Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession

by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

How is it that Americans are more obsessed with exercise than ever, and yet also unhealthier? Fit Nation explains how we got here and imagines how we might create a more inclusive, stronger future.

If a shared American creed still exists, it’s a belief that exercise is integral to a life well lived. A century ago, working out was the activity of a strange subculture, but today, it’s almost impossible to avoid exhortations to Walk 5K to cure cancer! Awaken your inner sex kitten at pole-dancing class! Sweat like (or even with) a celebrity in spin class! Exercise is everywhere.

Yet the United States is hardly a “fit nation.” Only 20 percent of Americans work out consistently, over half of gym members don’t even use the facilities they pay for, and fewer than 30 percent of high school students get an hour of exercise a day. So how did fitness become both inescapable and inaccessible?

Spanning more than a century of American history, Fit Nation answers these questions and more through original interviews, archival research, and a rich cultural narrative. As a leading political and intellectual historian and a certified fitness instructor, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is uniquely qualified to confront the complex and far-reaching implications of how our contemporary exercise culture took shape. She explores the work of working out not just as consumers have experienced it, but as it was created by performers, physical educators, trainers, instructors, and many others.

For Petrzela, fitness is a social justice issue. She argues that the fight for a more equitable exercise culture will be won only by revolutionizing fitness culture at its core, making it truly inclusive for all bodies in a way it has never been. Examining venues from the stage of the World’s Fair and Muscle Beach to fat farms, feminist health clinics, radical and evangelical college campuses, yoga retreats, gleaming health clubs, school gymnasiums, and many more, Fit Nation is a revealing history that shows fitness to be not just a matter of physical health but of what it means to be an American.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Health, Self Help, Audiobook, Fitness, Cultural

424 pages, Hardcover

Published February 7, 2023

Reviews

[Nathan Shuherk · Rating 5 out of 5]

If she could do a limited run podcast series on fitness history and culture, I would subscribe on Patreon immediately. Far and away my favorite straightforward history of fitness in the US.

[Katie Johnstone · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 - thorough, well researched, and fascinating! docking stars for academic writing style and meandering organization, as well as ending without a chapter on “where should we go from here.” As an academic with program development experience, I really wanted Petrzela to highlight best practices or bright spots of the more equitable or authentic Fit Nation she clearly hopes to see.

[Tony · Rating 1 out of 5]

Weighed down by presentism and lazy citations, the only thing that Fit Nation exercises is the ideological bona fides of its admittedly exercise-obsessed author.

[Debbie Wakefield · Rating 4 out of 5]

You should read the book “let’s get physical” instead.

I enjoyed Let’s Get Physical as well as the fitness section of the book “Cultish” so I thought I would enjoy this book. But it was tough to get through. It read more like an academic research article than a pop culture nonfiction read.

This book is a an historical overview of fitness in America. Starting in the early 1900s with bodybuilders who were considered circus freaks going all the way up to the pandemic rise of Peloton and the current state of fitness and 2022.

I thought the book would focus more on the intersections of fitness with race and sexuality, but it just skims the surface of the racial discrimination and deep history of homophobia.

I think this book is geared toward a more academic audience. I found the book “let’s get physical “much more enjoyable, approachable, relatable, covering very similar topics as this book.

[Gracie Griffith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting in parts but ultimately it read like a very sweeping sociological text that perhaps was a little too ambitious for a self-imposed "approachable" page limit... the breadth of topics and the length of time studied was just a bit too overwhelming and the result was a book with a myriad of interesting points (and an emphasis on feminism which continued throughout) but there just wasn't space to fully flesh out any one argument to a desired level of detail or specificity

on the other hand, I would have loved to have gotten my hands on this for a humanities course in college but I was a bit less thrilled to be reading it for pleasure only. still learned a little about a lot rather than a lot about a little...

[Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fit Nation does a fantastic job of laying out our obsession, as a country, with fitness and weight loss. While some people/fitness crazes were familiar to me, I still learned quite a bit. There were parts that did drag on a bit but I believe it was mostly due to my interest in certain parts of history over others. Thanks to Netgalley and The University of Chicago Press for the E-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Tina Cheng · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes I read to learn stuff.

