Exercise — how it’s changed from the Greeks to today

Do you have an internal (or external) voice encouraging you to go to the gym this year? As health and fitness centers are flooded with fresh faces and renewed determination, it’s easy to forget that for most of human history, fitness training was exclusive to athletes and eccentrics. As recently as the 1950s, American physicians were more concerned with the risks of overexertion than under-exertion, and fitness was a by-product of recreational sport rather than a goal in itself.

Increasingly sold as a luxury item, Americans on average now pay between $ 50 and $ 150 per month to exercise, and those who pay $ 35 for boutique classes reach that amount per week. A recent Vice Media survey indicates that 16- to 39-year-olds plan to spend more time and money on fitness after the pandemic. Two new books explore the evolution of the global fitness industry, which is valued at $ 828 billion and is projected to exceed $ 1 trillion by 2025, according to the Global Wellness Institute.

In Sweat: a history of exercise, journalist and photographer Bill Hayes aims to trace the origins of the exercise. In its first iteration, physical fitness was pursued in preparation for war. Athletic competition, as we know it, originated in ancient Greece with the Olympic Games, which were first held in 776 BC. C., and placed “the exercise on the road to eventual popularization among the masses,” he writes.

Hayes begins his search in the rare book room of the New York Academy of Medicine. Hoping to start with Hippocrates, he quickly gets sucked into an illustrated volume of gymnastic art, a 16th century treatise by Girolamo Mercuriale, an Italian physician who sought to revive the art of exercise. “Just as classical art and philosophy were considered the epitome of humanity’s achievements in the new spirit of humanism,” Hayes writes, “so is medicine.”

While the benefits of exercise may seem obvious today, the rise of Christianity had completely extinguished them. During the Middle Ages, “the body, which had been idealized, fetishized by the Greeks, was now seen more as a container for sin,” Hayes writes. “The exercise was considered self-indulgent.” This changed with the rise of humanism in the 14th century, Jean-Michel Agasse, an expert on Mercuriale, tells Hayes. “Taking care of oneself, the sense of the individual, returns.”

So far very relevant, but Hayes’s obsession with gymnastic art leads to mission creep. He travels to London to find Mercuriale’s translator from medieval Latin to English, to Paris to meet his French translator, to Lake Maggiore to see the original drawings, to Kansas City for the translation of another book by the author, and to Padua and Rome. retrace the steps of the good doctor. The result, part history, but more memoirs and a travel notebook, is more “a personal story, not a definitive one,” he admits.

Hayes has mixed personal anecdotes in body scans before, in books on the science of sleep, the history of blood, and the history behind the reference text. Gray’s Anatomy. His latest book, Insomniac city (2017), was a memoir that intertwined vignettes about New York and life with his late partner, neurologist and author Oliver Sacks.

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The discussion, well done, can be delicious. Sadly, Hayes’s style tends toward self-satisfaction and, at times, is seriously affected. When “climbing on top” of a StairMaster fitness trainer, he writes: “My finger found the start button on the machine, that little green circle, so powerfully gifted; every time he presses it, it is an opportunity to make a clean slate and absolve himself of his somatic sins ”.

To be fair, some of the digressions in Sweat they are tangential but not irrelevant: an explanation of the evolutionary adaptations of perspiration, for example, or a poignant reminder of San Francisco’s AIDS-era gym culture. You might agree with Hayes’s description of her nude career emulating early athletes. But I ended the book having learned less than I would have liked about the history of exercise and more than anyone needs to know, repeat for rep, about Hayes’ workouts.

The gymnasiums of ancient Greece were reserved for men and boys of the upper classes; women were forbidden, even as spectators. In Let’s get physical, journalist Danielle Friedman shows the tremendous achievements of women in obtaining their right to exercise. Even in the mid-20th century, it was considered unpleasant for women to sweat, and overexertion was thought to cause the uterus to “drop.” It was only in the 1960s that women began to move en masse and the fitness industry grew in step with the feminist movement as women realized the benefits of physical strength.

