You have been thinking about getting a trainer. Maybe for a while. But you hesitate because you know that your goals sit within a personal cultural context your body carries ancestral strengths not recognized by the mainstream fitness industry, and science backed health standards have harmed people like you rather than helped.
Will they see a fat body to fix, a disabled body to accommodate, a brown or Black body to assess through a framework that was never built for it? Will they know what it means to move through the world in your body, with your history, inside a fitness industry that has spent decades telling you that the goal is to look less like yourself?
What the Fitness Industry Was Built On
The mainstream fitness industry did not emerge from a neutral place. It grew out of the same cultural soil that produced the BMI. This was a deep, historically rooted belief that thinness, whiteness, and able-bodiedness are the markers of health, discipline, and moral worth.
The BMI itself tells this story clearly. Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet developed it in the 1830s using data almost exclusively from white European men. He was not a medical professional. He was a statistician, and his goal was to identify the “average man.” The index was never designed to assess individual health. When physiologist Ancel Keys repurposed it for medical use in the 1970s, he based his work on data from men across six countries and declared it applicable to everyone, despite its obvious limitations. The American Medical Association acknowledged the BMI’s “historical harm” and “racist exclusion” in 2023, but healthcare providers still use it routinely to assess the health of bodies it was never designed to measure.
Scholar Sabrina Strings documented in her book “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia” how thinness became associated with whiteness and moral virtue in the early 20th century, while larger bodies, and particularly Black and African bodies, were coded as inferior, undisciplined, and unhealthy. The fitness industry inherited all of this. The idealized body it sells, lean, light, able-bodied, predominantly white, did not arrive from science. It arrived from a long history of using bodies to sort people into hierarchies.
Sources: American Medical Association policy on BMI, June 2023; Strings, S. (2019). Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. NYU Press; AMA Journal of Ethics, July 2023.
What This Costs BIPOC People in Fitness Spaces
Walking into a mainstream gym or hiring a conventional personal trainer as a BIPOC person often means navigating a set of assumptions that arrive before you do: that your goal is weight loss, that your starting point is a problem to be corrected, that standard fitness assessment tools including the BMI tell an accurate story about your body. Underlying all of it sits the assumption that the body ideal you are being trained toward is neutral and universal, when it is in fact specific to a narrow cultural and racial framework.
For many BIPOC people, fitness spaces carry additional weight beyond the physical. Gyms have historically been white spaces. The language of fitness, “getting lean,” “cleaning up your diet,” “transformation challenges,” encodes the thin ideal without naming it. The body that gets celebrated in fitness culture, before-and-after photos, magazine covers, social media aesthetics, continues to centre a very specific look that most BIPOC bodies were never meant to achieve or aspire toward.
For fat BIPOC people, disabled BIPOC people, neurodivergent BIPOC people, and gender-diverse BIPOC people, these spaces can carry an additional layer of exclusion, one that shows up in equipment that does not accommodate all bodies, in programming that assumes a particular kind of brain and nervous system, in changing rooms that do not account for gender diversity, in the gap between what a trainer has been trained to do and what your body, brain, and life actually need.
Different Bodies, Different Needs, Same Right to Move
- Fat and larger bodies deserve movement support that does not centre weight loss as the goal. Health at Every Size, a framework developed by researcher Lindo Bacon and supported by significant research, confirms that weight-neutral approaches to fitness, ones that focus on strength, mobility, energy, and enjoyment rather than body size, produce better physical and psychological health outcomes than approaches centred on weight loss. A BIPOC personal trainer who practices from this framework will not use your body as a before photo.
- Disabled bodies deserve trainers who understand that disability is not a deviation from a norm to be corrected, but a different relationship with a body that has its own wisdom, limits, and capacities. The fitness industry has long treated disability as an obstacle between a person and their “best body.” A trainer practicing from a disability-affirming framework starts from a different question: not “how do we work around this?” but “what does movement that actually serves this body look like?”
