Hi! I’m Geve, and I started Little Ram because I was the kid who cried in gym class.
I came up with every excuse possible to avoid attending gym, and would staunchly refuse to play team sports. I was frequently accused by my gym teacher of “not trying hard enough” and being a “slacker”.
While I couldn’t put words to it yet, I was a queer, gender non conforming kid at a conservative rural high school, and it absolutely affected how I inhabited my body. I’d never developed the skills to perform athletically, and moving my body—especially in front of other people—had only been confusing and humiliating up until that point. My gym teacher was right: I absolutely wasn’t trying, because trying meant making mistakes and being laughed at. There simply wasn’t room for my body or my identity in that class, or in many gym spaces I’ve visited since.
And then, when I was a teenager, I decided that I wanted to feel strong. Going through a binary puberty as a non binary person was confusing and stressful, and I wanted to do something that would help me make sense of my body.
Strength training helped me feel grounded in my body in a way that nothing else did, and let me focus on what it could DO rather than how it looked to other people. For the first time in my life, I felt powerful.
I didn’t work out in a public gym until after I became a personal trainer, because I never felt like I belonged there. The environment was always heavily gendered, and the toxicity of diet culture felt inextricably linked with the fitness world.
My goal with Little Ram is the opposite of that:
I believe we are entitled to information about how to move in ways that are safe, effective, and joyful—in our bodies as they are, today.
Because movement should bring us closer to ourselves, rather than farther away. And it should be about what feels good.