[Abby Hickey · Rating 3 out of 5]

A comprehensive (if at times long winded) history on the evolution of fitness from a policy goal to a commoditized product

[Homefrontgirl · Rating 1 out of 5]

The style of this book was hard to get into and read. At times it was direct and informative, at others it was trying to be literary and high-brow. A thesaurus was definitely used--perhaps too much. Ultimately this is the history of fitness in America, which is interesting as it is not the history of sports or teams. The underlying theme is the desire of the author to require the federal government to require more PE teachers in schools. Apparently the only way to get all Americans to be fit is by paying more taxes and implementing more laws.

[Melissa Cripps · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very similar in content to Let’s Get Physical - a book I read last year. A review of the rise of fitness and wellness in the US over the past 70 years or so. It’s so interesting to learn about the rise and fall of so many trends in exercise and fitness, especially since I spent a couple years of college as a fitness and wellness major (and ended up switching to the much more practical accounting). I feel like the 90s and early aughts were very formative in my relationship with exercise and it’s interesting to examine it through the lens of a larger picture.
The book ends with an analysis of social issues related to health, wellness and exercise and the conditions of working in the industry - both important considerations and I appreciated the insights.

[Paul Foley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Natalia Petrzela’s Fit Nation: The Gains & Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession purports to be a history of exercise in the United States over the past century. Though written by a professor of history who is also a certified fitness instructor, it fails at its task. As a historical survey, it misses wide swaths of its subject, which is remarkable in a moderately long, non-specialized treatment. It is not only narrow in scope, it is also heavily biased, poorly argued, contains multiple contradictions, and is exhaustingly preachy.

The first glaring contradiction is the claim in the title that the nation is “obsessed” with exercise yet on page 2 of the Introduction it’s stated that only 20% of the populace exercises regularly. Some “obsession”, that. This is characteristic of Petrzela’s book; a plaintive, pervasive negative insistence that somehow there’s an excess and a simultaneous paucity, that nothing is ever right. We don’t have enough gym teachers in our schools, yet gym teachers do it wrong anyway, plus she hated gym as a kid.

Her argument is confused, and the negative tone is exhausting.

There are some things Petrzela likes. She’s nostalgic for the radicalism of the 60s and 70s (as she imagines it, anyway), she romanticizes the Black Panthers (what are they doing in a book ostensibly about exercise and fitness, you ask?). She likes the Obamas, especially Michele (same question). This is a political book on the history of exercise, and there’s a lot of pounding square pegs into round holes. A lot of speculation and assumption. Page 258: “Puma’s running shoe, the Predator… intimated how the countercultural activity of jogging [?] Had been recast as the pursuit of mercenary individualism”

Really? That’s a big burden to put on a simple sneaker. What if the name Puma Predator simply alliterates, or fits because a puma is a predator, or invokes a big fast cat? What if a shoe is just a shoe? Why the complaining, why the outrage?

This postmodern academic tomfoolery wouldn’t be so noxious if it hadn’t squeezed out so much of the history of exercise in America. There’s no mention of casual sports like amateur softball leagues or even golf. Petrzela’s history of exercise in America is pretty much restricted to group indoor fitness classes based on dance, aerobics.The entire field of strength training is ignored except for Muscle Beach and gay men (as an LGBQT+ issue) and Chippendales erotic dancers. Like many people ignorant of the subject, she identifies weight lifting solely with bodybuilding. Not a mention of the evolution of the classic barbell lifts or the history of weight training, the advent of Powerlifting, the introduction of the Nauilus machine and its inventor Arthur Jones (which gave us the basic setup of the modern gym), or the renaissance of free weights. Not a mention of Joe Weider, who defined what it meant to “work out” for a generation. We should expect more from a professional historian.

The history of exercise in America is a fascinating, complex, entertaining, and often quite funny story. A pity it is not told here.

[Reading · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-written and well-researched. Natalia has a great writing style, and covers an interesting topic.

The book left me a bit cold, overall. The bulk of the text is more of a "this happened then this happened" history of exercise in the United States, and less of an analysis of it. She hyper fixates on the specific stories of certain successful gyms or fitness instructors, sometimes spending 20+ pages on minutiae relating to a specific NYC gym, but failing to illustrate how this specific story connects to the story of exercise in the US as a whole. Really, there's more reporting than analysis overall.

She is always sure to touch on political points, and unequal access for minorities, at least once per chapter. But it often feels like it is mentioned in passing. After spending a chapter or two on the jogging craze of the late 20th century, she'll just say "and of course this was mostly white people. Black people and other people of color were excluded", but she does not go into much more detail about HOW or WHY or what was done about it.

