Last week I asked ten questions about the people, discoveries, fads, technology and occasional nonsense that helped create the fitness world we live in today.
Here are the answers. If you’re new to this Substack, here’s the original post.
1. Vic Tanny and the invention of the modern health club
Answer: Vic Tanny.
There were gyms long before bodybuilder and schoolteacher Vic Tanny opened his first club. Jack LaLanne opened his famous Oakland health club in 1936. Weightlifting gyms, YMCAs, athletic clubs and physical-culture establishments had existed even earlier.
But Tanny helped invent something different: the modern American health-club chain.
After some early attempts beginning in the 1930s, Tanny expanded aggressively after World War II. His clubs weren’t just rooms filled with barbells and sweaty men. They had carpeting, chrome equipment, swimming pools, mirrors, music and amenities designed to appeal to ordinary middle-class Americans, including women.
Tanny also understood that fitness could be sold. Prospective members were brought into the club for a tour and a workout, followed by a sit-down with a salesperson using many of the high-pressure closing techniques that would remain part of the health-club business for decades.
At their peak in the late 1950s, the Tanny empire included more than 100 clubs.
Exercise was beginning its migration from something associated primarily with athletes, bodybuilders and physical labor into something people might deliberately purchase as part of a lifestyle.
2. America gets a fitness scare
Answer: Two things happened in 1955.
First, researchers Hans Kraus and Ruth Hirschland reported alarming differences between the physical fitness of American and European children. On a series of basic muscular-fitness tests, American kids performed terribly by comparison.
Second, on September 24, 1955, 64-year-old President Dwight Eisenhower, seemingly the epitome of an active, fit adult, suffered a major heart attack.
It would be inaccurate to say Eisenhower’s heart attack caused him to create the President’s Council on Youth Fitness. His concern about the fitness of American children was already underway. In fact, Eisenhower had prepared a message for a national youth-fitness conference just six days before his heart attack.
But consider the cultural moment. America was prosperous, increasingly suburban and increasingly sedentary. Cars, television and labor-saving devices were transforming everyday life. Researchers were warning that American children weren’t physically fit, and now the president himself had suffered a heart attack.
The enormous media attention also turned Eisenhower’s cardiologist, Dr. Paul Dudley White, a co-founder of the American Heart Association and pioneer of preventive cardiology, into a national figure. Suddenly Americans were hearing about heart disease, exercise and lifestyle from one of the country’s leading physicians.
In 1956 Eisenhower established the President’s Council on Youth Fitness. Fitness was becoming more than an athletic concern. Americans were beginning to understand that health was something everyone needed to think about.
3. Kenneth Cooper gives cardio a name
Answer: The United States Air Force.
Dr. Kenneth Cooper was an Air Force physician who became fascinated with a question that now seems almost obvious: What happens if ordinary people regularly exercise their cardiovascular systems?
Cooper developed a system for measuring and improving aerobic capacity while serving in the Air Force. His 1968 book, Aerobics, helped introduce the concept to the public.
Today we casually talk about “doing cardio.” But cardiovascular exercise wasn’t always a normal category of everyday behavior. Cooper helped give it scientific legitimacy, a vocabulary and, perhaps most importantly, a reason for ordinary people to find new ways to do it.
4. Jack LaLanne puts fitness on television
Answer: Jack LaLanne.
Long before YouTube instructors, Peloton coaches and Instagram fitness influencers, there was Jack.
The Jack LaLanne Show began locally in the San Francisco area in the early 1950s and went into national syndication in 1959. LaLanne stood in front of a television camera and asked ordinary Americans, particularly women watching daytime television, to exercise along with him, occasionally joined by his wife Elaine and their dog Happy.
Separating fitness instruction from the physical gym was innovative and prescient. Technology moved from television to VHS, DVD, cable, YouTube, streaming, Peloton and eventually the phone in your pocket.
The instructor could now come to you. The remaining issue was motivation.
5. Then everything collided
Answer: There isn’t one. That’s the point.
By the late 1970s and early ‘80s, a remarkable collection of cultural and technological changes arrived at roughly the same time.
Disco demonstrated the enormous appeal of moving to a driving beat.
Better and cheaper stereo systems brought that beat everywhere.
Wireless microphones eventually allowed instructors to move around a room and still be heard.
Gyms increasingly became coed.
Cardio and the running boom introduced millions of Americans to sustained aerobic exercise and the power of endorphins.
The women’s movement was changing ideas about female strength, athleticism and bodies.
Lycra, leg warmers and home video with Jane Fonda made group exercise look fun and maybe even necessary.
Suddenly exercise became an experience. Music mattered. Personality mattered. Community mattered. Choreography mattered. What you wore mattered.
I was there for a good part of this, and I loved it. Ask anyone who was there. It was the most fun exercising, ever.
6. The workout comes home
Answer: Kathy Smith, Denise Austin and Billy Blanks.
Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons demonstrated that an instructor didn’t need a health club full of students. All they needed was a camera, decent production, some charisma and a medium like VHS to support the marketing that was creating a new kind of fitness personality.
Kathy Smith became one of the defining instructors of the VHS era. Denise Austin became another extraordinarily durable fitness personality. Then Billy Blanks combined martial arts, boxing, music and aerobic exercise into Tae Bo and created one of the great fitness crazes of the late 1990s.
