessible so everyone can reap the benefits of physical activity, regardless of their starting point.”

This is exactly the approach that is missing from the majority of fitness spaces and is needed for all humans with bodies to fully embrace the joy that comes from moving.

The majority of mainstream fitness is focused on getting your body to look a certain way and perform a set of impressive tasks. There is nothing inherently wrong with these goals as long as you simultaneously acknowledge that they are arbitrary end results of a lifelong process. The process may or may not result in reaching those goals, but even if it, does that achievement is temporary.

All of us, sooner or later, will come up against physical limitation. We get injured. We age. We get stressed out or have busy lives or get sick. As our lives and bodies change, so must our training. I have had so many clients and friends tell me that they no longer take joy in fitness because they don’t see a realistic path to the fitness ideal.

This urgency to reach an ideal hampers our ability to do the work that will actually benefit us. We rush through physical therapy or skip it altogether. We race to prove that we are strong and bendy and impressive, even if it means building on a shaky foundation that sets us up for future problems.

And so much of this is because we don’t know a different way to train. That is where Adaptive Fitness can lead.

I follow a lot of coaches and fitness influencers who don’t have the traditional body type that we associate with athletes. I learn so much from them and their work that directly applies to my own training, but I also see the vitriol and condemnation that they get from meatheads who think that fitness can only look one way.

People think that we have nothing to learn from athletes with disabilities, or who are in larger bodies, or who have chronic conditions. In truth, Adaptive Fitness has valuable lessons for everyone because if you aren’t needing to adapt now, it is very likely that you will. Respecting these coaches and athletes for all that they have to give and learning from them can give us the space we need to honor and care for our own bodies.

For more inspiration on making fitness welcoming and adaptable to all bodies I highly recommend Justice Roe’s book Deconstructing the Fitness Industrial Complex: How to Resist, Disrupt, and Reclaim What It Means to Be Fit in American Culture.

Again, even if you aren’t managing a disability or living in a body that falls outside the confines of fitness culture, this is still relevant to you. Able-bodiedness is a spectrum and never guaranteed. Embracing the multiplicity of training approaches will make you vastly more prepared to respond to whatever changes your body experiences throughout your life.

In next week’s post, I am considering sharing my own very personal story about disability and how it completely changed my relationship with my body and movement. I’ve never publicly shared this story so I might chicken out this time, but I’m inching closer.

In the meantime I’d love to hear from you. If you are a person with disabilities do you have experience with Adaptive Fitness and did it work for you? If not, have you ever learned from a coach with disabilities who taught you something valuable?

I leave you with this great interview with three badass athletes in the Adaptive Fitness world talking about their experience as competitors. I hope you enjoy it:

Happy Bendings,

Kristina