What Ancient Greeks did with sweat... and the young Jane Fonda’s gruesome way of staying slim
WARNING: Don’t read before you’ve had your breakfast!
Sweat: A History Of Exercise Bill Hayes Bloomsbury £14.99 ★★★☆☆
Let’s Get Physical Danielle Friedman Icon Books £16.99 ★★★☆☆
In the ancient world, the sweat of athletes was a hot commodity. As Bill Hayes describes in his new history of exercise, sportsmen would scrape their bodies after competing or working out and funnel the sweat into pots. ‘Gloios’, as the liquid was known, provided a major revenue stream for Greek gymnasia and was used to treat a range of awkward issues, from haemorrhoids to genital warts.
Hayes counsels against laughing at this practice: there are, he points out, ‘a hundred equally questionable’ wellbeing fads that are today intended to make us ‘stronger, thinner, leaner, harder’.
He kicks off his romp through the sporting ages with an enlightening description of Ancient Greek ‘palestra’ – athletic facilities devoted to wrestling that featured intelligently designed spaces for bathing and spectating. The ancients, like Hayes himself, took fitness extremely seriously: even Plato was a fitness freak, said to have been given his name by a coach who admired his broad, or ‘platon’, shoulders.
More recently, the importance of working out was evangelised by Girolamo Mercuriale, an Italian physician who wrote an influential Renaissance doorstopper about the benefits of exercise, while warning against getting hench for hench’s sake.
Hayes dispenses these and other history lessons amid blow-by-blow descriptions of him consulting experts; there are also lots of misty-eyed recollections of good workouts he’s had. If you crunched down the history bits, you’d be left with not much at all, but there’s a skip to Hayes’s step throughout, and the book will certainly ground any January health kick in a grander context.
There’s less chit-chat and mirror pecflexing in Danielle Friedman’s book, Let’s Get Physical, which describes how Western women discovered exercise. Until the mid20th Century, sweating was not considered lady-like, and doctors warned that exercise could make a uterus ‘fall out’. But thanks to a succession of post-war trailblazers, the stigmas that had long prevented women from exercising fell away.
Friedman paints vivid portraits of pioneers in the US and UK who changed the way women relate to their bodies, starting with Bonnie Prudden, a 1950s icon who promoted the then-radical idea that everyone should exercise, whatever their gender. Housework alone, she cautioned, ‘won’t raise a bosom to where it belongs’ – exercise was key. Prudden conducted research into the fitness of American children versus their European counterparts, and presented her findings to President Dwight Eisenhower, who was ‘stunned’ to hear that American kids were falling behind. As the Cold War got under way, the vigour of the nation’s young became paramount, and federal programmes began to encourage Americans to take walks in their lunch breaks.
In the 1960s, still more women began taking an interest in fitness, thanks in part to Mary Quant’s miniskirt. With more flesh on show, there was more of an incentive to keep pins contoured. Lotte Berk, a German Jewish refugee with a horror of a husband, set up a pioneering studio in Marylebone where she devised the ‘barre’ workout now adored by urban elites. From the start, Berk saw her classes – a fusion of ballet and stretching – as fuel for the burgeoning sexual revolution, christening exercises ‘the prostitute’ and ‘naughty bottoms’, and disciplining errant pupils with a whip.
It’s well known, of course, that women have long been sidelined as athletes; they weren’t allowed to watch the original Olympics, let alone compete. But Friedman does a good job of highlighting quite how recent women’s participation in sport is. In 1967, a 20-year-old student called Kathrine Switzer caused a ruckus by crashing the Boston Marathon; ‘It’s a GIRL!’ the men shouted when they realised there was a woman in
their midst. The race director tackled Switzer but she shook him off and finished the run.
Women’s involvement in jogging was later helped along some more by the invention, by two sisters, of the sports bra, conceived as ‘a kind of jockstrap’ for breasts.
By the time Jane Fonda opened her studio in Beverly Hills in 1979, the benefits of exercise were well established. Fonda had struggled with her body for decades; as a teen she chomped on chewing gum packed with tapeworm eggs, believing falsely it would help her ‘get thin’. The success of her workout was ‘like an avalanche’, Fonda recalled. But when she was asked to turn it into a home cassette, she was reluctant. She conceded in the end, and the result was a global sensation.
Friedman’s book becomes less gripping the closer it gets to the modern era: it’s hard to get excited about body-positive yoga influencers. And there’s a glaring silence around the inclusion of trans women in women’s sport categories, too. A cool-headed guide through that minefield would have been welcome.
Still, there’s plenty to learn here. The story of women’s discovery of exercise turns out to be an affirming tale about their growing self-confidence since the war, and the strengthening of their voice in the public space.