In the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime,” David Byrne asks the great existential question:
“Well, how did I get here?”
Ask that about fitness right now and you won’t get a clean answer. Health, exercise, diet, pharmacology, celebrity, and social media have all collapsed into one loud, tangled conversation, and actual science is just one more voice shouting to be heard in it.
We know more about the human body than ever before. We also have more people confidently telling us things about it than ever before. Some of them even know what they’re talking about.
I’ve been teaching fitness for almost 50 years — over 5,000 classes. I didn’t just read this history. I lived a fair amount of it. I originally put this quiz together for one of my spin classes, and it’s been rattling around in my head ever since.
So — how did we get here?
No Googling.
1. The modern gym Who created what is generally considered the first modern American health-club chain, and when did it begin taking shape?
2. 1955: A wake-up call Two events in 1955 helped turn physical fitness into a national concern. One involved alarming research about the fitness of American children. The other involved the 64-year-old president of the United States. What happened?
3. The father of aerobics Dr. Kenneth Cooper, the man who popularized the term aerobics, developed much of his early thinking about fitness while serving in what branch of the U.S. military?
4. Fitness comes into the living room Long before Jane Fonda, Richard Simmons, VHS tapes, Peloton, or YouTube, who became America’s first great television fitness evangelist, broadcasting workouts directly into American living rooms?
5. The cultural collision The aerobics explosion of the late 1970s and ‘80s didn’t happen in a vacuum. What convergence of music, technology, social change, and gym culture transformed working out from a chore into a mass-market spectacle?
6. The home-workout stars Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons became fitness superstars. Which three personalities became fixtures of the home-workout era that followed, including one who turned a combination of martial arts, boxing, and aerobics into a late-1990s phenomenon?
7. The running evangelist What was the title of Jim Fixx’s enormously influential 1977 bestseller that helped fuel America’s running boom? And what happened to Fixx just seven years later, at age 52, that shocked the fitness world and challenged some assumptions about exercise and health?
8. 10,000 and 10,000 Name two enormously popular “10,000” rules in fitness and self-improvement that became accepted as scientific truths despite neither being what the science actually said.
9. Fitness for what? Here’s the one that isn’t nostalgia. What is the leading cause of injury-related death among Americans 65 and older?
10. From a kitchen prototype to Spinning The indoor cycling phenomenon we now call Spinning began when endurance cyclist Johnny Goldberg, better known as Johnny G, built an indoor bike so he could train more effectively. What grueling race across the United States was he training for?
Bonus question Who believes he invented the step-touch, grapevine, and single-single-double choreography patterns now used in group fitness classes around the world?
I’ll give you a hint.
He’s the highly deluded author of this quiz.
Answers, and more importantly, the stories behind them, next week.