You Should Probably Stretch More
A new way to approach life in a “stuck” culture.
While I’m traveling, THE CHOW arrives in inboxes ~7:30pm HKT.
There’s a kind of person on Instagram that’s pretty hard to miss: post-run Strava stats on the story, mirror selfies with The Girls after Pilates, or a half-frontal thirst trap picture at the gym. But when I click the search icon—“Explore”—on the tab below, they’re practically inescapable: jacked men (or women) lifting weights, doing pull-ups, or running while drenched in sweat, sermonizing on which exercises target which muscles or how to improve your minute-per-mile pace, all while wearing a muscle tee or (as is more often the case) no shirt at all.
Their advice is pretty good. I should probably target my rear delts a little more for a wider and thicker back; switching from flat to incline has been great for growing my chest; to increase my running pace, it is probably better to run slower, longer. But I’m a bit hesitant to take their words as gospel because they all look so… stiff.
Fitness influencers on Instagram could pass for statues of Greek gods—curvaceous and sculpted like Aphrodite; chiseled and lean like Apollo. But all of them look as rigid as marble—like their bones would snap if pulled a degree backward, or their hips would shatter if their legs were stretched more than a meter apart. They probably can’t scratch their backs without a little assistance:
Stiffness and all, I could probably count the number of people that aren’t trying to look like this on one hand, because I know more people that go to the gym for a vague pursuit of size and strength (myself included) than people that don’t. Gen Z culture is much more siloed and fragmented than that of previous generations, as many have already argued, but in a world inundated with the all-seeing panopticon of social media, where anyone can pull up their phone camera and hit record at any second, the Pursuit of Looking Good becomes a near-universal aspiration. And fitness, as a result, becomes somewhat of a monoculture. So we go Jim.
The numbers can back this up: A recent report says that gym memberships for Gen Z have doubled since 2020. 30% of Gen Z are regularly working out in fitness facilities versus 15-25% of the total adult population.
Earlier this week, a roughly-my-age Scandinavian fitness influencer explained his quarter-life crisis over an Instagram reel: He had been “hustling,” which, in his view, meant working out twice a day, posting daily exercise videos on Instagram, reading a whopping *10 pages* of self-help books each night, and seeking to “change his life” by growing his audience on Instagram. But two months into the process, his actual follower count failed to meet his targets: His account had 1,000 followers—a mere tenth of his goal of 10,000.
I’ve noticed this very nebulous conception of hard work becoming more common in a world where fitness is the only monoculture (some examples: 75-day hard challenge or the post-manosphere). But what are you really working for when your only end goals are (1) a hot body, (2) Instagram followers? Will having abs and internet cool, as this influencer believes, really “change your life”?
In asking questions like these, I’m convinced that the online fitness enthusiast is analogous to modern culture under late capitalism: a society that emphasizes “endless self-optimization toward nothing, the performance of becoming,” as
so eloquently put it recently. (S)he optimizes workouts, grows muscles in size, looks hot on social media, but without a clear purpose. It’s not too different from the 60-hours-a-week fake email jobs or the meeting-packed Google Calendars that look like digital collage art. You might also compare it to inflated startup valuations, sustained mainly by some funky multiplication and questionable ARRs. But now that investors in VC funds are finally ready to cash out, many are realizing that there are more than a few unnecessary zeroes in the balance sheet. The “value” is completely hollow.What amounts from “optimization toward nothing,” or from the “performance of becoming”? What happens to a culture that promotes work purely for the sake of it?
Like the bodies of the exercise-twice-a-day influencers, culture has grown stiff and stagnant. Culture is growing in size, in muscularity—on record, there are more fashion garments produced, more music streams on Spotify, more video games published on Steam than ever before—but, as New York’s Office of Applied Strategy (OAS) argued in a dossier last year, under this “allure of cultural abundance, society has begun to enter a period of cultural stagnation. Despite the amount of culture surrounding us, it increasingly feels like an iterative repetition of something we’ve already seen before, disguised as newness.”
