Two fitness instructors laugh at a gymnast/documentation on social networks according to Section 27 A of the Copyright Law
Seder night is upon us and freedom is about the last thing that is relevant to our lives right now, but you know what they say in chaotic situations - concentrate on the things you have control over. Besides, we're here for escapism and there's nothing more escapist than dealing with other people's troubles, or at least taking comfort in the fact that we're not the only ones suffering. So let's talk about one of the areas that almost all of us are enslaved to in one way or another - body image - and this time precisely from the angle of the trainers.
As someone who most of her life did not like sports (and it should be noted that it feels mutual), I never understood people who work in it. What's the fun in an accelerated heart rate, increased sweating and a general feeling of impending cardiac arrest? How come some people love this nightmare? And don't settle for it as a hobby, but turn it into a profession?
"I just want to return the tits to where they used to be. Near the shoulders"
When it's a "celeb" the network is buzzing - when the offender is anonymous, the case was buried by the police,
forget everything you've heard about serums - you must know this detail,
so I decided to check with some trainers what's behind it Their choice of profession, does it have anything to do with dilemmas concerning their body image and most importantly - did the practice of sports manage to release their complexes on the subject or will it only make them work even more?
Jordan Amir, before the change
Jordan Amir, before/courtesy of the photographed
Jordan Amir, before/courtesy of the photographed
"I am originally from the United States," says Jordan Amir, a 35-year-old yoga teacher and holistic therapist, who came to the physical field following eating disorders and a very failed and painful relationship with her body image. "We immigrated to Israel when I was in the second grade, a very tall and big girl with the eating habits of an American girl. In elementary school, I asked for the first time to go to Weight Watchers, as a girl I could fast for a whole day so as not to eat around people, and then at night sew the refrigerator."
And how did it go?
"At the age of 27 I returned from India with my wife, I lost weight there in a very extreme way, I was really skin and bones. The environment started reminding me that it didn't look good and that it wasn't normal and healthy, I felt at my peak. But then I started to get depressed and didn't leave the house for three months" .
Why?
"First of all, because you're thin, even if you just drink water, it looks like you're fat, in your unhealthy brain. I started to feel that I'm afraid of my own shadow. I eat vegetables and I'm afraid of getting fat, I drink water and feel like I've gained 10 kilos. There came a point The turning point. I started to take care of myself, I did every possible holistic treatment and a lot of internal work, and in the process I started to do fitness and it made me feel better, so I went to study the field to actually help myself, and that's how I became a fitness trainer.
So far, a lovely story with a happy ending, but this is only the beginning. "It started from a really clean place," Jordan continues, "but then I became part of the loop. Part of the matrix of gyms. I started working in gyms and encountered a lot of ego, comparisons, competition. Everyone talks about toning, and cubes, and burning fat, once again I was lost. I started having very intense anxiety attacks. I didn't understand how exactly when I was trying to get better I found myself in the most unhealthy place possible."
"I started gaining weight, both because of the muscle volume that increased as a result of the training and because of the stress I was under, and of course this made the situation worse. For a long time I was bulimic, then I starved myself, I have notebooks from that time, in which I record everything I eat up to Ramat The cucumber, so as not to exceed the 900 calories a day. I wasn't aware of how excessive it was."
How did you get from that bottom to yoga and where you are today?
"Within a year I left the field of gyms because I realized that it was harmful to me. I exercised a little at home, I practiced meditation, breathing, mindfulness, gratitude in the morning, standing in front of the mirror and telling myself that I love myself. A lot of daily self-work."
"I was always attracted to yoga, but we had an uncool relationship. Once a year I would go to a class, not understanding the language, not understanding what happened here, not coming back. Then I came to Malibu to visit family, and they offered me to come to a yoga class with them. It was a full class With a smile and a laugh, the whole experience was wow. I finally understood why people love it. I decided to enroll in a teacher's course because there is no better and faster way to learn than to teach Today things are going on and I am in awe of the privilege of teaching my trainees anything at all about their bodies."
What do you see today when you look in the mirror?
"I see a soul. I am no longer in a body. Yoga has changed the rules of the game for me, because I - and I am only talking about what is true for me - have found in it an essence that goes beyond the visible super goals. Today as a teacher I constantly tell my trainees that it does not matter how You look like someone else. Everyone's body image is not related to how much you eat or how much exercise you do, it's not really related to our deep layers. Until today, the past Trying to come back. So when you start beating yourself up, you have to stop and check what it's about. You'll get a lot of fear, but that's not a reason to stop, it's just a sign that you're in the right direction."
In one way or another, even if the pursuit of fitness does not directly stem from motives related to body image, there is always some connection between the two, especially for women.
Michal Barda Kantrowitz, 37 years old, became a Pilates trainer and an emotional trainer after years in the field of advertising and content. Sports were always a part of her life, and as a child her love for it came mainly from a competitive and playful place. In adolescence, another facet was added to this hobby.
