Functional Training, From Rousseau to Baudrillard
The Romantic Postmodern Myths of ‘Primal Movement’ and ‘Functional Fitness’
Functional Training, From Rousseau to Baudrillard: The Romantic Postmodern Myths of ‘Primal Movement’ and ‘Functional Fitness’
Paul Bowman
Cardiff University
Abstract
· This article discusses the discourse of ‘functional fitness’ and ‘primal movement’ practices, focusing on heavy club training as a main example. It argues that these contemporary fitness discourses invoke romanticized myths of ancestral purity and natural movement to legitimize themselves, along with claims about increased sporting performance. However, such claims are largely unsupported by scientific evidence, and research actually suggests a lack of meaningful transfer to sports. Thus, I suggest – especially when evaluated in relation to its mythopoetic claims about ‘timeless’ and ‘universal’ natural human movement – the appeal of functional strength training really lies in its simulation of authenticity and connection to imagined origins. These origins are ‘imagined’ because, even though the discourse appropriates historical training implements from diverse cultures, it decontextualizes them, under a unifying myth of our ‘primal’ state of nature. I argue that – far from reflecting ancient and timeless transcultural truths – the movement cultures of ‘functional fitness’ constitute a hyperreal spectacle, in which practitioners consume idealized images of movement and authenticity, rather than engaging in either exploratory or individuated embodied experience or athletic performance. Ultimately, then, such practices serve psychological and cultural functions, rather than sporting ones, offering compensatory narratives of self-construction and authenticity in response to contemporary anxieties about alienation and embodiment, while perpetuating orientalist and primitivist assumptions in Western fitness culture.
Keywords
· Functional Fitness; Primal Movement; Noble Savage Myth; Hyperreality; Authenticity Simulation
Heavy clubs are exactly as they sound: clubs of different weights made of steel. I bought my first clubs when I was learning the weapons-based martial art of escrima. My rationale was that if I trained alone with heavy clubs, I would become so much stronger in a way that would translate directly into greater strength and stamina in class. I’m not sure this ever actually panned out the way I hoped.
Nonetheless, I pursued the myth even more avidly when I was learning Brazilian jiu-jitsu, years later. I found the heavy club and kettlebell tutorials provided by Mark Wildman on YouTube to be most helpful, because of the level of detail offered (Mark Wildman - YouTube, n.d.). However, over time, I increasingly noticed the presence of three things that travelled with the explicit ‘how to’ lessons. These were (are):
1. A kind of hyper-masculine tone, but a marketing strategy clearly aimed at women
2. The myth of ancient and transcultural prehistorical timelessness
3. The alibi that heavy club training was all about improving ability in sport
I have broached some of points one and two before (Bowman, 2025), but let me recap a bit, on the way to point three. Point one is illustrated by a quick look at one of Wildman’s earliest YouTube videos – a sleek and professional advertising pitch, aimed at potential female clients, that was used for a long time on the landing page of his website (Wildman, 2016). This appears to have been replaced now, as Wildman appears to have undergone a rebrand from ‘celebrity’ personal trainer to hawker of BJJ and other sports and martial arts-related training products. This relates to point three (which we will get to).
I have also discussed point two before – the myth that contemporary heavy club training is connected with an ancient and transcultural prehistorical timelessness. But let’s briefly revisit that again, as this has not been rebranded away.
The Noble Savage in the Room
Practitioners of heavy club swinging, particularly figures like Mark Wildman, regularly invoke a fantasy about primordial noble savages. When examined through the lens of critical discourse analysis, what becomes visible is a reiterated pattern of romanticized primitivism that draws heavily on the noble savage trope while simultaneously reflecting broader orientalist tendencies in contemporary fitness culture.
The noble savage concept, as established in the 18th century by figures like Rousseau, presents an idealized vision of ‘uncivilized’ peoples as morally superior to those corrupted by civilization. This framework manifests clearly in heavy club training discourse through several key elements (Britannica, 2025).
The first might be called temporal nostalgia and historical romanticism. Mark Wildman consistently frames heavy club training through appeals to ancient authority, often making statements like ‘clubbing is very, very old; so old that it’s probably older than actual civilization’ (Wildman, 2017). His rhetoric positions these tools as connecting practitioners to a pre-civilizational golden age when humans possessed superior physical capabilities and wisdom. He references mythological figures like Hercules and Gilgamesh, creating a narrative that situates club swinging as ‘older than civilization’ and therefore more authentic.
