A review of Fit Nation: The Pains and Gains of America’s Exercise Obsession by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, University of Chicago Press, 424 pages (February 2023)

The idea that developing the body is part of developing one’s mind or soul has been a part of Western thought for 2,500 years. That is not to say that this ethical injunction has been without its detractors and critics. Diogenes, the unruly ancient Greek philosopher, once defecated in the middle of the Olympic stadium during the Games to protest a culture that revered athleticism. During the 18th century in Europe, corpulence was held to signify a well-lived aristocratic life. And the sinewy, hardened physiques of immigrant laborers in 19th-century urban America were dismissed by the upper classes as crude and unsophisticated.

The body, in other words, is rarely a neutral, value-free entity in our shared cultures. One of the primary themes of New School historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela’s latest work, Fit Nation: The Pains and Gains of America’s Exercise Obsession, is how Americans have, for the last 130 years, conceptualized, bickered, and fought to understand the importance of their bodies through physical fitness.

As an exercise enthusiast and social historian, Petrzela is not only interested in the history of what is now a multibillion-dollar industry, but also in how fitness has become a “moral necessity”—and a costly one at that. It is a historical grievance in the making, as Petrzela believes that fitness ought to be a social good and an “imperative of public investment.” This is what strikes at the heart of what she calls the “Fit Nation.” And what is the Fit Nation? “A society in which exercise infiltrates practically every quarter of American life—in both problematic and promising ways—but in which full, autonomous participation depends on spending power rather than citizenship.”

Fitness in this context becomes part of what the turn-of-the-century sociologist Thorstein Veblen called “conspicuous consumption.” That is, the way in which individuals not only consume or use certain products or services, but how their very usage confers a mark of high or low distinction. The difference as it were, between belonging to a high-end wellness club like Equinox or opting for the cheaper Planet Fitness route. Veblen’s idea of conspicuous consumption first appeared in his 1899 work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, and could not have arrived at a more apposite historical juncture.

Only a few years earlier, the Prussian-born strongman Friedrich Wilhelm Müller, better known to the world as Eugen Sandow, had hosted the first bodybuilding competition in London. Petrzela informs us that Sandow was a proponent of the idea that building an aesthetically pleasing physique was tantamount to rising above the sickly masses. When the Prussian arrived in New York, he earned renown as a supremely self-assured prophet performing feats of strength before an awestruck crowd of carnival-goers. And it is here where the story of Fit Nation begins.

From their humble beginnings under the big-tent circuses, strongmen and strongwomen were—and in many ways continue to be—oddities to the wider American public. Those who lumber around with heavy musculature are still met with any number of reflexive reactions, from envy to disgust. Eugen Sandow, Katie Sandwina, Charles Atlas, and Siegmund Breitbart were members of the first generation to navigate the obscurity of fringe circus acts and sideshows. Sandow, in particular, was conscious of how a muscular physique could display not only strength but also prestige.

The author of numerous books and magazine articles, Sandow exhorted his male readership to develop their bodies, harkening back to the great marble statues of Rome and Greece, which he felt were exemplars of a truly masculine physique. He also publicized one of the foundational principles of strength training and muscle hypertrophy: the notion of progressive overload, or the lifting of heavy weights at less volume over time. For his efforts—both at self-promotion as well as popularizing lifting—Sandow became an icon for bodybuilders the world over. Every year, a golden statue of him is awarded as a prize at the Mr. Olympia bodybuilding contest in Las Vegas.

It is certainly true, as Petrzela points out, that Sandow had a deep streak of vanity, which he expressed in both his acts and writing. But he was also a keen observer of his time. The late 19th century bore witness to the breakneck pace of industrialization, and even Sandow was not immune to adopting a high-minded Victorian reformism as pungent as the billowing factory smokes across England. “Civilization” he proclaimed, “has, indeed, become a slaughtering-car crowned by a grinning effigy of Comfort, before which man blindly and voluntarily hurls himself in his own ignorance.”

But Sandow’s hard appeal to physical greatness was softened when he observed the crippling effects of World War I on British troops as they returned from the front. Life as Movement: The Physical Reconstruction and Regeneration of the People, published in 1919, was Sandow’s attempt to broaden his message that even the most basic moves towards better health were beneficial, whether they were undertaken by the desk-bound, middle-class Englishmen or by the somatically scarred Tommy. None of this, however, appears in Petrzela’s discussion of Sandow.

For those interested in a straight-shot, clean history of fitness, Fit Nation is not the read you might expect. To her credit, Petrzela lays out her cards and political commitments within the first few pages of her book (what she calls her “warm-up”). Sandow, far from being the revolutionary of fitness, is portrayed as an arrogant, self-indulgent racist. And there is certainly no need to make apologies or defend his actions. In vivid detail, Petrzela describes how the father of bodybuilding assaulted a young black New York bellhop, dangling him in the air for refusing to shine his shoes on demand. In chapter after chapter, the reader is treated to anecdotes of abuse and bigotry.

