The Mass Psychology of Fittism by Edward Yu

By Edward Yu Edward Yu, the popular author of The Art of Slowing Down, has a new book about the fitness world: The Mass Psychology of Fittism. Yu nods to Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism in the title, connecting a driven and mechanistic approach to the ideal body with some of Reich’s views. The book is full of fresh perspectives into what it really means to be fit. Yu accomplishes this through critiques of some of the current trends in the fitness world and suggestions for generative approaches to being fit, based on our evolutionary history. Yu employs Nikolai Bernstein‰۪s fundamental concept "degrees of freedom: and Claude Shannon's Information Theory to analyze both human movement in particular and human learning in general. In doing so, he demonstrates how conventional fitness programs tend to stifle learning as well as inhibit sensorimotor development. By taking a deeper look into fitness and comparing Darwin's original concept of the word to our dominant cultur