What emerged between Fonda and Simmons and Billy Blanks was the growing importance of marketing. Late-night infomercials created another kind of exercise personality: self-proclaimed experts who became famous by appearing on television pitching their products.
The pitch became remarkably familiar. You have a problem. We have the solution. And you can order it right now.
The Gazelle, Bowflex, P90X and Insanity became as much a part of the late-night fitness-infomercial boom as the instructors themselves. Fitness had become not just an activity but a product, with television providing an enormously effective way to sell it.
7. America learns to run
Answer: Jim Fixx’s 1977 bestseller was The Complete Book of Running. Seven years later, at age 52, Fixx died of a heart attack while running in Vermont.
But Fixx was only one piece of something much bigger: the awareness and growth of cardio as a required component of being fit.
New Zealand coach Arthur Lydiard helped develop the idea of recreational jogging. Oregon coach Bill Bowerman brought those ideas home and became one of America’s great running evangelists. Kenneth Cooper provided the scientific case for aerobic exercise. Frank Shorter won the Olympic marathon in 1972. Bill Rodgers became a road-racing celebrity, winning both Boston and New York four times. Nike and its competitors transformed running shoes from relatively primitive athletic equipment into a huge consumer category.
Suddenly there were road races everywhere. By some estimates, 25 million Americans took up running during the 1970s and ‘80s. There were 10Ks, marathons and then triathlons.
Cardiovascular exercise was something regular people could do. And you could start today. No team, opponent or gym needed. Just a pair of shoes and some very short shorts.
Then Fixx died. One of America’s most famous evangelists for running had died of a heart attack while running. While runners paused, the cardio genie was already out of the bottle, opening the door for the group-exercise boom that continues today.
8. Beware of suspiciously round numbers
Answer: 10,000 steps and 10,000 hours.
Walk 10,000 steps every day. Practice something for 10,000 hours and you’ll become an expert.
Both are wonderful examples of what happens when a complicated idea gets converted into a wonderfully memorable number. But the facts tell a slightly different tale.
The 10,000-step target did not emerge from research identifying a magical physiological threshold. Its history traces to a Japanese pedometer marketed in the 1960s. Similarly, the famous 10,000-hour rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell greatly simplified research by psychologist Anders Ericsson and colleagues on deliberate practice.
That doesn’t make either idea useless. Walking is good. Practice makes us better.
But 10,000? That’s magical thinking, or perhaps just the perfect packaging of an idea that helps it spread.
“Move more” is advice. “10,000 steps” is a program.
Guess which one travels farther?
9. Fitness for what?
Answer: Falls.
Falls are the leading cause of injury among Americans 65 and older and a major cause of injury-related death.
Kind of amazing, isn’t it?
For much of modern fitness history, measurable data was the gold standard: body weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, resting heart rate, treadmill stress tests.
All useful. But as we live longer, fitness needs to be connected to something more practical.
Like not falling.
Enter wellness and a broader idea of what it means to be fit. Can I balance? Can I react quickly if I stumble? Can I get off the floor? Can I carry groceries? Can I get in and out of my car and my bed? Can I keep doing the ordinary things people do every day without hurting myself?
For that I need a more holistic view of fitness, one that includes strength, balance, flexibility, sleep, diet, body awareness, mental acuity, mental health, social connection and movement, along with the cholesterol.
Maybe the better question isn’t simply, “How fit am I?”
It’s: Fit for what?
10. Johnny G takes the bicycle indoors
Answer: Race Across America, better known as RAAM.
South African-born endurance cyclist Jonathan Goldberg, better known as Johnny G, was preparing for ultra-distance cycling when he began experimenting with a stationary bicycle that better reproduced the geometry and feel of riding a road bike.
Goldberg has also said his wife was pregnant and he wanted a way to continue training without spending so much time away from home. And, yes, the wonderfully improbable part appears to be true: an early prototype was built in his kitchen.
What began as a personal training solution eventually grew into a group-exercise format. Goldberg opened an early Spinning center in Santa Monica, and by the early 1990s he was working with John Baudhuin to develop the bikes and program that became Spinning.
Once again, fitness history was a collision of things that already existed: cycling, aerobic conditioning, music, group exercise and instructor coaching.
And I may be slightly biased here, but that turned out to be a pretty good idea.
And the bonus question
Who invented the step-touch, grapevine and single-single-double choreography patterns now used in group exercise classes throughout the world?
Obviously, Jim Stalker.
There is absolutely no evidence supporting this claim. None.
But after teaching thousands of group exercise classes, the highly deluded author remains convinced that somewhere, sometime, he must have invented at least one of them.
Please don’t research this. I’d like to keep one fitness myth alive.
So, how did we get here?
Modern fitness emerged from a strange, wonderful and occasionally ridiculous collision of science, culture, commerce, technology, fashion, celebrity and human behavior.
And looking back at these stories, something else becomes apparent. The history of modern fitness is also partly the history of how ideas get communicated.
A doctor writes a book. A president has a heart attack. A runner wins an Olympic marathon. Jack LaLanne gets on television. Jane Fonda puts on a leotard. Somebody decides 10,000 is a really good number. And a cyclist puts a stationary bike in his kitchen.
Ideas become movements. Movements become businesses. Businesses become culture.
Which makes the question David Byrne asked all those years ago worth asking every once in a while:
Well, how did we get here?
Because understanding how we got here might help us decide where fitness ought to go next.