Well researched and attractive, Let’s get physical share the stories of pioneers who pushed through barriers in women’s practice. The book was born from a 2018 popular item Friedman wrote for The Cut about the “secret sexual history” of the barbell exercise, one of the first boutique fitness classes. The method, described by one teacher as “a combination of modern ballet, yoga, orthopedic exercise and sex,” was launched in 1959 by Lotte Berk, a former dancer and evangelist of free love. Although the erotic nuances of push-ups and pelvic training movements are minimized today, Berk aimed not only to equip women with a “muscle corset”, but also to promote “the state of sex” by encouraging them to seek their own pleasure. .

While the barre classes catered to London and New York celebrities, Judi Sheppard Missett’s Jazzercise franchise attracted “normal Midwestern moms” looking to shed a few pounds and enjoy some time to themselves. Popularized in the disco decade in the mid-1990s, aerobic dancing would become the second most popular physical activity in the US after walking. “Dancing felt safe,” Friedman writes, “particularly for women who are not interested in breaking down gender barriers.”

While some moved in the studios, other women went out to run. Yet only thanks to the efforts of elite athletes like Kathrine Switzer, who crashed in the 1967 Boston Marathon, five years before the event admitted female competitors, do women have the freedom to run, Friedman writes. Before the late 1960s, running more than a few miles was believed to be harmful for women. In 1972, the decisive passage of Title IX in the US gave female athletes the right to equal opportunities in sports in institutions that receive federal funds, and yet the gender pay gap in professional sports persists to this day.

In 1977, when the first sports bra was sold, one of the first prototypes of which was two stitched jockstraps, 45 percent of women exercised regularly. The following decade would usher in the age of muscles, with Arnold Schwarzenegger modeling a steroid-inflated physique and Tamilee Webb promoting her “Buns of Steel” brand. When a 1982 Time magazine cover declared the new sexy strong, Jane Fonda urged women attending her classes in Beverly Hills to “go get the burn.” His best-selling exercise videos, which allow people to “do Jane” in their living rooms, are credited with launching the home entertainment industry.

Yoga, meanwhile, had been buzzing quietly. Their introduction into the West was due in large part to Indra Devi, a Latvian immigrant who studied in India and opened a studio in Hollywood in 1947. Pushing their bodies to the max, “they were exhausted,” Friedman writes. The percentage of women exercising decreased for the first time since the 1950s. Against this backdrop of exhaustion, yoga, offering a low-impact way to stay in shape, burst into the mainstream. From 1990 to 2002, the number of Americans practicing regularly increased sevenfold, and by 2019 the global yoga industry was valued at $ 37 billion.

With the fitness industry simultaneously offering empowerment and capitalizing on women’s insecurities, Friedman addresses the dichotomy between beauty culture and exercise for wellness. And it reminds readers that for all its feminist accomplishments, fitness has been a bastion of privilege, accessible primarily to white women with the time and resources to achieve it. In a poignant final chapter, it highlights contemporary pioneers working to make exercise more inclusive – race, body shape, and income.

The pandemic has altered many areas of our lives, including physical fitness. Closure restrictions forced 22 percent of gyms in the U.S. to close and fueled an explosion in home workouts (Peloton exercise bike lawsuit increased 250 percent in the first quarter of 2020, only to sink, along with the share price, when people reverted to pre-pandemic habits.) While our minds remain healthy, gyms report strong attendance for the beginning of the year as its members tiptoe back to the common spaces.

It is a kind of proof that fitness centers are about more than the equipment or the instructor. When Hayes found himself lazing around during the pandemic, he found that he missed the feeling of working out, but “perhaps more than anything, the sense of community that he had always found in gyms.” In an increasingly atomized society, they are what sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls a “third place,” a place of communal living outside the home and office.

Our exercise habits will undoubtedly continue to change shape. Some things, however, remain unchanged from ancient times. “To achieve excellence,” Hesiod noted around 700 BC. C., “first we must sweat.”

Sweat: A history of exercise by Bill Hayes, Bloomsbury Publishing £ 20, 256 pages

Let’s get physical by Danielle Friedman, Icon Books £ 16.99, 352 pages

Data visualization by chris campbell

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