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Books > Health, Home & Family > Family & health > Fitness & diet > Exercise & workout books
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Getting Physical - The Rise of Fitness Culture in America (Paperback)
Loot Price: R826
Discovery Miles 8 260
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Getting Physical - The Rise of Fitness Culture in America (Paperback)
Series: CultureAmerica
Expected to ship within 18 - 22 working days
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From Charles Atlas to Jane Fonda, the fitness movement has been a
driving force in American culture for more than half a century.
What started as a means of Cold War preparedness now sees 45
million Americans spend more than $20 billion a year on gym
memberships, running shoes, and other fitness-related products. In
this first book on the modern history of exercise in America,
Shelly McKenzie chronicles the governmental, scientific,
commercial, and cultural forces that united - sometimes
unintentionally - to make exercise an all-American habit. She
tracks the development of a new industry that gentrified exercise
and made the pursuit of fitness the hallmark of a middle-class
lifestyle. Along the way she scrutinizes a number of widely held
beliefs about Americans and their exercise routines, such as the
link between diet and exercise and the importance of workplace
fitness programs. While Americans have always been keen on
cultivating health and fitness, before the 1950s people who were
preoccupied with their health or physique were often suspected of
being homosexual or simply odd. As McKenzie reveals, it took a
national panic about children's health to galvanize the populace
and launch President Eisenhower's Council on Youth Fitness. She
traces this newborn era through TV trailblazer Jack La Lanne's
popularization of fitness in the '60s, the jogging craze of the
'70s, and the transformation of the fitness movement in the '80s,
when the emphasis shifted from the individual act of running to the
shared health-club experience. She also considers the new
popularity of yoga and Pilates, reflecting today's emphasis on
leanness and flexibility in body image. In providing the first real
cultural history of the fitness movement, McKenzie goes beyond
simply recounting exercise trends to reveal what these choices say
about the people who embrace them. Her examination also encompasses
battles over food politics, nutrition problems like our current
obesity epidemic, and people left behind by the fitness movement
because they are too poor to afford gym memberships or basic
equipment. In a country where most of us claim to be regular
exercisers, McKenzie's study challenges us to look at why we
exercise - or at least why we think we should - and shows how
fitness has become a vitally important part of our American
identity.
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