She also fails to really answer the question of "so what?". She successfully tracks America's growing obsession with exercise over the last 130 years, but to what end? Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Why do Americans care about exercise so much? How does this relate to increasing obesity rates? Does it? Does it matter?

The book ends with a "and here we are in a fit nation, but at what cost?" sort of a statement.

I don't mean to be harsh. It's an enjoyable read and I learned a lot of interesting facts! University of Michigan launching the first intramural sports teams was a cool one! But I don't know that I have a greater understanding of "America's Exercise Obsession" than I did before.

Took me a long time to get through because every time I picked it up I was overcome with an urge to go for a jog...

[Tanya · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this fascinating history of fitness in America.

[Sneha Dey · Rating 2 out of 5]

So clearly well-researched but it read like a 350 page journal article

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very interesting read, even though the focus is very much on the USA (which is not where I live). It is essentially a history of the fitness industry, and the disconnect between the popularity of the fitness industry, its place as an aspirational target for the wealthy, and the lack of support for physical education in schools to improve the health of the populace.
I agree with the author that it is a somewhat shocking dichotomy, and note this is true of most endeavours - there is not enough support for science and music in schools either, despite the huge commercial success of technology and popular musicians.
It tries to cover a huge amount of material, so struggles a bit when trying to make detailed comments, or to really talk about issues in meaningful depth. I eventually worked out that I just had to trust the "story arc" of the book. The book felt more interesting to me in the last few chapters. I particularly liked her section on the complex social function of the personal trainer (including their need to be physically attractive, but not a sexual target).
I learned some interesting factoids - about Richard Simmons and the great Sandow and the even more amazing Sandwina, about Muscle Beach and the weird suspicion that those interested in physical fitness must be gay, the role of Jane Fonda's exercise routines in supporting her husband's political aspirations, the role of gyms in the providing health information during the rise of AIDS, and as a place for feminism to grow.
The writing is a bit undisciplined, and the author is easily distracted on issues of gender and race, which are not always well supported by her examples (e.g. Paul Cadmus' "Golf" painting was really weirdly represented, and the use of the Central Park Jogger convictions as an example of jogging being a "white" sport was also strange - I feel it is more an example of racial profiling and a terrible judicial process).
I did find it a bit confusing at first, because she never really defines what she means by "fitness" - where does fitness end, and sport begin? Is it the competition? No, because there were aerobics competitions... I still don't know.

I did wonder how this book would be different if one wrote about fitness in Australia - our history of girls and women's calisthenics (which is nothing like what Americans call calisthenics), the role of swimming and the beach, our interest in bushwalking. Where does this fit in her "fitness" paradigm?

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I give her an "A" for effort. Natalia Petrzela did an enormous amount of research and the result is a comprehensive look at exercise in the USA since the early 20th century.

Fareed Zakaria observed, in the very different context of his book "Illiberal Democracies" that the gym is the new church. He made the observation along the lines of explaining where certain cultural energies are channeled in newly secular Western societies. That rang true to me, the idea that the personality traits of self-discipline, persistence, and even some faith which inspired prior generations are now expressed as much in the gym as in the pews.

Also, its quite a story of social change if you consider that even 50 years ago, much less 100, very few Americans exercised. How did that happen? Petrzela takes us through the several steps in the process. I was particularly interested in the early apprehensions that cultivation of the body was effete or unduly egotistical. In Arnold Schwarzenegger's words "Men shouldn't feel like fags because they want to have nice looking bodies." She has some really interesting observations on the early leap of Joseph PIlate training dancers and Venice beach body-building culture to Jack LaLanne's TV show and attempts to make exercise part of everyday routines.

Petrzela spends a lot of effort advocating for a greater government role in propagating exercise across the socio-economic spectrum. She faults the federal and local governments for not facilitating exercise and allowing the fitness industry to remain largely private. Not something I've given much thought to, but an interesting take.

Needless to say, in 2023 a professor at the New School is tirelessly inclusive in her perspective on these topics. This is, of course, welcome but it can be intrusive. I laughed out loud when she put Jack LaLanne on blast for calling his body his slave and wondered how that made Black and Brown viewers feel.

But a bigger reservation, and the reason for 3 rather than 4 stars is the excessive length and repetitiveness of the book. She needed a better editor to cut a hundred pages of academic jargon and virtue signalling.

