In recent years, more gyms have started using the phrase “trauma-informed.” You might see it in class descriptions or posted on a studio wall. But too often it’s treated as a buzzword or a marketing tool rather than a real commitment. While softer lighting or a grounding exercise before class can help, being truly trauma-informed goes much deeper. At its core, it’s about creating fitness environments where you feel safe, respected, and empowered to move your body, regardless of size, ability, or background.

Feeling Unsafe in a “Safe” Space

If you’ve ever left a workout feeling judged or excluded, that’s a sign the space wasn’t truly safe for you.

Some common experiences include:

• Pressure to focus on diet talk or weight loss when that’s not your goal.
• Hearing exercise framed as punishment instead of empowerment.
• Feeling out of place if your body doesn’t match the “ideal” fitness image.
• Having your pronouns ignored or being forced into gendered spaces.
• Experiencing sensory overload from loud music, crowded rooms, or harsh lighting.

A gym can market itself as trauma-informed, but if you leave feeling diminished instead of supported, something isn’t lining up.

Respect and Education 

When most people picture a trainer’s education, they think anatomy, movement science, and programming. But what’s often missing is the human side or understanding how complex people really are.

That’s where trauma-informed practice matters. It means your trainer recognizes that “push harder” or “no excuses” doesn’t work for everyone. For trauma survivors, those approaches can cause shutdown, not motivation.

A truly trauma-informed coach learns cultural humility, consent-based touch, inclusive language, and when to refer clients to other ways of support. If you’ve ever been told that toughness is the only path to results, you already know how harmful those messages can feel.

Real safety in fitness goes beyond mechanics. It’s about psychological safety and respect for the whole person.

Fitness Barriers

The fitness industry has long celebrated those who are lean, muscular, and conventionally attractive. This “face and body card” dictates who gets attention, hired, and respected.

If you’ve ever noticed only certain bodies in marketing images, or felt gyms were built for a specific “type” of person, that’s not an accident. For decades, the industry has reinforced the “face and body card” or idea that credibility comes from appearance, which leaves many exercisers feeling unwelcome.

Other barriers deepen that exclusion:

• Financial: High costs make fitness feel out of reach.
• Cultural: Not all communities view gyms as accessible or inclusive.
• Disability and neurodiversity: Lack of adaptive equipment or overwhelming environments make many spaces inaccessible.

These barriers send a clear message: fitness is for some, not all. That narrative must change.

Safety Belongs to All

When people think of safety, they often picture injury prevention. But safety also includes emotional, psychological and cultural well-being. Yet in many gyms, only thin, white, cisgender, able-bodied clients feel safe. 

For newcomers or immigrant families, structured fitness can feel financially or culturally out of reach. For neurodivergent people, bright lights, loud music, and crowded rooms can be overwhelming.

As the child of an immigrant and a neurodivergent individual, I know how survival can take priority over wellness. That’s why trauma-informed fitness must expand access and reflect the communities it serves.

So how do you tell the difference between a gym using “trauma-informed” as a label and one that truly practices it? Look for signs like:

• Inclusive language: No shame, diet talk, or punishment framing.
• Consent-first approaches: Trainers ask before offering touch or adjustments.
• Options for all bodies: Modifications, adaptive equipment, and encouragement to move at your own pace.
• Sensory-friendly practices: Lower music, softer lighting, or quiet spaces.
• Facilities that reflect community needs: Gender-neutral change rooms, diverse instructors, and welcoming imagery.

In a true trauma-informed space, you don’t have to “fit in.” The space adapts to you.

Inclusive Spaces

Healing from trauma isn’t something that happens alone. It requires community. Trauma-informed fitness is bigger than individual care. It’s a cultural shift.

Many who feel unwelcome in traditional gyms thrive in environments where inclusion is the norm. In these spaces, success isn’t measured by six-pack abs or the number on the scale. It’s showing up without fear, breathing deeply through a workout without anxiety, or rediscovering joy in movement.