"As a child, I really liked winning running competitions and achieving good results, it was very much the place of achievement," she says. "Besides, I remember that sometime in high school, something changed a bit. I really liked Britney Spears then and I would say: 'Wow, I want that kind of stomach. Flat, shapely.' A break. I set myself a flat stomach and I was determined to do everything for it. But even then, it wasn't from a place of self-flagellation, it came from a place of great fun, my sister and I would do it together, it also became a kind of game."
And today? How do you feel about your body?
"I've always had a problem with my stomach. I mean, the structure of my stomach is athletic, when I train and take care of myself I have cubes and I love it. But I also have an irritable bowel and sometimes I have a bloated stomach and it really sucks because I know how I am You look, how my stomach looks doesn't necessarily depend on what I do or don't do, so it creates a feeling of helplessness."
"In the past I also had a hard time with my pelvis. I have a very narrow waist and a very wide pelvis, so to speak an hourglass structure which is the perfect female structure, but it is really challenging to find pants for such a body type and I saw it as a disadvantage. As I got older I realized that it is not, but there are things who stay with us."
According to Michal, working as a Pilates instructor helped her to come to terms with things that bothered her on her own, also because of the understanding of the anatomy, physiology and internal processes that happen in the body, but mainly thanks to working with the trainees.
"The more I work, and I work mainly with women, I see their encounter with their body image," she says. "If there is an abdominal exercise, for example, and someone tells me they can't do it because they have too big a stomach, my answer will always be full of compassion. I will gently reflect the place of our judgments towards ourselves and the importance of loving ourselves and our bodies, and that in itself Makes me look at myself with compassion as well."
"It's like coming to a child and telling him all the time that he is wrong. He will grow up with this feeling. Getting down on myself is the last thing that will lead me to the goals I want. If I accept myself, praise myself and tell myself how good I am, it will give me the drive ".
Michal emphasizes that her meeting with women who judge themselves during training doesn't happen often, and I add that it probably happens all the time, but not out loud. On the other hand, when I ask about how men perceive their body image, the answer is unequivocal: "I haven't heard men talk badly about their bodies."
Hard to say it's surprising. Dealing with body image is, as mentioned, a female classic, and most of the trainers I spoke with will testify that they see most body image problems mainly in women. Mainly, but not only.
Liran Asraf, 31 years old, is a strength training and functional training trainer, but he mainly concentrates on calisthenics training - body weight training without equipment, which includes a lot of endurance on the hands, and is carried out in the open air, in parks.
Sports have always been a part of his life, as a child playing soccer and as a teenager training for an elite unit in the army. After the release he worked in port security and personal security jobs and kept in high shape as part of the job, but not to look a certain way. Until one day everything changed.
"I was 25 years old," he says, "the look started to preoccupy me a little, but what broke me was that one day someone just said to me: 'You're a little too thin for me.' To think about this sentence. I asked a friend, I tried to understand why she said that, if they think like her, and they told me: "Listen, I would like to feel a man, not a skeleton in the laboratory." It was unpleasant to hear that. Mainly as a child who has zero concern with body image and suddenly they give him a mirror and tell him: this is how you look, and you need to fix it."
"Suddenly I started looking at myself more - the ribs were protruding, the arms were thin, I was really really thin. This motivated me to make a change and took me straight to the gym. I started working on mass and pushing weights and slowly I also started to grow. And as I grew, my hunger also began to grow "Suddenly I go to the beach, take off my shirt and see that the gaze lingers on me, and it's not just fleeting glances that continue immediately. I started to get addicted to the visual results."
As in Jordan's story, Liran's start in the fitness world took him to bad places. "I started to get really anxious about my appearance. All kinds of thoughts that if I eat something by the sea my stomach will swell, and then when I go to the sea I am so ashamed that maybe the cubes are out of place that I am ashamed to take off my shirt. Literally scratches that accompanied me for a whole year which was very difficult in terms of mentally".
What made it stop?
"The corona virus. Because when the corona virus came, I started to get to know the world of body weight and calisthenics, which don't make you bloated at all, just give the body an athletic look. I really liked it. I felt light and healthy, I felt that this male ego of the mass, of pushing as much as possible, is starting to disappear, and also The anxieties and the endless preoccupation with how I look went away."
Upon finding his place in the world of fitness, Liran also started to train, and today he feels that this whole path he has gone through helps him convey healthier messages to training and the trainees. "Sport today is a very visual and social affair, it is not what sport really comes to convey," he says. "And in Tel Aviv it is very, very noticeable. I train in two very large studios, which are full of celebrities who train in them, all the people of Tel Aviv, and you see how important the visual thing is to people, the comparisons. It goes into subtleties, it never ends."