So overall I recommend it but maybe more as a skim than a close read. Lots of good stuff in here if your interested in the questions which form the books premises.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

I vacillated between 2 and 3 stars. Some interesting historical stuff (e.g., how colleges till about the 1950's didn't even have gyms for non-varsity athletes) and cultural analysis -- mostly on attitudes toward race, sex, and sexual orientation as they intersect at various points with fitness trends.

But a lot of fairly tedious chronologically-ordered material tracing well-known fads and personalities. I'm old enough to remember seeing Jack LaLanne on TV, knew people who followed along with Jane Fonda aerobics videos daily, have students who are crossFit devotees, etc. etc., so just recapping these and other developments is not news, and the way in which it was done is not scintillating -- lots of scare quotes to highlight infinite amount of jargon (subtypes of yoga, for instance) and redundant interviews. Here's one person who hopped on the Peloton bandwagon during pandemic, and here's the input of another, and another.........

Very little commentary and only a couple mentions of her own experience, though she is a certified fitness instructor per the jacket copy. That might have livened things up. As it stands, you can infer that she thinks the government should make exercise opportunities more affordable and accessible to eliminate inequities, and that people have always been susceptible to deceptive quick-fix advertising, but that's about it. Could have used more on, say, whether the endless pendulum swings are actually getting us closer to guidelines that, if followed, would be healthy.

Anyway, i won't keep piling on to work through my disappointment; i'm interested in the issue, so i was hopeful this book would deliver more. But one last nit pick -- not great editing. Besides being too long, there were some weird typos, plus direct contradiction p. 155 vs. p. 173 on whether Jim Fixx in The Complete Book of Running was painstaking vs. indifferent as to distinction between "running" and "jogging." Anyone who thinks it doesn't matter probably hasn't been insulted as a "hobby jogger" on letsrun.com

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a lot of culture in physical culture, and Petrzela takes you on a journey through American fitness culture, starting in the days of freakish "strongmen" through the ebbs and flows of yoga (pun intended) into the crazes for trademarked workouts like Tai-Bo and Zumba and up to Trump's "unprecedented" presidential assertion that he never exercises and the Covid Pandemic's tarnish on the halo of gyms.

It is enlightening to learn about some of the historical trends that I've heard about in books or TV, but didn't really know much about, like Jack LaLanne and Jazzercise and those fat-jiggling belt machines. It's good to know how recent women's sport and fitness has been, that girls in high school gym just two generations back were told not to run too far or too fast, lest their uteruses fall out.

Petrzela is an activist as well as a historian, and she is definitely concerned with women in sport, as well as the LGBTQ+ community, and she has a sort of cognitive ambiguity about fitness in America. She clearly makes the theses that fitness ought to be democratic, funded by national imperative, rather than the province of the elite who take their technical clothing, gyms and even safe neighborhoods for granted. In one illustrative thought experiment, she asks us to contract the popular culture view of the yoga instructor (wise, strong, perhaps a little self-righteous or elite) with the P. E. teacher (lazy, bullying, probably with their best sporting days well behind them). However, she recognizes also that fitness itself has some ambiguity. Yes, the late 90s and 2000s ushered in the "strong is beautiful" physique, but doesn't that mean now women have to be not only thin, but also defined? Yes, a 50+ Jennifer Lopez can promote her Body Lab, but does this mean that older people, too, have to keep it tight?

A real page-turner with plenty of philosophical grist to mill.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Petrzela's ambition here is applaudable; attempting to tell the whole story of fitness in America - and make it readable - is a tough road to travel. And that, ultimately, is what hurts the book: In attempting to share so much information, we end up with a confusing stew of characters, anecdotes, and facts in areas ranging from government actions on fitness to private equity investment in gyms; we meet Jack Lalanne and Richard Simmons and Jane Fonda, but we don't get to know them; there's politics mixed in with Nike advertisements, and a few paragraphs of the controversial Peloton ad from 2019 shortly after some haranguing about a particular ex-president's disdain for fitness. The beginning of the book teased an examination of government involvement in making this a fit nation; what I was left wondering, after 344 pages, is why the government's hasn't been more involved in making this nation fit.

There's a lot of roads she could have gone down but didn't - nutrition is almost wholly excluded from the book, and there's no perspective or history of fitness from any countries outside the US. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - the book didn't need more content - but it's indicative of the fact that the book was unfocused to the point where even the conclusion did not involve any recommendations, suggestions, or even her opinion on whether the fitness/wellness industry is in good shape or not.

Again, snaps for all of the work and research that went into a book of this sort, but it didn't work for me.

