Perhaps my father walked out on me, the speaker hypothesises, his voice thundering over crashing drums (the kind that accompany tense moments on reality TV shows).
Absent fathers are a common theme of motivational workout speeches, and so the narrator in my earbuds takes the form of Dad; sometimes Encouraging Dad, but more often Shouting Angrily from the Sidelines Dad.
Motivational speeches were first adopted by weightlifters who wanted some screaming encouragement as they benchpressed, but they’ve since infiltrated the fitness mainstream. These stand-in dads live in a labyrinth of playlists proliferating on Spotify and YouTube – so you can listen at the gym or, if you’re feeling pooped, watch stock-footage montages of people screaming in the rain on your laptop. Tracks can feature solo speakers or snippets from several sources. Their voices are often uncredited, though ministers, athletes and business leaders feature heavily. Usually, the voices are underscored with dramatic music.
Perhaps you’ll be familiar with David Goggins, a former US Navy Seal who berates the camera while running and orders his 10.4 million Instagram followers to “callus your mind”.
When it comes to motivation I’m more carrot than stick – a “great job” makes me bloom – but, after a few months of overindulging, I need a stern taskmaster. I do usually take my workouts seriously – fighting in Muay Thai and competing in amateur bodybuilding – but, if anything, my real dad was a bit bemused when I started going full beast mode.
So I’ve been listening to Don’t You Dare Give Up On Yourself from Gold Coast company Fearless Motivation, whose tracks feature Turia Pitt alongside US motivational speakers, editing the wisdom to rousing rhythms and galloping strings.
Fearless Motivation was founded in 2015, when such tracks started to move beyond bodybuilding circles. Back then, Arnold Schwarzenegger (relationship with dad: “complicated”) was a popular choice. Now big players such as Motiversity, Motivation Madness and Mulligan Brothers have millions of subscribers, while Fearless Motivation claims its tracks have been streamed 500m times on Spotify. In addition to soundtracking endless reels from gymfluencers, motivational speech creators now aim their sights at students and wannabe entrepreneurs. A secondary industry, of YouTube tutorials on how to make these videos for fast monetisation, has also flourished.
Over the next hour, as I swing kettlebells, I hear speakers mulling over famous quotes such as Oscar Wilde’s “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”. I’m also given lots of contradictory advice:
Give up!
Don’t give up!
The more valuable you are, the more a team will pay for you. Same with YouTube. The more value you give, the more people watch.
Stop with the YouTube binge sessions!
Boiled down to its essence, the premise is always: you’re the underdog. Nobody knows how much you’ve suffered. Nobody cares either. So now you need to dominate.
My friend Eilish Kidd, a kettlebell sport athlete who co-owns Art Gym in Hobart, was intoxicated by this genre a few years ago. In particular she found solace in the work of Niyi Sobo, a former NFL athlete turned mindset coach who hosts the podcast I’m Not You. Kidd put aside her disquiet at all the references to “kings” to listen.
“I was using these soundtracks to retreat,” she says. She stopped listening after deciding these speeches were making her antisocial. “It created an even stronger sense of isolation. Now I had something going through my head that other people couldn’t hear: ‘You’re not the average person. You are stronger and more powerful.’
“I think why it appealed to me initially is because it’s that lone wolf kind of thing. It gives you the licence to be by yourself and different from everybody else.”
I skip a Jordan Peterson track and land on Tom Bilyeu. He’s the mega-rich founder of Impact Theory, a motivational media company, but he doesn’t hold a commanding presence in my earbuds – the better tracks build in intensity in the manner of Eminem’s classic hype song Lose Yourself. In any case, being told by Bilyeu that I can’t be in a successful relationship if I haven’t read books on the differences between men and women seems counterintuitive to moving up to a heavier kettlebell weight.
There’s a selfishness that’s celebrated in this genre. We’re living in an era that celebrates dark triad types and that’s crossed over into self-improvement. Ten years on from the original swell of interest, figures like Andrew Tate and Russell Brand have infiltrated the pack, with their interviews and podcasts becoming source material. (I give Tate, who’s puffing on a cigar in the cover art, a cursory play. He tells me to stop wasting my potential watching Pornhub or I’ll disappoint my father.)
While these speeches offer tough love, following their advice to the letter would likely lead to burnout or injury. But I find my groove with the ultra-alpha The Wolf King Speech. It’s a 20-minute male/female double-header that spends less time trying to guess my backstory and more on convincing me I’m one of a kind.
Just like these speeches, kettlebell workouts are all about momentum, so I decide to execute as many violent, hip-thrusting swings as possible as a finisher. I just hope nobody expects to get past me to the dumbbell rack any time soon.