"And then you get to the point where you seem to have the most impressive body in your group, but you're the one who's afraid to take off your shirt at the end, it's absurd. They want my cubes, I want their ease, the fact that they don't see anyone from a distance. The neighbor's lawn is always greener".
Who do you see it in more? Men or women?
"Definitely women. There are also athletes who simply enjoy the sport itself, but the absolute majority come from a place of 'I have to lose X weight by Y date'. This is accompanied by incessant looks at the mirror, and if there are no mirrors in the studio, then her training is visible on her face, it really affects About the way they train. I really try to convey the message of not looking at the visuals as a goal. It will come as soon as we get better sleep and start loving the sport we do."
How do you do that? Do you like sports?
"There is no such thing as a sport that doesn't suit me, you just haven't found your type of sport. Every type of sport will contribute to you in one way or another, and the results will come. It's simple math. But you have to do things in a slow, controlled manner, slowly adapt to the process and understand that it's a habit , and the habit was formed after quite some time."
Following Liran's words, it is important to note that negative experiences are also individual. There are those for whom a gym would be the ideal place, and there are those who will thrive thanks to pushing large weights. The point, as in any subject related to body image, is finding the right dose, and being able to look inward and not outward.
"Sports is a competitive field," says Omri Ben Porat, 37 years old, a veteran fitness trainer who today mainly focuses on beach volleyball. "If you don't know how to devote yourself to it, it can become a kind of mechanism for self-destruction. Because you are constantly comparing yourself to others, constantly checking what you are wrong with or how to do like someone else, instead of looking for a moment at how you know and can do We always have some sort of visibility code, and in the world of sports it's easy to quantify what's strong, fast, and efficient, so it's also easier to compare to others."
Omri was an athlete as a child and knew from a young age that he would be involved in sports and fitness. He served as a physical training officer in the army, gave workshops and courses in the field of physical fitness and did quite a bit of building and assembling gyms in the last 15 years. Over the years, he has come across quite a few exercisers with various phenomena related to body image, including children, and in his experience this does not go away even when they start exercising and the external "problem" is seemingly solved.
"The dissatisfaction with physical aspects is often a never-ending phenomenon," he says. "I know very few people who are at peace with their bodies, and for most of them it is accompanied by one process or another that they went through with themselves. Deep in the heart, there are sometimes other things that want to change, but you don't always want to pay the price, and this is where you are at peace with yourself , with this choice."
how is it with you
"Until 3-4 years ago, I was rarely satisfied with my body. I have always had difficulty with abdominal fat, that is, with the fact that you can see the upper cubes in the stomach but not the lower ones. With my friends, athletes and athletes, they did, and it was Annoys me! On the other hand, I could go out in the evening and make three rounds of pizzas on the way home, so what can you expect," he laughs.
"Because I was an athlete, my body also went through a process of changing from an athlete's body to an amateur's body, and it was also strange to perceive. However, as I got older, I feel that I am much more comfortable with myself. The body may have changed "for the worse", in double quotes, but The perception has changed for the better."
Body image was not the thing that motivated him to engage in sports, nor what made him persist in it, but in front of exercisers, and especially exercisers, he encountered the issue all the time, among other things in the competitive frameworks where the physical indicators are an integral part of the conversation.
"When I was a professional manager at a beach volleyball club," he says, "I would have conversations with players at the end of a season and inform the player whether he continues at the current level, goes up a level or goes down a level. Now, there is nothing to do. You are measured by your physical abilities. If you are able To jump higher or to be faster then your technical ability changes, and sometimes it also depends on the weight, so this conversation is never easy, it always goes into difficult places of body image, of insecurity, stories about how as a girl the sports teacher oppressed her. Meeting with lots of people who have or have had dissatisfaction or oppression in their physical perception of themselves."
According to him, the same suppression of body perception begins with the education we receive, and is often the source, or at least a significant cause of our body image problems.
"A boy who does something bad in sports class and is given a punishment to run or jump, a chubby girl in ballet class who is put in the back - this creates antagonism and shame and alienates people from their bodies. Me too, when I was a physical training officer in a flight course, and I had to toughen attitudes and give physical crises, It would hurt these pilots, in their operational service. They would take out gyms. This rigidity is not healthy. The body strives to be in motion, and if we have a system A supporter from childhood, who brings us closer to mobility and does not make us afraid of it or ashamed of our physical abilities, it can remain our nature."
Although I promised Omri that most of the time I really don't aspire to be on the move, I completely understand what he is talking about, and probably most of you too. Whether we've chosen to stay away from sports or indulge in them obsessively, there's a good chance it sits in a similar place, and for all of us the answer is the same - to find the middle ground. So the next time you see your coach or trainer, with the perfect body and impressive physical abilities, and feel bad about yourself, remember that clichés are always true in the end: everyone has their own story and everyone needs to find the right path and rhythm for them. If it gives you even one moment of freedom, then as they say on Pesach - judge.