When fitness spaces create belonging, they stop being intimidating and start becoming places of empowerment.

Fitness can’t replace therapy, but it can help you reconnect with your body with movement in ways that heals, rather than harms.

The industry is slowly shifting, but as participants, we play a role too. By noticing how gyms make us feel, and by supporting inclusive, safe spaces, we can help push fitness culture toward something more empowering, accessible, and human.

The future of fitness isn’t about looking the part. It’s about feeling safe enough to move, connect, and thrive. And that future belongs to all of us. 

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A quick Google search — as one does in the modern world — provides many definitions that are all more or less the same. They all seem to make reference to ‘activities performed in daily life,’ or how we function from day to day. Per Wikipedia: “exercise which involves training the body for the activities performed in daily life.”

It is important to ask the question when talking about being functional for daily activities: functional for what? Functional fitness for a university basketball player is different than it is for your 70-year-old grandmother. Functional fitness should serve you in what you do in your daily life, but not all of us have the same daily activities. The problem is that for many of us, daily life is sedentary and lacks activity in general.

Functional fitness doesn’t have to be as complicated as the Olympic clean and jerk. Functional fitness is a spectrum – more like the activities we do (or should be doing) in our daily life.

There is a very important difference between simply functioning and being functional, or rather, functionally sound. As fitness professionals we should focus on more happening at one time. Both ends of the spectrum that we’re describing here can have their respective impractical extremes. Practicality prevails here as in most areas.

Not exercising = not functional. So even something such as bicep curls are functional (more functional than doing nothing), but they are on the end of being less functional. Less overall is happening at once, therefore the transference of benefit to daily life is less. On the other extreme, however, social media influencers are guilty of adding unnecessary equipment or steps to tried and true, already perfectly functional exercises (please stop squatting on stability balls, you’re going to hurt yourself).

Six Key Exercises

Hip hinges, squats, lunges, pushes, pulls and twisting (or preventing twisting) are the big six human movement patterns. Getting strong and proficient in all of these and their many variations will make you a more functional, pain-free human being with better balance and less injuries.

They are also most likely to serve you in natural human movement. The greatest example of this would be hip hinging, otherwise known as Deadlifts. Since the dawn of time, human beings have been bending over and picking things up. It is most likely the most common form of physical demand from a strength perspective that any of us are going to engage in day to day. Despite sedentary lifestyles that most of us live (which thereby makes it more important to avoid injuries), we’re always picking things up. Consequently we’re also always injuring our backs or are suffering from back pain. Deadlifts strengthen the legs and low back and teach us how to properly pick heavy things up (thereby lessening the chance of injury).

Because functional exercise utilizes more of your body at once — that is, if we’re referring to the more functional end of the spectrum — that means more energy expenditure is happening. More movement happening at once = more challenging = more calories burned (i.e. higher metabolism – bonus!). In terms of resistance-style training this will also equate to more muscle growth and strength building.

“In layman’s terms, your metabolism is dictated by the amount of energy your body requires to function on a day-to-day basis, otherwise known as your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). This is why we eat food! The total daily energy needs of every person is going to be different. Every body is different and every lifestyle is different. More movement requires more energy. Movement is the one thing that we have control over, as opposed to the involuntary needs our body constantly has for life support.” – Essential Understandings of Muscle Building and its Relation to Health and Fitness.

Burning calories or muscle / strength building may or may not be a goal for you personally, but for those living modern, sedentary lifestyles it is necessary. We’re simply doing much less physical activity compared to humans even just two generations back. We’re getting injured, living in pain, struggling to keep up with the kids, and dealing with preventative health issues like diabetes and heart disease more than ever.

If you find that your gym routines are relying on seated machine exercises, your results will pale in comparison to a fitness program centered around robust and challenging movements patterns.

Machine-based exercise is the easiest place to start your fitness journey. Start where you can, but don’t stay there. Anything is better than nothing, do something. But not everything is worth your time. Don’t stop to pick up pennies when you can learn to dig up diamonds.

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