The Unequal History of Fitness in America
And how “we never made good on the commitment to a fit nation,” with Professor Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
Amid record-breaking heat, I spoke with Professor Natalia Mehlman Petrzela about the history of America’s fitness obsession—and why some people can work out when it’s sweltering, while many others cannot.
Professor Petrzela is a historian of contemporary American politics and culture at the New School. She’s the co-producer and host of the acclaimed podcast Welcome to Your Fantasy and the co-host of the Past Present podcast. She’s also a frequent media guest expert, public speaker, and contributor to outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and The Atlantic. She’s the author of Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture, and most recently, Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession, the subject of our interview today.
In conversation, Professor Petrzela revealed the changing perceptions of fitness over the last hundred years, morphing from a sideshow to an integral part of our everyday lives. A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. You can also listen to the audio of our conversation, which includes further discussion of figures like the Great Sandwina and Jane Fonda, the rise of brick-and-mortar gyms, performing appendectomies while preheating ovens, and a whole lot more:
Ben: Professor Petrzela, thank you so much for being here.
NMP: Thrilled to be here. Thank you for inviting me on.
Ben: My pleasure. Today I’d like to trace evolving perceptions of fitness over time. To begin, how were the first models of strength in the US treated as sideshows?
NMP: In the early 20th century, there were “strong men” and a few “strong women” who attracted a lot of attention. They’d get on stage and flex and do crazy things like have barnyard livestock walk over their chests. A woman, Katie Sandwina, known as the “Great Sandwina,” would lift her husband and kids over her head. But strong people were seen as belonging in freak shows. It was just so weird to strength train.
Exercise only began to normalize and even be seen as virtuous when it became connected to white superiority. Recall the early 20th century saw all these so-called “inferior” races coming over as immigrants. Black populations were growing, too. Meanwhile, a lot of white people in the pre-war period began working at desk jobs, so they were doing cerebral work, which to them proved their superiority, but it also had a negative impact on their health.
So a lot of early boosters of health, nutrition, and fitness gave advice of the sort that we think is normal today—eat vegetables, lift weights, go outside—but they framed healthy activities as important to strengthening the white race. You see explicit racism throughout the writings and promotional materials of early strength trainers.
A surprising origin story, and yet sadly not at all.
Ben: My thoughts exactly.
How did mentalities surrounding fitness evolve after World War II?
NMP: A big transformation occurred during the Cold War, sparked by a woman named Bonnie Prudden.
Prudden was a homemaker and real outdoorswoman, who’d been a dancer on Broadway. She looked around her bedroom community in White Plains, New York in the late 1940s and thought that the influence of things like cars, TVs, and pre-made frozen food was having a huge bodily toll on kids. She and a doctor developed a physical exam for kids, called the Kraus-Weber Test, which revealed that American kids, compared to European ones, were not in good shape. They published a study but at first, no one paid any attention.
Ben: As you write, Prudden was pushing for kids to get in shape amid “a moment when most Americans were still overwhelmingly suspicious of the virtues of exercise.”
NMP: This is so important to emphasize: most people today think exercise is good for you, but that was not the case in the 1950s. In fact, there wouldn’t be a consensus on the value of exercise for many more decades to come.
But Prudden very cannily got people on the federal level to see fitness as a national security priority. Soon, President Eisenhower got wind of her research and created the first Presidential Council on Youth Fitness, aimed at getting kids (specifically, white boys) fit to fight. JFK expanded the program and showed off working out on the beach with his family. He also published a very fat shaming article in Sports Illustrated, called the “Soft American,” portraying fitness as a national security concern but also as fun; as something the affluent do in their leisure time.
Ben: You describe a spectacle where Robert F. Kennedy once went on a 50-mile hike in the snow to illustrate the merits of exercise—all while wearing loafers. A little over the top, but it helps explain why for the remainder of his life, RFK was only seen wearing a comfortable pair of Merrells.
NMP: Yeah, right.
Ben: How did early TV programs transform exercise into something meant to provide joy and balance?
NMP: And something that you should spend time and money on.
Ben: That, too.
NMP: So Eisenhower and Kennedy, with Prudden’s help, began cleaning up the image of exercise into something fun and necessary. But in many ways, it was private industry that ran with the message.