Going hand in hand with this is the Romantic claim of the corruption of modernity. Wildman’s discourse consistently evokes a mythic contrast between the ‘pure’ movement patterns of ancient peoples with the degraded state of modern humans. He argues that ‘people sit down all the time and when they go to the gym they lift in straight lines’, positioning contemporary exercise as fundamentally corrupted compared to the natural throwing patterns that ‘define humans’. This directly echoes the noble savage trope’s central premise that civilization corrupts natural human goodness (Wildman, 2017).
This is hardly surprising given the explicit embrace of primitivist ideology within the ‘primal movement’ and ‘functional fitness’ communities, of which heavy club training is a part. This discourse consistently presents hunter-gatherer movement patterns as superior to modern exercise, with practitioners claiming that ‘primitive men and women’ possessed optimal fitness naturally (Dalleck & Kravitz, n.d.; Dangerously Fit, n.d.; Scott-Dixon, 2021; Senart, 2013).
Prominent in this discourse are constructs like ‘the seven primal ovement patterns’. Such concepts exemplify the romanticization central to the discourse, as advocates frequently assert that these movements ‘have deep roots in human ancestry’ and were ‘essential for survival’. The underlying assumption is that pre-agricultural humans lived in harmony with their bodies and environment, while modern civilization has corrupted these natural patterns (Dangerously Fit, n.d.).
At the same time as this ostensible universalising and deracinating of its discourse, the heavy club training community has simultaneously appropriated such items as Indian clubs and Persian maces, in a mannter that reflects what Edward Said identified as orientalist discourse (Said, 1978). These tools are presented not as products of sophisticated (and differing) training cultures, but as artifacts from a more ‘primitive’ and therefore more ‘authentic’ past. The rebranding of complex Persian and Indian training implements as ‘primal’ tools strips away their actual cultural contexts in favour of a generic primitivist fantasy.
Hence, heavy club practitioners frequently invoke the figure of the ‘ancient warrior’ as the idealized practitioner. This archetype embodies the noble savage’s key characteristics: physical prowess, moral clarity, and connection to nature – all of which have supposedly corrupted by modern civilization. Mark Wildman, for instance, references ‘The Great Gamma’, a wrestler who allegedly performed 1,000 shield casts daily with an 80-pound club, and he presents this as evidence of superior ancient training methods (Gamma was actually a 20th century wrestler).
This warrior mythology serves several discursive functions:
It provides masculine heroic archetypes that embody ‘natural’ strength
It suggests that modern training methods are inferior to ancient wisdom
It positions practitioners as recovering lost authentic human capabilities
However, what really makes contemporary heavy club discourse particularly sophisticated is how it wraps romantic primitivism in scientific language. Practitioners cite evolutionary arguments about ‘natural’ movement patterns while simultaneously engaging in what anthropologists recognize as classic noble savage romanticization (Rapp, 2024; Scott-Dixon, 2021).
The discourse of ‘ancestral movement’ and ‘primal patterns’ presents itself as evidence-based while actually perpetuating the same romantic myths about pre-civilizational human superiority that have characterized Western thought since the Enlightenment (Rapp, 2024).
In the end, heavy club training discourse invokes noble savage fantasies, but it is not alone or idiosyncratic in doing so. Its discourse needs to be understood within a broader context or landscape that is populated with anxieties or sense of:
Contemporary alienation, both from industrial work and compounded by sedentary lifestyles
Masculine identity crisis in post-industrial society
Consumer culture’s constant search for authentic experience narratives
The wider drive to gain scientific legitimation of appealing romantic primitivist beliefs
The romanticization of primitive strength training serves psychological and cultural functions beyond simple nostalgia. It provides practitioners with a sense of authentic masculinity and connection to imagined ancestral wisdom while also offering a kind of escape from the perceived corruption of modern life.
However, this discourse ultimately reproduces the same orientalist and primitivist assumptions that have historically justified Western cultural superiority while simultaneously appropriating and decontextualizing non-Western training traditions. The ‘noble savage’ in heavy club training is less about actual historical peoples and more about Western fantasies of pre-civilizational purity projected onto convenient cultural artifacts.
