Earlier this week, CrossFit shared a short documentary style video titled “Letting Beauty Speak” on their YouTube channel. The video dives into how society has defined beauty and its subjectivity. CrossFit originally shared this video six years ago, and it is clear why it was worth sharing again; the stigma surrounding beauty, particularly for female athletes, still remains a challenge in modern day culture.
If you have not yet had the opportunity to see the video, check it out here. It is six and a half minutes long:
The video opens on a premise that beauty is constantly being judged and assessed.
Ask one hundred different people to define beauty and you get one hundred different answers.
Most people retreat from the challenge of the question, confident they know beauty when they see it; choosing to describe it rather than define it.
But when really pressed on the question, descriptions of physical appearance begin to fall away.
Slow montages of CrossFit athletes play one after the next. The athleticism and grit of each CrossFit athlete is highlighted while the classical underscore carries through.
At first, the narration focuses on the aesthetics of CrossFit athletes. Close ups on the striations in athletes’ quads, the 3-D shoulders, the deep ridged abdominals.
2008 CrossFit Games champion Jason Khalipa says,
Right off the bat, you see outside aesthetic looks, and you look at them as beautiful traits. That’s what first comes to mind.
The video briskly shifts from the surface level definition of aesthetic beauty to the values CrossFit athletes hold in high regard.
As clips from the CrossFit Games play, Khalipa continues,
I think what differentiates the beauty from the outside and the inside is the heart and perseverance that each CrossFit athlete shows through each one of these workouts.
Athletes share their views that confidence and the way someone carries themselves lends to being beautiful. They challenge the stigma that beauty is defined by fashion magazines rather than the work done in a gym.
Khalipa says further,
So hopefully over the years…there will be a cultural shift from looking at just the aesthetic looks to how well can this person perform.
The video suggests that this cultural shift should measure beauty by the discipline imposed to overcome the shortcomings of the human body; that beauty is found in the determination to better yourself and grow stronger.
The narrator concludes,
Ask one hundred people at the CrossFit Games to define beauty and they all answer with a gesture.
At the CrossFit Games, beauty speaks up itself.
Feature image from Jason Khalipa’s Instagram page: @jasonkhalipa