About Sasha Rose
Hello!
I’m Sasha Rose.
I’m a Personal Trainer
in Sydney, Australia.
I play Roller Derby.
I have a cat.
I like to read books and drink tea.
I’m a small fat.
When I first became a Personal Trainer, it was all about Roller Derby and sports performance. There were a lot of mixed messages out there about “the best” workouts to do for Derby and in my overwhelm, I decided to throw them all out and study to find the answer for myself.
Turns out all kinds of workouts work on all kinds of bodies.
That’s one really beautiful thing about movement and exercise — it works on everyone.
“That’s one really beautiful thing about movement and exercise — it works on everyone.”
I believe that is our magic power as Personal Trainers: the shit we can do works. We have enough knowledge to understand the basics of human movement and can be on the front line to help someone achieve a better chance at independent movement long term, a better chance at reducing basic postural abnormalities, and an improved general outlook on life. Fitness, the ability to do things with your body, is a really broad concept.
But the fitness industry is a shitshow. And is a really narrow concept.
It is more a product of our beauty culture than it is a product of our progressive health knowledge.
Because our health knowledge knows a lot of things, including and not limited to:
- That our societal characteristics are larger contributing factors to health and well-being than our lifestyle.
- That dieting doesn’t work.
- That your hunger should be honoured and listened to.
- That there is no such thing as good and bad food.
- That fatness does not kill people like you think it does.
- That the ob* epidemic was invented by diet pill companies.
- That moving is great for you and not punishment for eating.
- That bodies naturally come in a range of shapes and sizes.
“The fitness industry is a product of our oppressive beauty culture and not a product of our progressive health knowledge.”
While our beauty industry only presumes to know one thing:
- That thinness, whiteness, straightness, cis-ness, ableness, youth, classy appearance, peak health, and cultural adherence is morally superior while all other demographics are bad.
And that one thing is a lie.
A lie that we live by, uphold (whether we know it or not), struggle with, and benefit from as we navigate where our identities intersect with it: where we do and don’t or can and can’t stand; what is and isn’t actually or perceived to be within our control; what does and doesn’t make us truly happy and free; who is given and refused adequate treatment, access, and opportunity. This lie has so much power over us.
While a lie; it’s a reality.
This is the patriarchy: our culture, our existing social structures that hierarchies folx based on the complex combination of their intersections. The higher up the social hierarchy — the more access to the basics and benefits you’re afforded. The lower — the less. Being lower on the hierarchy often results in death and is a larger contributing factor to health risks than diet and exercise. Our society decides who lives or dies by these lies. Oppression sucks.
As a Personal Trainer, my contribution to the patriarchy is within the facet of diet culture.
Or rather, it was.
Most people who seek out Personal Trainers are not usually seeking a fitness product.
They are seeking a weight loss promise.
A beauty product.
A personality trait.
An idea.
And a one sided friendship that they are fiscally entitled to.
When people do that, they are coming from a framework where thinness is held up as a physical ideal of beauty, value, and virtue. Where our language around pursuing thinness has become coded and veiled as health, wellness, and lifestyle. Where they feel bad about their bodies; blame themselves for their inability to adhere to social pressures of what a healthy/moral life should look like; and what an upstanding, admirable, strong character is. And — where they need love and support to deal with all these things that are going on.
Talking about fitness is complicated, is nuanced, is fucked.
So I started this blog.
