Physical Activity Guidelines for Meaningful Living?

I have been long troubled by the fact that physical activity recommendations for the public are almost exclusively produced from a medical perspective. The goal is the promotion of physical and psychological health and reducing the risk of chronic diseases. Typically, the minimum amount is identified for producing the benefits. I mean, who would want to do anything more than necessary!

It is, of course, understandable that organisations such as WHO see physical activity as a means to improve health – after all, they are a health promotion organisation. Their (2020) “WHO guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour” specify, in relation to physical activity, that (1) all adults should be active; (2) the duration and intensity of aerobic exercise that is needed, (3) strength training is also beneficial, and (4) more is better. These guidelines are certainly valid within the adopted perspective and based on extensive scientific research.

However, these guidelines offer nothing on the subjective life-world of being physically active or on the intrinsic value of physical activity. On the contrary, these guidelines provide a very instrumental picture of physical activity as a mere means to better health.

Furthermore, it is simply stated that these are “physical activity guidelines”, but it is not stated “…for what”. It is taken for granted that health is the goal of being active.

However, health is not the necessary or even obvious end value of physical activity. It rather reflects the medicalization of movement that is a dominant trend in our society. For example, Sigmund Loland’s (2006) article Morality, medicine, and meaning: Toward an integrated justification of physical education provides a critical discussion of why physical education might be valuable for human life. He argued that health is not an end value, but a means for striving towards a good and meaningful life.

While there is lots of excellent work on physical activity and sport that attest to their value for human life beyond the health benefits, unfortunately this work has not been synthesised to provide alternative ‘guidelines’ or ‘recommendations’ where physical activity is seen as a potential avenue for meaningful living. This kind of recommendations would look very different from counting minutes and measuring aerobic intensities of that has been done.

With Olli Tikkanen, we submitted an abstract with the title of this blog post twice to the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport conference (2020 and 2021), but both times the event was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. So I thought to share some thoughts on the idea via the blog so that perhaps some conversations could arise.

Drawing on Breivik (2020), Kretchmar (2000), and scholarship using narrative theory in sports, we proposed some tentative guidelines that we hope will be extended and challenged by others working in the areas of human and social sciences of physical activity and sports.

Drawing on existential thought, we start with the assumption that human beings are meaning-seeking and meaning-creating beings who become who they are through concernful involvement in their life-world (Yanchar, 2015). As existentialist thinkers such as Sartre and de Beauvoir have suggested, meaningful lives are realised, at least partly, through the pursuit of life projects that require commitment and persistence over a long time (a point also emphasised by Kretchmar). From this perspective, thinking around physical activity is not about a weekly minimum dose of bodily movement (for health), but about how people can transcend their horizons through ‘becoming’ within their ‘life project’ in physical activity or sports.

To think about ways that physical activity and sports can contribute to meaningfulness, we see a lot of value in Breivik’s (2020) ontology of the sporting human being, involving four fundamental relationships that operate in sports (I-Me, I-You, I-Society and I-Nature). In physical activity, I-Me (individual activities where the self is the reference point) can be meaningful, for example, as craftsmanship, practising or meditative practice; I-You (activities involving an encounter with another person) offers possibilities for play and competition; I-Society (team activities) can provide a sense of belonging and camaraderie; and I-Nature (outdoor activities) can offer possibilities for a spiritual experience, connectedness and sense of peace. This perspective entails the assumption that different movement cultures could prioritise different avenues to meaningfulness due to their constitutive factors

Some of our ideas at for recommendations at this point are…

(1) Explore the different relations that can be experienced and developed sport and movement culture to find an activity that resonates with your own way of being;

(2) Commit yourself to the activity at least for several months even if it is not always enjoyable to overcome initial discomfort and develop ownership of the activity.

(3) Immerse yourself to the life-world of the activity (spaces, history, stories, myths, landscapes) and reflect on your place in the movement culture’s unfolding story.

This is still at an early stage of thinking and will need a lot more work. Some would also question whether guidelines for meaningfulness can or should be developed at all given the subjective nature of it.

Furthermore, we are nowhere near the research evidence on how meaningfulness arises in movement compared to the evidence on health benefits, and therefore it is crucial to very carefully assess what we know and what we need to know in order to move forward with this.

However I see it as a worthy goal to at least start developing an alternative to the medicalised perspective that dominates so strongly the public messages around exercise. If you have some thoughts around this, tag @MeaningfulSport on Twitter.

References

Breivik, G. (2020). The Sporting Exploration of the World; Toward a Fundamental Ontology of the Sporting Human Being. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 14(2), 146-162.

Loland, S. (2006). Morality, medicine, and meaning: Toward an integrated justification of physical education. Quest, 58(1), 60-70.

Kretchmar, R. S. (2000). Moving and being moved: Implications for practice. Quest, 52(3), 260-272.

Yanchar, S. C. (2015). Truth and disclosure in qualitative research: Implications of hermeneutic realism. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 12(2), 107-124.