I was shocked to discover the harassment of women marathoners, whose exclusion from the sport was often met with physical violence and assault. We are told of the hapless housewives and their children who were enlisted into the Cold War’s fat paranoia. Women were chided to “firm up” their post-partum figures, and kids were swiftly introduced to physical education classes, courtesy of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. This is to say nothing of the ever-present specter of homosexuality looming over the psyches of straight white men, who perhaps wanted to lift but did not want to mingle in a growing gay niche that was bodybuilding. Fit Nation leaves no stone unturned in demonstrating the toxicity of the world of fitness.

In fact, there is so much handwringing that by the time I arrived at the chapter on Jazzercise I had become adjusted to the predictable litany of social injustices churned out in nearly every paragraph. As if to provide some relief, Petrzela occasionally attempts to countervail the emotive impact wrung from this catalog of social sins by reassuring the reader that, with every passing decade, fitness became more empowering to future generations. But even then, each chapter closes with a nagging feeling that fitness culture could not redeem itself from one watershed decade of the 20th century to the next. When I consider my own fitness journey and engagement in the culture, I find this emphasis interesting, if not puzzling.

A neglected area of fitness is the impact of barbell training in the United States. In the first sections of the book, weight lifting is a sort of throwaway cliché—the “dank weight room” or a “dank men’s gym” and so on. But it is especially telling that CrossFit is described as “militaristic.” While Fit Nation does discuss the very early days of Muscle Beach, and includes the odd reference to Gold’s Gym, Petrzela seems to believe that lifting weights is either too masculine or too reactionary. Instead, she pays particular attention to what she calls “revolutionary” forms of working out, such as dance classes, running, and yoga.

As a result, there is little of substance on the trifecta of strength training: bodybuilding, powerlifting, and Olympic weightlifting. No mention is made of the Golden Era of bodybuilding from the 1960s through 1980s, which saw a diverse array of men compete and win their chance to raise a Sandow trophy. It was more than just Arnold Schwarzenegger or his predecessor, Steve Reeves. There was also the Frenchmen of African descent, Serge Nubret, who they called “The Black Panther” and Robby “The Black Prince” Robinson, to name but a few of the legends who comingled at the same gyms as white bodybuilders, and who formed close bonds of friendship. In powerlifting, there were women like Jan Todd and Beverly “Bev” Francis, the Australian-American whose records in powerlifting and bodybuilding paved the way for future female champions.

In Olympic weightlifting, meanwhile, there was Tommy Kono, who was of Japanese descent and widely considered to be the world’s greatest weightlifter. Then there was the African-American John Davis, the first man to clean and jerk over 400lbs. Both men were members of the York Barbell Club in York, Pennsylvania, the legacy of which would reach far beyond the confines of the club itself. Today, its cast-iron tonnage of plates and dumbbells can be found scattered across thousands of garages, basements, and yard sales, serving as rusty testimonies that strength training in America was often done in homes, away from overpriced gyms.

It may be that Petrzela’s omission of bodybuilding, powerlifting, and weightlifting is due to the fact that they are technically sports, and therefore outside of the scope of Fit Nation. But all three are also forms of exercise which become sports when they are made competitive. Moreover, all three of these sports saw their growth in garages as well as gyms and exclusive fitness clubs. This is especially true of powerlifting, which came to be seen as a sort of outlaw sport for working-class men throughout the Rust Belt and beyond. Construction workers, firemen, cops, soldiers, and landscapers have all held world records in what was once called “the odd lifts” due to their less technical appeal and their reliance on brute strength.

Since its inception in the 1950s, powerlifting has enjoyed meteoric success, particularly in the 2000s, when more and more federations began to form, all of which enjoyed a steady rise in female participation year after year. Olympic weightlifting coach and author Andrew Charniga’s book The Demasculinization of Strength argues that, since the late 1980s, greater female participation in weightlifting has produced a narrowing of the strength gap between men and women. “By the end of 2012” he writes, “the female [weightlifting] records constituted approximately 80% of the male records.” And what was the catalyst behind the growing participation of women in weightlifting? CrossFit. As Daniel Kunitz, author of Lift: Fitness Culture, From Naked Greeks and Acrobats to Jazzercise and Ninja Warriors, writes:

Between the 2012 and 2016 Olympic Games, membership in the USA Weightlifting (USAW) more than doubled, from 11,000 to over 26,000. But those numbers only account for people actively competing at local and national meets. Because of CrossFit, which incorporates those lifts, many hundreds of thousands of others are now engaged in weightlifting as part of their exercise routine.