The is all particularly palpable when reflecting on how this discourse selectively appropriates elements from various cultures (Indian clubs, Persian maces, European medieval weapons, etc.) while stripping away their actual historical and cultural contexts in favour of a generic ‘ancient warrior’ mythology that serves contemporary psychological needs and fantasies about a kind of authentic communion with the primal source rather than something rather more akin to a postmodern simulation. Which takes us to our next theme: the idea that heavy clubs are supplements to sport.
Hyperreal Heavy Clubs
Functional strength and circular strength training discourse appeal to improvements in sporting prowess as one of their raisons d’être. However, this raison d’être is actually more of an alibi. Heavy club and functional strength training is arguably much more of a hyperreal performance, in which the fantasy of authentic movement is more important than actual athletic performance.
Before we get to this kind of Baudrillardian argument, though, there are other, more straightforwardly empirical observations to make. For instance, research suggests a significant disconnection between the claimed sport performance benefits of such training and actual evidence. For a start, multiple studies demonstrate that the ‘functional movement screen’ (FMS) – a cornerstone of functional training discourse – lacks both measurement and predictive validity. Research shows the FMS ‘does not demonstrate the properties essential to be considered as a measurement scale’ and cannot prospectively identify athletes at risk of injury. More damning for the sport performance claims, the FMS was explicitly ‘never intended to measure sport performance’ (Bardenett et al., 2015; Cook et al., 2014; Philp et al., 2018).
Similarly, from a scientific perspective, there is a limited amount of what is called ‘transfer evidence’: systematic reviews of functional training show improvements primarily in laboratory measures rather than actual sport performance. While functional training demonstrates ‘near transfer’ to related movement tasks, there is minimal evidence for ‘far transfer’ to actual competitive performance. This mirrors broader research showing that cognitive and perceptual training rarely transfers to real-world performance despite impressive laboratory results (Bashir et al., 2022; Fransen, 2024; Liu et al., 2024; Xiao et al., 2021).
In light of the paucity of scientific data, some of the performance claims of circular strength training advocates seem unsupported. It was Scott Sonnon who most popularized today’s Circular Strength Training system, and from the outset it was marketed as/for elite performance training. However, despite existing since the birth of the 21st century, there is still limited peer-reviewed evidence for the sport-specific benefit claims. The single study examining circular strength training found improvements in bone density and kicking performance in soccer players, but this represents a remarkably thin evidence base for such expansive performance claims (Hamza, 2013).
So, where does this leave us? Being a cultural theorist rather than a scientist, to my mind the heavy club and circular strength discourse seems to have more in common with Jean Baudrillard’s notion of a hyperreal or postmodern simulation – both of ‘timeless essences’ and of ‘sport performance’.
Famously, Baudrillard postulated a four-stage process involved in becoming postmodern, or hyperreal (Baudrillard, 1994). The functional strength discourse perfectly exemplifies Baudrillard’s four stages of simulation moving toward hyperreality. Where Baudrillard writes about ‘representations’, we can insert the term ‘functional training’. Hence:
· Stage 1 – The Faithful Copy: Early functional training genuinely attempted to replicate sport-specific movement patterns based on biomechanical analysis
· Stage 2 – Distorted Reality: The discourse began emphasizing ‘primal’ and ‘functional’ movements that distorted actual sport demands while maintaining claims of authenticity
· Stage 3 – Pretense Without Reality: Current functional training creates elaborate movement practices that simulate the appearance of sport preparation while having minimal connection to actual performance demands.
· Stage 4 – Pure Simulation: The training becomes its own self-referential system where practitioners engage in ‘functional’ movements that exist independently of any real-world application, yet feel more authentic than traditional training
The movement culture surrounding functional strength training exemplifies what scholars identify as a performance of authenticity rather than genuine authenticity (Daudi, 2022; Riemer, 2020; Rörström & Grist, 2022). There are several key characteristics of this.
The first is the value of what might be called ‘aesthetic authenticity’ over other considerations of performance. Practitioners prioritize movements that look natural, fluid, and ‘functional’ rather than those that demonstrably improve performance. The emphasis on ‘movement quality’ and ‘flow’ creates what researchers describe as a ‘visual culture’ wherein authenticity is performed for different kinds of consumption rather than experienced in some kind of, well, natural or authentic way (Riemer, 2020).
The second again involves (surprise, surprise) appeal to a discourse of ancestral wisdom. The appropriation (or evocation) of ‘ancient’ training methods (such as clubs, maces and ‘primal’ movements) serves as what Baudrillard would recognize as the simulation of depth and meaning (Scott-Dixon, 2021). These tools are recontextualized not as products of specific cultural practices but as generic signifiers of authenticity.
