Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America by Shelly McKenzie (review)

In Getting Physical, McKenzie traces the foundation of the modern fitness movement in the United States. Taking the 1950s—“a time of exceptional cultural change” (2)—as her starting point, she first examines attempts by the President’s Council of Youth Fitness to “make personal physical fitness the goal of every American child” and then considers the separate routes for men’s and women fitness during the 1950s and the 1960s (11).

According to McKenzie, women’s fitness, which emerged most notably through popular culture (for example, women’s magazines, Jack La Lanne’s popular television show, Jane Fonda’s workout videos, etc.), emphasized improved appearance through weight loss, whereas (middle-class) men exercised in men’s clubs, ymcas, or workplace fitness clubs to improve “heart health.” The next two chapters focus on the jogging movement of the 1970s and, finally, the popularization of health clubs primarily during the 1980s. The brief conclusion, treating “the future of fitness” (178), refers to the contemporary trends of yoga and Pilates without further contemplation of the constant change and diversity of the contemporary U.S. fitness industry.

Recognizing fitness “as a field that often leaves little in a way of a paper trail” (6), McKenzie employs an impressive variety of sources, ranging from popular magazine and newspaper articles, and books to academic sources primarily from the fields of history, sociology of the body and sport, and, to a lesser degree, from health promotion and medicine. The result is a compelling, cohesive, and easy to follow account of the evolution of fitness culture in the United States, beginning with the warnings about the dangers of physical exertion during the 1950s to the depiction of fitness as a necessary component of well-being and good looks during the 1980s.

McKenzie’s definition of fitness is “fluid.” She uses physical culture, exercise, and fitness often interchangeably. Based on a reference from 1988, McKenzie claims that “even today, physical educators, health experts, and sports authorities define the term [fitness] differently” (7). However, in more contemporary exercise literature, physical fitness is defined more narrowly as being composed of four health-related components—cardiovascular fitness, muscle strength and endurance, flexibility, and body composition; each one is improved by specific exercises (physical activity is a broader term denoting any bodily movement). Improved physical fitness, in this context, prevents numerous costly illnesses.

Although the open definition of fitness used by McKenzie allows her to examine how “the term fitness and the ways to achieve it are constantly being re-examined in the developments in scientific research, trends in popular culture, and health promotion policies” (178), an engagement with medical and exercise-physiology viewpoints could have further clarified how fitness and health have become intertwined during the past decades. For example, the American College of Sport Medicine (acsm), established in 1954, in connection with its academic journal Medicine and Science in Sport (1969) has published a newsletter since 1966. In addition, feminist researchers have examined women’s fitness, particularly aerobics, since the 1980s. McKenzie cites some of this work, but she could have taken greater advantage of the well-established premise that women’s fitness is about “looking good” to develop further insights into American fitness culture. Furthermore, the ongoing influence of the physical-culture movement (led by Bernarr MacFadden and Charles Atlas) into weight training, a major component of men’s fitness programs, warrants a discussion beyond a brief acknowledgement in the introduction.

Although these suggestions could have deepened the analysis, McKenzie’s book weaves the cultural analysis of consumerism intricately within fitness culture. Her discussion of the cultural centrality of jogging in American society as a direct response to the ills of consumer society by the “morally” superior, “natural,” and healthy runner is particularly engaging. McKenzie also carefully integrates a discussion of minority identities, such as gay men and African Americans, into the development of the fitness culture.

McKenzie’s book highlights that fitness was not always considered...