Every week, it feels as if there’s a hot new fitness trend. The classes are full, there’s a line at the squat rack, and there’s a good chance you know someone with a stationary bike in a corner of their apartment. When it comes to how we choose to move our bodies, we have options. But our pilates (and barre and weightlighting) obsession did not come out of nowhere.
That’s where Danielle Friedman comes in. She’s a journalist and author of the book, Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World. According to Friedman, we’re living in a fitness golden age, but it wasn’t always this way. In the 1950s, people were actively discouraged from exercising. “For women, exercise was seen as especially dangerous,” she says. “There was a widespread belief that strenuous exercise would make your uterus fall out.” This week on Explain It To Me — Vox’s weekly call-in podcast — she tells us how the messaging around movement changed.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Friedman, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
When did we first start to see our ideas around exercise evolve in America?
The post-World War II era was actually a time when Americans were moving less than ever before that then helped give rise to what would come. After all of the hardships of the Great Depression and the war, Americans were really embracing what they called the “modern way of life,” which largely meant exerting yourself physically as little as possible, particularly in the middle and upper classes. Push button appliances became popular, ranch houses eliminated stairs, driving replaced walking, and TV exploded.
So the good life meant a life of little sweat, and it was at that point when the first real fitness influencers stepped onto the scene through TV. The message that exercise was both necessary and good for you was beamed into living rooms across the country, and almost as soon as this period of inactivity began, there were these fitness evangelists who were saying, “Not so fast, we actually need to move our bodies to feel good.” There were a few really popular TV fitness personalities who had to work really hard to convince the country that exercise would not kill you.
Yeah, there was a lot more fear about over-exertion than under-exertion at the time. There were still outdated beliefs that you were only born with a certain number of heartbeats and you didn’t want to waste them on exercise. Muscles were seen as unseemly and unladylike.
Heading into the ’60s, people like [fitness pioneer] Bonnie Prudden were saying, “No. It’s safe. You need to do it.” And as people started discovering that a regular exercise habit made them feel good, and in some cases improved measures of health, slowly the cultural messaging began to take off.
There were still outdated beliefs that you were only born with a certain number of heartbeats and you didn’t want to waste them on exercise.
We also had a president at the time, JFK, who famously wrote a piece in Sports Illustrated before he even was inaugurated called “The Soft American.” There were a lot of fears about the fact that basically in this Cold War era, Americans were becoming really physically unfit and soft, and we would have trouble defending ourselves.
All of these cultural forces were helping to shape what happened in the early ’60s, and we started to see some of the first really early group fitness classes. So many of these workouts are almost a century or over a century old. Pilates was created basically a hundred years ago.
Let’s fast-forward one decade. It’s the 1970s. This is a decade you’ve written that has changed fitness forever. What happened in the ’70s?
There was the rise of the women’s movement. Books like Our Bodies, Ourselves, the seminal feminist health tome, actually had a chapter about exercise, and they were telling women, “It’s okay for women to have muscles.” It was part of this messaging that women can be independent and self-sufficient. There was the passage of Title IX in 1972, which created so many more opportunities for girls to play high school and college sports, so there was a whole new generation of women who were active and wanted to continue to be active.
There was also the birth of exercise science, which is huge. For a really long time, even as some enlightened doctors knew or suspected that exercise was good for your health, those fears about overexertion were very real. Against that backdrop, there was an explosion [of exercise]. And in the ’70s, we saw what we would now look at as almost like the virality of so many workouts and modes of exercise that laid the groundwork for how we move today.
What are some of those exercises?
Running or jogging. Before the early ’70s, it was seen as people who ran for fun and ran in public were really kind of kooky, and they would sometimes have cans thrown at them. The idea that you would run for the sake of running for health, for fitness, was not established yet. Women were not allowed to run most marathons. It was in 1972 that for the first time women were officially allowed to enter the Boston Marathon.
Before the early ‘70s, it was seen as people who ran for fun and ran in public were really kind of kooky, and they would sometimes have cans thrown at them.
The ’70s was in many ways, the decade of dance. Chorus Line was this huge Broadway hit. There was disco. There was Saturday Night Fever. Dance was cool. Everyday Americans wanted to have good dance skills, and that helped to fuel the rise of aerobic dancing.
At the time, Jazzercise was the most successful of the aerobic dancing brands. It was created by a professional jazz dancer, and she discovered that there were a lot of adult women who had no plans to become professional dancers, but wanted to look like dancers and were kind of captivated by dance. And so this felt very new and fresh. And for a lot of women at that time, going to a jazzercise aerobics dance class was the first time that they had ever worked out as adults.
What about yoga? It’s obviously a very old practice, but how did it become popular in America?
The Beatles really had a lot to do with that in the late ’60s. They very famously spent time at an ashram in India, and that helped to normalize it a little bit among Americans. A lot of Americans still saw yoga as dangerous. It felt scarily exotic to them, and there was a mystical element to it And then the real turning point was a PBS show called Lilias, Yoga, and You. So a lot of housewives who just had the TV on were exposed to her. For better and maybe for worse, that helped to demystify yoga and make it feel accessible and very American
You’ve also written about how weightlifting took off in the ’70s.
Of all of the workouts we’ve talked about, bodybuilding was probably the most fringe. Men who really focused on strength training and building muscles were viewed suspiciously either as being narcissists or they were often portrayed as thugs or bodyguards. Enter Arnold Schwarzenegger who was a champion bodybuilder at the time. He defied a lot of the stereotypes that existed about male bodybuilders because he was very charming. He was very articulate. He was kind of a ladies man, and he helped make bodybuilding and strength training aspirational in this country.
There’s another celebrity who had a huge impact on fitness at the time.
None of them had quite the impact as Jane Fonda. She was already an Oscar-winning actress, she was the daughter of Henry Fonda, and she had become kind of notorious for her anti-Vietnam War protests. She was the first Hollywood celebrity also to become a fitness influencer. Part of her success was selling herself, and the idea that if you workout like me, you can be like me. Her biggest impact came in 1982 when she released the Jane Fonda workout video. At the time, not that many people even owned VCRs because the idea that you would want to watch the same movie over and over again was new and people couldn’t quite wrap their heads around it yet. But to be able to do Jane Fonda’s workout, you had to own the tape, which meant you had to own a VCR. She, more than anyone who came before her, made exercise aspirational, especially for women.
Is there anything that stands out that’s kind of uniquely American about our exercise culture?
Fitness culture, as we know it, is an American invention. Some of the popular workouts that we do today, like barre and Pilates, have their roots in other countries, but it was in America that they became commercialized.
I think there is something about always striving for thinner, better, faster, stronger that does feel uniquely American, but hopefully now we’re beginning to recognize some of that and we can move away from it a bit.
