When I started this site ten years ago, my main interests were how physical activity was used to achieve certain goals, including corporate profit, and community compliance with PA guidelines. Underlying these ideas was the very concept of physical activity itself. The way physical activity is defined has consequences for how it is deployed in both science and in society.

So I have been fascinated with some articles which have come out recently. These three articles, discussed below, have overlapping concerns. While they are published in a variety of journals, I wonder if momentum is building with the ideas discussed. Has the orthodox, dominant approach to physical activity run out of energy, or will it continue despite changes like the ones below?

These articles all offer challenges to traditional ways of defining physical activity. At a time of horrific global conflicts, intensifying national politics and the climate emergency (all of which are somehow entangled in physical activity), maybe some of these ideas can provoke us to take positive action in our own communities and in our own work?

First is “A case for ‘Collective Physical Activity’: moving towards post-capitalist futures“ by Gianmarco Dellacasa and Emily Oliver, in 2024. They argue for three things to move towards a better world, 1) diverting attention from organized sport towards personally meaningful physical activities; 2) focusing on bottom-up collective opportunities, rather than top-down ones, and 3) advocating for system change to foster hope and tackle societal issues at their roots. They conclude by saying “collective physical activity can be an opportunity to foster critical consciousness and wider empowerment, trying to replace despondency with hope in the power of collective action.”

Next is “The health-physical activity entanglement in a neoliberal landscape: alternative possibilities for inquiry“ by Fernando Santos, Dominic Malcolm, Emma Pullen, Celia Marcen, Paula Teixeira Fernandes and Angela Beggan in 2025. They offer an alternative perspective to the traditional conception of physical activity. In opposition to neoliberal and capitalistic ideas about physical activity and health they offer a concept of incommensurable health-PA. They propose a “free-flowing, situated and embodied notion of health that creates undetermined opportunities for individuals to feel well with-through movement.” While the paper has many thoughtful ideas, one of the most provocative is this articulation, where the authors are arguing for a radical re-conceptualisation of the status quo: “[Currently] Blame and responsibility get levied against everyone and everything else and thus it becomes an agenda based on control. Conversely, from an epistemic injustice perspective, incommensurable health-PA cannot be controlled by the World Health Organization, scholars or health agencies.” The authors’ concept of health-PA is a rejection of certain knowledges, potentially freeing up other ways of knowing. Diverse knowledges, and their suppression, is the focus of the third article discussed here.

Lastly, and recently, “Physical activity recommendations in South America: a decolonial analysis” by Priscilla de Cesaro Antunes, Heitor Martins Pasquim, María Rosa Corral-Vázquez, Tatiana Castillo, Rodrigo Soto-Lagos, Fernanda Ramos Parreira, Leonardo Trapaga Abib, Claudia Cortés-Garcia, María Laura Pagola, and Edwin Alexander Canon-Buitrago in 2025. This is a particularly insightful article, as it is the first study that I have seen which empirically challenges the ways in which PA/health is created and produced in public health documents in South America. They show that “South American countries are importing, and translating in their own way, conservative references from the global north that do not necessarily reflect the continent’s socio-health needs.” And so the research challenges the orthodox and exclusionary aspects of dominant PA understandings. This is consequential, they argue, because “This [exclusionary] process can be understood as an expression of epistemological-health colonialism, in which the development of fields of knowledge and practices in Latin American countries is marked by centuries of European domination and the political and economic influence of the United States. The power of this hegemony marginalizes critical thinking formulated in Latin America, including regional cultural manifestations”.

In all three articles there is a sentiment of hope, but this comes with the idea that changing things will not be easy – it will take time, energy and a determined outlook, since changing the status quo is not easy. All of these articles raise questions for how we should teach about, research, and promote physical activity.

Which ideas are deemed important?

Who and what is prioritized?

What goals are we trying to accomplish?

How radical should we be when promoting physical activity?

What actions are needed to realize the emancipatory potential of physical activity?

Joe P