[Pat | _chaoticbooknook · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sighhhh it's always a shame when the subject/thesis of the book seems SO INTERESTING but the writing itself was just.. not it.

The premise is really interesting, and overall the content was a super fascinating look into the history of exercise in the US, the changing norms and attitudes towards it, and how we got to where we are vis a vis this tension between exercising and being healthy. But my ability to enjoy the book and absorb the learnings were really bogged down by the poor organization, and slightly inaccessible the writing style - I got so tired of plodding through the writing that I ended up listening on audiobook instead, which was definitely a bit better. I also felt there were a lot of assumptions and incredible generalizations made about the people who seek to exercise - at times, it ventured into the realm of an opinion piece for me.

Overall, I felt like the main points of the book could be distilled down to:
1) we are easily impressionable and obsessive about fads and trends
2) people want things that are fun & community building - with some slight status signaling
3) ultimately, we are not healthy because of how we value individual achievement above all else. So the act of exercising is a display of discipline moreso than the enjoyment of the activity.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting but poorly executed. If you're *really* interested, I'd recommend listening to it on audiobook instead.

[Matt Carl · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of my nonfiction TBR comes from my massive addiction to podcasts, and Fit Nation is no exception. The author, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is one of the co-hosts of the Past Present podcast, in which three historians discuss an issue in current events in a brief and entertaining way, and also each host presents a separate topic of historical interest for briefer consideration.

Unlike the brief podcast segments, Fit Nation is a deep dive into the history of exercise and fitness of all sorts, and is full of fascinating detail. Some of it with dark undertones, such as bodybuilding’s roots in racial purity, and the Presidential Fitness Challenge out of a concern the US was falling behind in potential military during the Cold War. Even one of the most familiar stories to me, that of Katherine Switzer running the Boston Marathon at a time when women were still banned, had more details. I’ve seen the pictures of her boyfriend shoving race director Jock Semple away as though he is the hero. I’ve never heard that he then berated Switzer for maybe getting him in trouble and threatening his own athletic future.

The book is full is these stories, and I could have gone for a book twice as long. Everything from Arnold Shwarzenegger to Richard Simmons to Donald Trump gets a mention.

A note on the audio…Professor Petrzela reads the book herself, and while I usually like that (especially if it’s a voice I already know from a podcast) I feel like this production had some issues. Weird pauses in the middle of sentences and a couple of time some audible deep breaths. I think this is mostly due to the edit rather than the reading, but it did take me out of the narrative at times.

[Nathan Ren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an academic history of exercise in America written by a historian of education. Again, it is an academic text. I normally don’t find myself excited to continue reading academic texts. But Fit Nation was as much of a page turner as an academic history can be!

I personally found the author’s voice wonderful, and the audiobook with the author herself made the reading experience for me. It’s hard to tell when academics want us to laugh with them without their voice!

Summary:
This book is first of all a history and second of all an argument Petrzela presents in the introduction. The first sections are some of the most enjoyable, the early history of exercise “when it was weird to sweat” are fun. An age when only strongmen were strong? The secondary argument throughout the book is a critique of an exercise culture that does not provide the means to exercise in a safe or efficient way. Petrzela’s book urges us to find new ways to organize exercise beyond the current individualized and often elitist($$$) ones currently available. This argument is hard to argue with, but you don’t need to agree with it to learn from her history of exercise.

[Hattie Strange · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book reads like talking to your enthusiastic friend at a bar after they fell into a research rabbit hole. It's fascinating and interesting, and desperately in need of an editor. It's just a firehose of information with very little in the way of organization. It's mildly chronological, but not really, and chapter headings are close to irrelevant (the chapter on Title IX spends time on Barre and jazzercise, and doesn't talk about how college sports had anything to do with either. It could maybe be said it was addressing "women in sports," except it draws a distinction between sports and fitness as subjects). At times, it says something and then later contradicts it ("gyms weren't a thing until x date!" / "this new gym was very different from the ubiquitous gyms of yore")("women weren't running at all" / "all these women runners I just told you didn't exist created a huge demand for jog bras").

It's just a barrage of interesting facts with no clear conclusion. I look forward to future research in this area though. I'm fascinated by America's individualized obsession with fitness.