Finally, we see the ‘anxiety of influence’. Movement culture practitioners exhibit what one analysis identifies as ‘anxiety of influence’, constantly seeking new modalities to establish authentic individual practice while paradoxically conforming to recognizable patterns of ‘functional’ movement (Riemer, 2020).
The Functional Movement of the Spectacle
To go a stage further back in time and in the development of postmodern cultural theory, we might also revisit Guy Debord’s concept of ‘spectacle’. We might connect this with the sense in which functional training operates as performance rather than utility. The discourse creates what Debord identified as ‘social relations among people, mediated by images’ (Debord, 1990, 1994) – in this case, images of ideal movement and authentic physicality.
Inevitably, then, we are also very much in the terrain that cultural studies analyses would regard as the commodification of authenticity. Fitness culture transforms certain movements, deemed authentic, into commodity (and) spectacle . What began as practical training becomes ‘an immense accumulation of spectacles’ where practitioners consume images of ideal movement rather than developing actual performance capabilities (Andreasson & Johansson, 2014; Bell et al., 2023; Hearse, 2021).
To stick with Debordian imagery, this produces what might be termed ‘separation through unity’: the functional movement community creates apparent unity around ‘natural’ movement while actually separating practitioners from direct embodied experience. This happens in more than one respect. The most obvious is today’s hypermediated mode or engagement. Another is the way that the focus on the technical execution of ‘functional’ patterns which replaces intuitive movement development. (It perhaps also deserves to be noted here that some contemporary theorists in the tradition of Deleuze and Guattari are returning to the proposition that insistence on unity of movement is a kind of ‘microfascism’.)
The Postmodern Self-Project
Functional strength discourse clearly serves the broader postmodern project of self-construction through consumption and performance. As historians of fitness have noted, exercise has become ‘part of a distinctly self-centered mood’, in which people ‘seem to have turned to ourselves, putting what faith we can muster in our own minds and bodies’ (Andreasson & Johansson, 2014; Stern, 2008). Arguably, this is a kind of ‘compensatory authenticity’: In a world perceived as increasingly artificial, functional training offers the simulation of returning to ‘natural’ human movement. This is what some scholars identify as ‘compensatory authenticity’: the feeling of genuine experience within a fundamentally simulated framework (Daudi, 2022).
Against this backdrop, sports performance claims attempt to provide legitimacy for what is essentially a kind of therapeutic movement practice. The discourse of ‘corrective exercise’ and ‘movement dysfunction’ – which is also palpably present in the discourse of advocates such as Mark Wildman – both (pseudo)medicalizes normal human variation while attempting to position functional training as both cure and prevention – a ‘return’ to some kind of Rousseauian State of Nature.
Conclusion
Thus, despite not being sport, functional fitness discourse appeals to sporting efficiency as its legitimizing narrative. Claims about improvements to athletic performance seek to provide socially intelligible and legitimate credibility for practices that actually primarily serve psychological and cultural functions, rather than performance enhancement. In them, simulation receding reality. Many practitioners – such as me – never engage in actual sports yet feel they are training ‘functionally’ through elaborate movement practices that simulate the idea of sport preparation. (Even when I was participating in sports – or, rather, martial arts sparring of various types – I remain unclear as to whether any of my club training workouts led to any improvement of any kind.)
Thus, despite all claims to primordiality, what we have here is a hyperreal movement culture. The training creates its own self-referential reality in which ‘functional’ movement exists independently of function, becoming more important than actual physical capabilities. In it, fantasies about authenticity are the principal commodities. The discourse transforms genuine movement exploration into packaged experiences of authenticity that can be consumed and performed.
In these ways, the functional strength movement represents a sophisticated form of what Baudrillard called ‘the desert of the real’ – a hyperreal environment in which simulated authenticity becomes more compelling than authentic experience. Practitioners engage in elaborate rituals of ‘functional’ movement that feel more real than traditional exercise, while remaining largely disconnected from actual performance demands or genuine movement exploration.
This phenomenon reflects broader postmodern anxieties about authenticity, embodiment, and agency in an increasingly mediated world. The functional training simulation provides psychological relief from these anxieties while simultaneously reproducing the very conditions of simulation it claims to transcend.
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