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The story of working out
Sweating for centuries: The long history of exercise
Run for your life. And swim, bike, and walk for it, too. Of course, if you don’t want to stick around for a healthy old age, don’t sweat it. Just don’t do it. You’ll get to the end a lot faster. But for thousands of years, people have known perspiration plus persistence results in a longer, happier life. It’s a simple fact: Workouts work.
But it’s a complicated story, as Bill Hayes recounts in Sweat: A History of Exercise. He’s well suited to it, too. Hayes is dedicated to his workouts and has written about health-related topics, including insomnia. As the partner of the late Dr. Oliver Sacks, he knew a truly dedicated fitness buff.
Yet thousands of years ago, Hayes observes, exercise didn’t exist as a concept. If you ran, it was to flee from what wanted to kill you. If you swam, it was so you wouldn’t drown. These weren’t hobbies, but life skills. According to Plato, not knowing how to swim was as much a sign of ignorance as not knowing how to read.
“Parents taught their children, and presumably, children learned from one another,” Hayes writes. “The same obligation has held for many centuries in Judaism. As stated in the Talmud (Kiddushin 29a), parents must teach their children three essential things: the Torah, how to make a living and how to swim.”
Over the centuries, civilization brought leisure time and the need to fill it.
“Eating alone will not keep a man well; he must also take exercise,” Hippocrates observed 2,500 years ago. He was also an advocate of cross-training. “Those who get exhausted with running should wrestle,” he advised, “and those who get exhausted with wrestling should run.”
In 776 BCE, when the first Olympics were held in Greece, there was a single event, a 200-meter sprint. The winner, Coroebus, was crowned with olive leaves. Other competitions were soon added, including the discus, the javelin and wrestling. Only men participated, though, with their naked bodies oiled.
A thousand years later, Greeks still spoke nostalgically about that glorious era and lamented how woeful their current competitors were. “The athletes of today are inferior to those of former times,” complained Philostratus.
To help out athletes, he wrote a 10,000-word guide for personal trainers, advising them not to talk too much or work their clients too hard. “If someone has a break, or a flesh wound, or clouding of the sight in his eyes or a dislocation of one of his limbs, then he needs to be taken to the doctor,” he warned. “The art of the athletic trainer does not concern himself with problems of those kinds.”
By Philostratus’s time, Rome had eclipsed Greece. The Romans copied so much of Greek culture, including the love of physical competitions. And, the Romans erected sprawling athletic centers with lavish spaces for exercise, walks, baths and saunas.
While the Greek contests were tinged with philosophy, Roman events were more martial. They added sword fights to the mix and gladiatorial contests where men fought to the death.
That abruptly changed when Christians – often the victims in these extreme-sports spectacles – came to power. In 325 CE, Constantine the Great, the first Christian Roman emperor, banned gladiator battles. Before the century was out, Emperor Theodosius I canceled the Olympics. Soon, even the idea of exercise and sport disappeared.
“Athletic competition was linked to pagan rituals (such as blood sacrifices of animals) and dedicated to the pantheon of Greek and Roman gods,” Hayes writes. “Cathedrals replaced gymnasiums as sacred sites…Within a few hundred years, the notion of exercise for the sake of exercise was considered indecent.”
It took Girolamo Mercuriale, a 16th-century Italian physician and philosopher, to try to revive it. Inspired by the sad ruins of ancient athletic complexes, he vowed to “restore this lost art to its pristine splendor and ancient dignity.” After years of research, he emerged with his exhaustive, six-volume De Arte Gymnastica, covering every sport and exercise from running and boxing to laughing and even holding your breath.
Mercuriale’s long-winded work was groundbreaking but not culture-changing, Hayes writes. More influential was Pehr Henrik Ling, an early-19th-century Swede. Watching Napoleon’s relentless march across Europe, Ling became convinced that Sweden was next and that its out-of-shape citizens wouldn’t pose much of a challenge. Ling opened the Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics with the government’s approval.
Ling’s methods – emphasizing group classes, comfortable clothes, calisthenics, and dance – caught on and spread wide. In 1839, the first gym for women opened in Boston. In the 1860s, American educators promoted physical education classes for schoolchildren. Later, suffragists advocated that women take up bicycling not simply as exercise but as a path to independence.
“It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance,” Susan B. Anthony said. “I stand up and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.”
It was a return to the old Greek ideals, but with a difference. Instead of being banned, women were not only included but exalted. Exercise was politicized. Once demonized by Christian Rome, eventually promoted by a patriotic Sweden, exercising eventually became a source of pride.
In America, the Presidential Fitness Test originated during the Cold War. Being fit became patriotic. Then, by the late 1970s with Jane Fonda leading the way, it was equated with being progressive.
Fonda, who studied dance for years, switched to exercise classes when she broke her foot but needed to get bikini-ready for a new movie. After a few sessions, she fell in love with aerobics’ pounding music and repetitive routines.
She opened the first one in 1979 – and began a business that soon spawned books, audiotapes, and nearly two dozen exercise videos.
Not every good sweat, though, requires money. Some workouts, like jogging, which caught on in the ’70s, need nothing more than sneakers. Another exercise around forever but that exploded in the 1970s is weightlifting. Bodybuilders showed what the human form could look like and Arnold Schwarzenegger was at the forefront.
Gyms became common, tucked into hotels, condominiums and office buildings. And long before the Peloton craze, millions had exercise equipment at home, which varied with the times.
The need for physical fitness doesn’t change. Hayes maintains it’s sure to outlast COVID. After all, it’s outlasted everything else – including the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon and fuzzy leg warmers.