[Jennifer Abdo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hm. I listened to a few interviews with the author on my favorite podcasts, which made me think, wow, I really have to read this book. I don't know. I sort of stalled out - maybe she talked about the best part of it in there interview. It didn't really get to the parts I was most interested in till the very end of the book. And it identifies problems with access to excercise but stops short of imagining or mentioning any sort of solutions that any group may have proposed. But it is a pretty good history of excercise and changing American relationships with it throughout our history, so four stars.

As a (female) jiu-jitsu black belt, I waited for her to mention my sport and all I got was this:

"In the twenty-first century fitness "bro culture" disseminated in weight rooms, in jiu-jitsu studios, and through supplement-sponsored YouTube channels, fellow historian and gym rat Patrick Wyman writes, men celebrate pain, might, and brawn as they figure out "what it means to be a guy.""

Ick.

[Zibby Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book tells the story of the history of working out and how we got to a place of intense focus on exercising. The author traced the history of exercise from the nineteenth century to today's Peloton craze. It looked at how this obsession with working out has become a part of American culture and how the definition of health has changed over time.

I really enjoyed this book and thought it was well-written and well-researched. One of the main things I loved was when the author talked about how we can't out-exercise a bad diet. This book is about fitness, but we can't understand or solve fitness inequality until we understand how intricately it is intertwined with other factors like location, money, family, time, work, etc.

To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at:
https://www.momsdonthavetimetoreadboo...

[Summer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was very very good. My only caveat is that Petrzela is clearly a very strong academic writer, haha! It probably pained her to dumb down her sentences enough for a lay person to read!

There are no short sentences in this book. This is not a breezy read.

But if you are up to the challenge, you will find this book endlessly interesting. It's well researched, perfectly paced and put together beautifully. It is exactly as deep and broad as it should be (which must have been torture for someone willing and able to write MUCH deeper and MUCH broader!)

You can't write for the lay person and say everything you want to say, imagine each paragraph being a whole academic article! So, my thanks go to Petrzela for slowing down long enough to write a book that is accessible to lay people like me. I suspect Petrzela will write more books about endlessly fascinating subjects explored here.

[Leah DeFlitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost a 5! 4.5 because I looooove an academic text and I looove the millions of pages of notes lmao

Worth noting this isn’t necessarily a book for pleasure, it’s quite in the weeds and I wished I knew that going in so I could brace myself for the learning and the cognitive work it would take. I’d love to discuss this book and American history of “working out” in general in a book club format!!

But really, I think the author did a great job staying unbiased yet addressing her own personal interests: the downfalls and benifits of our current US exercise climate are described, as well as how we got there. We get themes of feminism and a sociological landscape of how people think, not only interact with movement as a whole. It is very fact and vignette based, and I think organization into some common themes or a purely chronological order might have benefited the “readability” of it. I’d go back for certain chapters over others to underline, which for me makes it worth it

[Hannah Hethmon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely thorough, nuanced, and insightful. I really learned so much reading this book. I grew up with a mom who ran and did aerobics at home in the 90s and it was interesting to place her exercise journey in historical context.

Personally, I’ve always struggled to exercise and enjoy exercise without being flooded by weight loss content. Learning this history, with all its highs and lows, positives and problematics, actually inspired me to start and stay exercising in various ways that I enjoyed.

It did take me a while to get through this book because the writing is a bit academic and dense, and kind of jumps back-and-forth in time. So I kind of had to read it in a short bursts, but I always was eager to get back to it, and found a chapter interesting and engaging overall.

[Caitlyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

I went into this book thinking it was going to mostly be an analysis of the U.S. fitness culture and how to address issues of exclusivity, inaccessibility, and problematic messaging/advertising. But it's actually 95% history of exercise in the U.S. from the turn of the 20th century to present day and the last 10 pages proclaiming how gyms need to be more inclusive and provide worker protections, with no real concrete action steps.

I stuck with it 'til the end simply because I found the history of exercise interesting. Just know that if you're looking for more of the social justice angle on how the U.S. can make exercise more attainable for all citizens - those in poverty, those with disabilities, etc. - this book is not it.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

****.5

Fantastically interesting overview of the history of the fitness industry in the US, and the changes in attitudes towards fitness and wellness over the past 100 years. The author is both a history professor and an Equinox fitness instructor, making her doubly qualified to speak with authority about both aspects. She does a decent job narrating the audiobook herself, but it could use a bit of polishing in places.

The one potential drawback for some readers is that she gets rather political towards the end, flouting her anti-trump stance as she advocates for more public investment in treating fitness as a national priority available to all and not a private commodity reserved for the white and wealthy.