Why Fitness for Christians?

Squats and lunges and eating enough protein… these are the kind of things we tend to think of when we start talking about fitness. When you think of a personal trainer, you probably think of someone wearing spandex and yelling at you to do 2 more reps.

So what in the world does it mean that I offer personal training for Christians? What does one thing have to do with the other?

I would argue that Christianity has everything to do with our health and fitness, and health and fitness have a bit to do with our Christian faith as well. By keeping the two separate and treating them like they’re unrelated, we’ve actually opened up our minds to some really destructive theology and even lost believers to sneaky ideologies.

But really, what does Christianity have to do with fitness?

I understand asking this question, but my answer to it is: everything. Or at least it should. Because Christianity isn’t a private religion, and following Christ isn’t limited to what we do on Sundays or the parts of our lives that seem spiritual. Living our Christian faith is something that should touch every single corner of our lives.

When you start to scrutinize it, it makes so much sense that health and how we treat our bodies should be part of that.

God created us. Our bodies were part of his perfect plan and design. They’re fallen like everything else in the world, but when you read Genesis 1 and 2 you see that He made us, spirit AND BODY. We’re not 2 separate things. Our bodies are fallen, like everything, but they aren’t bad or mistaken or something to fight against. They are God’s creation for us to be grateful for and to care for.

So it makes perfect sense that to respect God’s creation means to care for our own health.

What we give up, when we give up the fitness space

There are so many more reasons for us to care about fitness as Christians, and I’ll dig into many of them in later posts. However, for now, there’s one more giant reason that I’ve chosen to be a fitness coach for Christians, specifically.

We’re losing Christians to the New Thought movement that has taken over the fitness industry.

You’ve probably never heard of the New Thought movement. I know I hadn’t until recently but, like you probably have, I had seen it in action.

In particular, I’d seen it creeping into more and more of the fitness space as I started noticing more and more influencers promoting…

• manifesting – the idea that you can make something become real by speaking it and believing your words will create reality.
• affirmations – the idea that by repeating positive phrases to yourself like “I am enough” or “I am wealthy” or “I am healthy,” that you will be those things.
• the law of attraction – that you attract positive and negative things into your life based on the energy of your thoughts; things like vision boards are a common example in the fitness world

I could go on, but you can probably already see the theme emerging. New Thought is built on the idea that your thoughts have power. Ultimately, it’s built on the idea that YOU have power. New Thought will quote scripture (out of context) and tell you that it’s Christian, but what it does at it’s core is put YOU in the place of God.

And it’s sneaky. It can do it without many Christians even realizing that they’ve started believing unbiblical ideas. I’m not the expert, that’s Melissa Dougherty and I highly recommend you check out her book and YouTube channel. I just noticed something taking a strong hold in my industry and it was leading my sisters in Christ astray so I decided to offer an alternative.