We live in an increasingly polarised world – and I’m not talking about politics, I’m talking about exercise. There’s a fitness community obsessed with constant optimisation and hacks: how can you get from 50 press-ups to 100, from an eight-minute mile to seven minutes, or increase your deadlifts from body weight to double or triple body weight – ideally using just “one weird trick” or novel method no one has seen before.

It seems as if no one is happy with basic fitness or steady progress. Or people are overly concerned with what’s secretly holding them back, from sleep to “I had a couple of glasses of wine … it ruined three days of my life” (that’s Steven Bartlett’s podcast).

Much of the gym and fitness influencer world is about the already fit and active trying to get marginally fitter. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It can be meaningful to have objectives and targets. But on the other hand, there are constant stories about finding the minimum amount a person can do to be fit. In the past few years we’ve seen studies argue that it’s not 10,000 steps per day that you need, but actually that 7,000 is enough. That you........

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