I recently stopped following a fitness coach I liked. Solid programmer, realistic expectations, no nonsense. The kind of account that’s actually rare. Then out of nowhere: videos of empty gyms at 2 a.m., dramatic lighting, captions about the grind never sleeping. I unfollowed immediately.
I’m old and cranky, and I think that’s bullshit. But as a historian I also think it’s interesting bullshit, because the 3 a.m. gym post isn’t really about training. It’s content. And understanding how we got here requires going back further than Instagram.
In 1983, a former junior-college basketball player named Mark Mastrov bought into a small Nautilus facility in San Leandro, California. He noticed members queuing before opening and lingering after closing. His solution was simple: keep the doors open. The club became 24 Hour Fitness, and by the early 2000s it was doing over a billion dollars in revenue. Chuck Runyon and Dave Mortensen launched Anytime Fitness in Minnesota in 2002, key-fob access, small footprint, always open. By 2009 they had a thousand locations. Today they have over five thousand worldwide. What started as a practical fix for shift workers became industry standard.
That’s the practical origin story. But access alone doesn’t explain why training at 3 a.m. became a virtue rather than just an option. For that you need the cultural soil, and it had been prepared for a decade before Mastrov kept his doors open.
Sport historian Benjamin Rader, writing in 1991, described what had been building since the mid-1970s as the ‘new strenuosity.’ Fitness culture shifted in purpose. It was no longer primarily about health or longevity. It became a vehicle for identity formation, a way of demonstrating character in a society that had stopped trusting its institutions. Watergate, Vietnam, stagflation, urban decline. By the late 1970s, a significant chunk of the American middle class had concluded that the only reliable unit was the self. You couldn’t fix the country. You could fix your body. Rader noted the turn ‘to the self, upon the individual rather than upon society or community,’ and he was right that something had genuinely changed. The gym became a place where you proved something, not just a place where you exercised.
Jane Fonda understood this perfectly. Her 1982 workout book and video weren’t just fitness products. They were identity products. The message wasn’t ‘get healthy.’ It was ‘become someone who does this.’ Discipline, transformation, visible effort. Recovery didn’t fit that story.
Arnold Schwarzenegger told a parallel one. The gym made him a businessman, an actor, a success. Training wasn’t just physical. It was rehearsal for dominance in other domains. Serious men trained seriously, and serious training looked a certain way.
What that story obscured, conveniently, was infrastructure. Joe Weider gave him a platform, connections, and access to American culture that had little to do with squats. The self-made myth required that to be invisible. What remained was the image: the lone figure, the iron, the will. No rest days. No recovery. No support system. Just discipline, stripped of context.
Sound familiar?
CrossFit, founded in 2000, took that aesthetic and made it explicit. Not just training hard, but making extremity the point. Workouts became performances with a scoreboard. You posted your times. You compared yourself. ‘No days off’ wasn’t a joke. It was a value system.
The key confusion was simple but consequential. Exertion, that feeling of being destroyed, became the metric. But exertion and adaptation are not the same thing. Strength training works through progressive overload and recovery, not through how wrecked you feel at the end. CrossFit collapsed that distinction and presented the collapse as intensity.
It’s also when the lifting community became widely familiar with rhabdomyolysis. Rhabdo became a dark joke, which should have been a warning. Suffering that hospitalises you is not a training outcome. It’s a training failure. The culture treated it as a rite of passage.
That logic hasn’t gone away. HYROX runs on the same DNA: push to extremes, measure the extremity, share the result. Exertion is the product. Recovery is just the gap between exertions. The idea that the gap is where adaptation actually happens has no place in that framework because it has no aesthetic. You cannot post a photograph of sleeping eight hours.
The physiques setting the template from the 1980s onward were largely chemically assisted. Those athletes could sustain volumes and frequencies that natural trainees cannot replicate without wrecking recovery. Their apparent resilience was pharmacological. But they became the reference point, and their methods, or what people thought were their methods, were copied anyway.
None of this would have surprised the people who built modern strength training. Bob Hoffman emphasised rest days and sleep. Joe Weider told beginners to train on alternate days and prioritise recovery. Eugen Sandow kept sessions short and warned against late-night training. George Hackenschmidt was blunt: do not train to exhaustion; use moderation and common sense.
These weren’t soft men. They built extraordinary physiques. They just understood that adaptation happens during recovery, not during the session.
My former coach, the one filming himself at 2 a.m., isn’t working with that mechanism. He’s working with a different one entirely: the attention economy. The empty gym photographs beautifully. The timestamp proves you were there when everyone else was asleep. It signals discipline in a way that is, crucially, shareable. A sensible evening session does not.
So the fitness influencer economy optimises not for training outcomes, but for content that signals training virtue. Those are different objectives, and they produce different behaviour.
This is where Rader’s ‘new strenuosity’ ends up forty years later. The individual proving themselves, visibly, against the world. The 3 a.m. session isn’t about adaptation. It’s about signalling.
Late-night training elevates cortisol and impairs recovery. The old masters knew it. The science confirms it. Enough people have run the grind script and found it didn’t deliver. Hence deloads, sleep tracking, and the slow rehabilitation of recovery as a serious training variable.
Twenty-four-hour gyms were a genuine breakthrough for people with real constraints. That access matters. The distortion came when we stopped treating it as a tool and started treating sleepless grinding as virtue.
The 3 a.m. deadlift isn’t discipline. It’s content.
Sandow knew the difference. Hackenschmidt knew it. Even Weider knew it.
It might be time to remember it.