- Neurodivergent bodies and brains often have specific relationships with movement, sensory environment, routine, and instruction that mainstream fitness rarely accounts for. Loud music, fluorescent lighting, the unpredictability of a busy gym floor, verbal instruction delivered at a pace that assumes neurotypical processing: all of these can make fitness spaces genuinely inaccessible rather than simply uncomfortable. A neurodivergent-affirming trainer adapts their environment and approach to the person, not the reverse.
- Gender-diverse people deserve fitness support that does not centre gender in ways that exclude or erase. This means trainers who do not make assumptions about goals based on perceived gender, who use correct pronouns and names, who do not default to gendered programming, and who understand that for many trans and non-binary people, the relationship with the body is complex, layered, and deserving of particular care.
What Indigenous and Diverse Beauty and Movement Traditions Know
Western fitness culture presents itself as the science of health. But movement, strength, and embodiment have roots across cultures that predate and contradict the western gym model entirely.
Indigenous movement traditions across Turtle Island are relational and land-based. Movement as ceremony. Physical practice as connection to ancestors, to land, to seasonal rhythms. The body as a site of cultural knowledge and spiritual relationship, not a machine to be optimized.
Across cultures globally, health and beauty have been understood in ways that western fitness culture has consistently dismissed: strength over thinness, roundness as abundance, flexibility understood collectively, the relationship between the body and the earth as central to wellbeing. Korean martial arts. West African dance. South Asian yoga, in its full philosophical and spiritual depth rather than its commodified western form. The capoeira traditions of Afro-Brazilian communities. Tahitian dance. These are not alternative fitness options. They are complete knowledge systems about bodies, movement, and health that existed long before the gym.
A BIPOC personal trainer who draws on these traditions, or who simply understands that the western fitness model is one framework among many, brings a different quality of practice. One that does not require you to see your body as a problem before the work can begin.
What to Look for in a BIPOC Personal Trainer
The four trainers currently listed in Healing in Colour’s Professionals Directory each bring a distinct approach to body-positive, culturally grounded fitness. Arianne Liu (Un Fold Move Ment) has been in the fitness industry since 2011. Christie Noua (In Wholeness) brings a personalized, integrative approach that considers nutrition, fitness, and mental health together. Ruby Smith-Díaz (Autonomy Fitness) runs a body-positive training service dedicated to helping you feel your best in your body, on your own terms. Amaluddin Janif (Un Fold Move Ment) has been building strength with clients since 2017, bringing a lifelong background in movement from Brunei.
Ready to find a BIPOC personal trainer who starts from your body as it is? Browse fitness and wellness practitioners in the Healing in Colour Professionals Directory
Beyond the directory, here is what to look for when searching:
- Body-positive or weight-neutral framework. A trainer committed to this framework will not make weight loss the default goal. Look for explicit language like Health at Every Size, body liberation, or weight-neutral in their bio.
- Disability and neurodivergent affirmation. If you have specific access needs, ask directly: how do you adapt your approach for clients with disabilities or neurodivergent brains? A trainer who has thought about this will have a specific answer.
- Anti-oppressive values. Look for trainers who name their values explicitly: around race, body size, gender, disability, and the cultural origins of fitness itself.
Your Body Already Knows Things
The fitness industry spent decades telling you that your body was the problem and that discipline, restriction, and transformation were the solution. That message was never about your health. It was about reproducing a particular kind of body, rooted in a particular racial and cultural history, and calling it universal.
Your body is not a before photo. It is not a project. It carries history, wisdom, and capacity that no assessment tool built from 19th-century European data can measure.
Movement that serves you starts from that truth. A BIPOC personal trainer who practices from anti-oppressive, body-affirming values already knows it.
Find them at Healing in Colour. Browse the Healing in Colour Professionals Directory
Additional Resources
Browse BIPOC fitness and wellness practitioners
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- Cultural Awareness, Cultural Humility, Cultural Responsiveness: What They Mean and Why It Matters
- Understanding the Nervous System and Why It Matters for BIPOC Healing
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About Healing in Colour
Healing in Colour connects BIPOC clients across Canada with therapists and allied professionals who practice from anti-oppressive values. We believe BIPOC people, in all our intersections, deserve care that supports our healing and liberation.
Learn more: About Us | Our Statement of Values
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