Like the fitness enthusiast, culture has entered a phase of blind repetition, of endless unrelenting exercise—where everything is a remake is a prequel is a sequel is derivative from existing IP. Forms and styles continuously repeated at a more frequent number of iterations. This does not make for a functional body, or a thriving culture. It renders both of them stiff. What do we do about it?
As of late, there’s one solution that comes to mind: active retreat. Internet wellness culture today is actively pushing saunas and cold plunges as modes of recovery—it’s not all that different to how some creators have reacted to cultural consumption in excess: in taking active pauses or engaging in cultural production that resists race-to-the-bottom metrics-chasing or any idea of “growth” or “scale.” Think of social media detoxes, 3-hour podcasts paywalled on Patreon, or niche Discord servers.
But saunas and cold plunges are merely reactionary—they prime us for the same exercise again, except more intensely. Charisse, a Pilates trainer I know in the Philippines, had this to say about the sauna and cold plunge epidemic: “This will spoil your body. You’re making it weak by relying on these things, and not on itself.”
Cultural retreat is similarly reactionary. It weakens our power to create better culture; it hides away, refuses to expand its reach in the cultural conversation, and ultimately prevents us from creating better systems.
Can we instead heal a stuck culture in a more holistic way?
There’s a new, quickly-growing niche in Asia’s wellness market that’s pivoting towards a new idea of healing. Dr. Stretch, a stretching studio that helps improve people’s flexibility with licensed therapists, just opened in Queen’s Road in Hong Kong’s Central district. It’s the first attempt at flexibility-as-a-service in the city, but the brand has already launched successful outposts in China, Singapore, Malaysia, and the UAE since its founding over 10 years ago.
Headquartered in Tokyo, Dr. Stretch borrows from the recovery techniques used by the Boston Red Sox. When Genki Yamaguchi launched the brand in 2010, he reportedly “reprogrammed” these stretches to suit the lifestyle of the average person. Outside some of their flagship stores in Tokyo—my dad and I visited one in Roppongi, the city’s nightlife district, a few years ago—a team of stretch therapists will give you a five-minute sample of their services on top of a black stretching bed, right outside of the store. We had visited in the winter—it was a tough sell in the cold, but my dad and I were intrigued, and took them up on their offer.
A more recent video on Instagram details the whole process start-to-finish: You start by getting dressed in comfy stretch-wear, then sit on a black leather massage bed and, with an iPad, a staff member will snap a full-body photo of you from the side and the back, and analyze your structure. Based on said analysis, they perform a series of stretches—30 to 90 minutes long, depending on the service chosen—that promise to rid you of lower back pain and stiffness.
Dr. Stretch Hong Kong did not respond to multiple requests for a comment on this story. But I’d speculate that their real value proposition is a new model of recovery, one that directly competes with the sauna-and-cold-plunge-industrial complex. For Dr. Stretch, recovery from the over-optimized pursuit of work comes not from active retreat. It comes instead from aligning your structure, focusing on mobility and injury-prevention; from working in harmony with your body rather than recovering just to work again the next day. When I asked Charisse why these were important, she said, “It’s important to know who you are”—to fully understand how your body functions.
Perhaps rather than simply overcoming a tight, stuck, and overly muscular culture, the prerogative is to create an aligned and flexible one—a culture that can change in form, rather than simply grow in size.
A flexible culture is malleable and mobile, open to possibilities and progress, and stretches itself like putty until it almost snaps in half. Through bending and breaking and constant reshaping, culture can rid itself of the knee-jerk urge to reuse and repeat what was made before, and instead create something new. More importantly, a culture that is aligned will understand itself and know what it is capable of: It is privy to what it ought to be, rather than blindly engaging in the “performance of becoming,” or optimizing in pursuit of metrics without deeper meaning for itself.
So please: stretch more. You’re probably not doing enough of it.
