700. Kevin explores how socioeconomic factors influence access to sports and fitness. Drawing from personal experience, he highlights the disparities created by costs associated with equipment, facilities, and participation fees, noting how these barriers often exclude underprivileged groups.
700. Kevin explores how socioeconomic factors influence access to sports and fitness. Drawing from personal experience, he highlights the disparities created by costs associated with equipment, facilities, and participation fees, noting how these barriers often exclude underprivileged groups.
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. Find a full transcript here.
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Hello and welcome to Get Fit Guy. This is Kevin. This week I am going to talk about socio economic factors in sport. I can’t say I have the ability to argue my premises to any conclusion on this subject but just to point out things I have noticed across my time as a coach.
Firstly, if you were listening last week, I talked about someone I know inadvertently inspired me to go do something fun and active. So, there is a factor in training or playing sports that absolutely is social. I also talked about CrossFit and how community driven that was. This being what I believe was the key to it’s success. But I also have to say that its REALLY expensive. Sport likes the wave the flag for equality. Taking steps to ensure that in track running events, all athletes are running on the same quality of surface. In other sports like soccer, teams change ends at half time, and in other sports like javelin, there are strict rules on the javelin itself to ensure competitive fairness and equality. But I don’t see this same equality when it comes to socio economic factors.
It’s one thing for me to tell you that you should train a certain way or that I recommend certain methodologies, certain foods and certain supplements. But being able to access the things that I recommend is something entirely different. Something that certainly isn’t lost on me now that I am a university full time student and frankly can no longer afford to eat grass fed meat and organic vegetables anymore. The same goes for sport.
When I came to University, I was super excited to have the opportunity to try new sports. And yet, I have ended up doing the exact same sports I always have. Why? Well, the answer is money. I don't need money to buy any new equipment to do judo, karate or kickboxing. I was like a kid in the candy shop when I attended the sports fair to see all the different sports I could do. From clay pigeon shooting to a gliding club and horse polo to yachting. I looked into horse polo, which I really thought would be fun: I could learn a new skill and girls with double barrelled surnames could invite me to shoots at their family’s estate. What’s not to love? However, in reality, for me to continue to practice judo, the cost for the year was less than 100usd. The cost of polo, if I attended all 3 training sessions a week would be over 7000usd a year. No wonder your family needs to own an estate for you to participate.
I have seen this too in my own coaching career, when I was working in Hong Kong, the gym was around 400usd a month for a standard membership and that was a decade ago! If you wanted to train one on one for an hour with myself or any of the other coaches, the gym would charge 100usd an hour on top of your 400usd a month membership. So, it’s little wonder then that I had ZERO local Hong Kongers in my classes and almost everyone was an investment banker. I remember when I went to South Africa to teach 2 seminars in 2015 and remember thinking I was really quite surprised that I was at gyms in Africa but there were only members of a certain racial background. And it wasn’t the predominant one of the country. But it was the demographic that could afford the gym membership or that could afford it and wanted to put themselves in that environment.
A 2023 study by the British Medical Council found that across 8000 participants that were studied, 68% of those playing sports had a university education. Sport England published a study in 2019 stated that stated those who were unemployed or in low income jobs were most likely to be inactive and those in managerial roles were most likely to be active.
I recall that I was sitting in the corner of a boardroom of a well known functional fitness brand doing some work on my laptop one day. The Chief Operating Officer was in there on a zoom call with a potential gym owner and asked for advice on gym locations. The advice was to open where there was a Lululemon and a Wholefoods. So basically: people with money are nearby and you can charge more for your product. Now, how business works isn’t alien to me. I do understand the concept of profit. But I also understand that as humans we simply aren't move enough and simply don’t eat well enough. So I find it a bit weird when gym owners have a mission to change lives and then charge 400 bucks a month to basically run about in an empty warehouse space. So I would argue they do want to change lives: their own, by selling you high ticket fitness.
I’m not sure what the answer to this, but I definitely feel the pain of people who want to be more active and healthy and simply can’t afford to do so. I’m also aware that, although I’m still a poor student, that I am still in the bracket where I can afford to play sport. I can afford to be active, and I can go to the gym and therefore I myself am much better off than those who cannot afford to do any of those things. That is not lost on me at all.
I’m curious to hear from listeners who find socio economic conditions have impacted their ability to train and what they have found worked for them, that way I can bring some useful solutions to other listeners. My email address is at the end of the show if you want to get in touch. And it’s been a minute since I have had any listener emails!
To round off this week, I thought I would share a fun fact that I just learned myself. I have done an episode in the past on the fact that this gold standard of 10,000 steps a day is a myth. It was created as part of a marketing campaign for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. This week I learned that the idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day was actually a marketing slogan from 1917 for Good Health magazine that was written by Kellogg. As a philosopher, I was aware that Thomas Aquinas believed that eating early (specifically before morning mass) was a sin. After all, this was done fasted and breakfast is literally where one breaks the fast. But I wasn’t aware this modern preoccupation with breakfast came from Kellogg. A shame, because I could literally eat breakfast for every meal of the day. I can’t get enough avo smash and toasted sourdough. All I need now is to find someone who wants to come for a hipster breakfast with me.
If you have any questions or would like to say ‘hi’, please email me at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com
Get-Fit Guy is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to the team at Quick and Dirty Tips Morgan Christianson, Holly Hutchings, the director of podcasts Brannan Goetschius and Davina Tomlin. If you have a question, leave me a voicemail at 510-353-3104 or send me an email at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com. For more information about the show, visit quickanddirtytips.com, or check out the shownotes in the podcast app.