The Atlantic – “A new generation of fitness instructors teaches simple skills that make a difference. Why is beginner-level exercise treated like a niche?…Hampton Liu is a gym teacher of sorts. He has amassed millions of followers across YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok by teaching a remedial PE course for adults from his Arkansas backyard. In many of his videos, he wears a T-shirt and jeans instead of specialized athletic gear, and he uses little or no equipment. The most popular installments take viewers through super-common exercises—squats, lunges, push-ups, pull-ups—with variations tailored to many different capability levels. For someone who has never exercised at all, a push-up might start as—or might just be—lying on your back and “bench-pressing the air” in order to expand your range of motion. There are several more types of push-up that Liu tells viewers to master before they assume the hands-and-toes position that’s long been taught to American kids as the One True Push-Up. (Kneeling variation acceptable for girls, if they must.)…Liu focuses on teaching progressions for novices, which work toward the skills that other types of exercise instruction take for granted. There’s a real audience for these, he told me. Lots of people seem to assume that their inability to do sets of those basic moves is an irreversible failure—for many of them, it’s been their lot in life since elementary-school gym class. For decades, exercise instruction for adults has functioned on largely the same principle. What the fitness industry calls a “beginner” is usually someone relatively young and capable who wants to become more conventionally attractive, get swole, or learn a trendy workout such as high-intensity interval training or barre. If you’re a novice looking for a path toward these more intense routines, most of the conventional gyms, fitness studios, and exercise experts that offer them don’t have much for you—come back when you’ve developed on your own the endurance and core strength to avoid barfing, crying, or injuring yourself in the first 10 minutes. The situation is even worse if you have no designs on getting ripped and instead just want to build a baseline of capability, whether that’s for hoisting your toddler, shaking off the stiffness of a desk job, or living independently as you age…”