In 1951 a guy named Jack LaLanne started a revolutionary TV program. LaLanne was a bodybuilder who’d come out of Muscle Beach. In his show, he introduced the idea to his audience, who were primarily homemakers, that to be a happy, fulfilled person, you need to move. The light exercises he demonstrated, like leg lifts, were what America needed for a soft entry into exercise culture.
On the other hand, there was a clear flip side to his show; a sense of like, oh, do you feel tired? Are you getting fat? Do you look old? Well, that's your fault because you're probably not exercising. And so exercise became another thing on the list of chores for women.
Ben: I was fascinated by your description of the rise of women's jogging as an alternative, more intersectional form of exercise right around the time that Title IX passed.
NMP: Totally. So Title IX was this watershed, feminist legislation in 1972 that prohibited gender discrimination around programs like sports. It was a huge deal. The idea that women would even want to play sports flew in the face of so much thinking at the time.
Many of the women active in advocating for Title IX were runners, and the legislation inspired the rise of road races for women all over the place. Thousands of girls and women of various backgrounds tried running, which until then had been a weird activity—and they really liked it. So running was a really important entry to athletics for women, even if it was still wrapped up in antiquated views of gender. Races would be sponsored by different companies in the beauty industry where, for example, women would be offered a free makeover if they ran in races.
Ben: On a related note, could you please describe the invention of the sports bra? That was shocking to me.
NMP: I love that a guy is into this story.
Basically, there were these two women joggers commiserating about why there wasn’t a jockstrap for women. They were always uncomfortable when running because their breasts weren’t supported. One of their husbands overheard and as a joke, stretched one of his jockstraps over his head. The women were like, oh my God, what if we sewed two jock straps together to make a bra? That led to the first prototype of the “Jogbra,” which later became the sports bra.
Ben: I now look at anything that's kind of stretchy in a whole new light. Like, are large wedding tents just thousands of jock straps sewn together?
NMP: They’re the building block of society.
Ben: Going off of commodification, I’m really interested in how private fitness increasingly came to envelop people's lives in the 80s and 90s, while investment in public initiatives, like physical education, dried up. Can you discuss that evolution a little bit, please?
NMP: Absolutely. Since the 1970s, we’ve seen a rise in austerity politics and a cutting back of social and public programs, coupled with an increased celebration of self-help ideology and the private sector. The fitness industry is no exception to that. No one on the Left or the Right ever built a strong physical education infrastructure while in the 80s, for example, the VHS industry took off.
If you think about what that meant, people no longer had to work out in the communal settings and gyms that proliferated in the 70s and early 80s. You also didn't have to tune in at 9:30 AM to an exercise program—you had this videotape and you could do it whenever you wanted.
In the 90s, with the rise of boutique gyms like Equinox, fitness became even more exclusive. A lot of fitness environments began selling some form of exclusivity. So at the same time that we as a society came to agree that exercise is good for you—in fact, it might be the only thing most Americans agree on now—it also became a pay-to-play industry. We still see that dynamic today with things like Peloton and SoulCycle.
Ben: On a concluding note, you discuss a growing fitness gap. Studies have revealed that in the 2010s, people in higher income brackets exercised more, while people in lower income brackets exercised less. How do you address the growing gap and the inequality that has been baked into exercise since it became a popular pursuit?
NMP: Well, we need safe and well-lit streets—you can’t go for a run if you’re scared the cops are going to chase you, or you'll run into trouble in some other way. As running activist Alison Desir talks about, we also need more tree cover in lower-income communities to lower the temperature and make it more comfortable to be outside.
We also need to invest in public recreation centers and physical education. We’ve so devalued our physical educational system that a lot of people who’d make kickass PE teachers look to become trainers or influencers instead—a really understandable decision given the way private industry has taken over the fitness world.
One of the big stories that I'm trying to tell is how there was a missed opportunity in the history of fitness in America. While fitness’ reputation improved, we never made good on the commitment to make a fit nation; to give people more access to exercise. My vision is a world where people finally have the opportunity to work out on their own terms.
Ben: A good note to end on. As someone whose favorite subjects in school were PE and history, I really appreciate your time, Professor Petrzela.
NMP: Thank you, Ben! This was fun.