Fitness Program & Syllabus: 2025

joshuacitarella.substack.com

Substack post outlining a 2025 fitness program paired with a reading syllabus linking gym practice to socialist texts and community study.

Fitness Program & Syllabus: 2025

This project began as an elaborate shitpost where posting gym selfies would pipeline people into reading socialist books. As stupid as that sounds — it has been wildly successful. More seriously, there has been an endless amount of mainstream media think-pieces that desperately seek to connect weight lifting with right-wing politics. Blue check journalists have done just about everything they can to villainize the most popular American pastimes (exercise, video games and more).For the past few years, I’ve released an annual summer syllabus and fitness program. From the hundreds of messages that I receive throughout the year, the most frequently expressed sentiment is: ‘this $5 syllabus is a better education than my fancy university’. Of the many layers of trolling at work in this project, this is perhaps the most satisfying.As the scale of this project has grown, I’ve had to consider that my audience is no longer a niche intellectual publication designed to troll a handful of journalists and academics. Instead, this newsletter has become a participant in mass culture and the broader alt-media landscape. For me, an “exercise program + syllabus” is a much harder troll when its point of comparison is a university course. But when it exists alongside actual influencers and fitness content, it starts to feel less resonant. For all of these reasons, this will probably be the last fitness syllabus that I publish.In summary, this year’s program is comprised of all the most impactful links and course materials from the previous 4 years. Everything contained here is freely available online. (You don’t need to buy any additional books or materials.) If you’re new to this project — this is the ideal place to start and quickly be brought up to speed. This is a 9 week program. Its a bit shorter than previous iterations and so the weekly course materials are proportionately heavier. (Think of this as low rep + heavy weight, intellectual hypertrophy training.) Once you complete thi

Visit joshuacitarella.substack.com
* This website doesn't allow embedding. AUX iOS app for the best experience.