Fitness, Technology and Society

Amusing Ourselves to Life

Brad Millington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317365020
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Biological Sciences

The fitness industry is experiencing a new boom characterized by the proliferation of interactive and customizable technology, from exercise-themed video games to smartphone apps to wearable fitness trackers. This new technology presents the possibility of boundless self-tracking, generating highly personalized data for self-assessment and for sharing among friends. While this may be beneficial – for example, in encouraging physical activity – the new fitness boom also raises important questions about the very nature of our relationship with technology. This is the first book to examine these questions through a critical scholarly lens.

Addressing key themes such as consumer experience, gamification, and surveillance, Fitness, Technology and Society argues that fitness technologies – by 'datafying' the body and daily experience – are turning fitness into a constant pursuit. The book explores the origins of contemporary fitness technologies, considers their implications for consumers, producers, and for society in general, and reflects on what they suggest about the future of fitness experience.

Casting new light on theories of technology and the body, this is fascinating reading for all those interested in physical cultural studies, technology, and the sociology of sport.

Chapter 1
Historicizing fitness technology

Who would have thought not long ago that Oscar Wilde, the apostle of dainty estheticism, the wit and poet, fêted everywhere and even worshipped at times by people of position and discernment – who would have dreamed it even? – would come to sweating on a prison treadmill?

So began the article ‘Oscar Wilde on a Treadmill’, published on 23 June 1895 in the American newspaper The Chicago Sunday Tribune (1895, p. 42). Wilde, the famous Irish poet, playwright, and writer, had been sentenced in England in the same year to two years’ hard labour, the maximum allowable penalty, for the crime of indecency – in this case a synonym for homosexuality. Wilde suffered terribly in prison. As Vybarr Cregan Reid (2012) recounts, Victorian-era sentences of ‘hard labour’ in prison could be traced back to the 1778 Hard Labour Bill and the recommendation therein to build ‘Hard Labour Houses’ for punishing and humiliating prisoners. In the 1800s, the treadmill, or treadwheel as it was sometimes called, was devised and implemented in prisons as a way of achieving these ends. The treadmill, continued the Tribune’s (1895) review of Wilde’s plight, was the bugaboo of the English prisoner:

It is almost barbaric in its severity and savors somewhat of the torture inflicted upon unfortunates 500 years ago. It is shaped somewhat like the wheel of a stern-wheel steamer or the paddle-wheel of a ferry-boat, except that the treadmill is considerably wider than they are…. When all is ready the prisoner jumps upon one of the steps of the wheel and grasps the bar with his hands…. The weight of the men turns the wheel, and as they sink down on one foot they must step up to the next float when it comes round. It is much like climbing a particularly nasty flight of steep stairs with no ending at the top.

(p. 42)

Though befallen by life-threatening exhaustion, Wilde survived his sentence of Sisyphean labour. He died, however, at age 46, just three years after his release from prison. That the treadmill, a device that perhaps hastened Wilde’s demise, is now used in households and fitness gyms the world over for improving health is an irony not lost on Reid (2012).

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This chapter examines historical logics, practices, and technologies that underpin contemporary fitness practices. It focuses in particular on the nature and significance of fitness technologies at three historical ‘moments’: ancient Greece; the physical culture movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s; and the (first) fitness boom of the 1970s and 1980s. This is undoubtedly a selective history of fitness and fitness technologies. It would be impossible in this space to deliver an exhaustive account along these lines. The point instead is to demonstrate that present-day fitness technologies have a protracted – indeed, ancient – history and that the technologies of earlier eras in many ways presaged the new fitness boom dealt with in subsequent chapters. The term fitness is used throughout this chapter to signify activities related to strength, endurance, flexibility and the like, recognizing that other terms have been used over time (e.g., training) for a similar purpose.

In historicizing the present, this chapter plots a path of technological development: from basic tools like the pre-modern dumbbells of ancient Greece to mechanical machines like the door-attachable resistance apparatuses of the physical culture movement to electronic technologies like the cycling and rowing simulators of the late-twentieth-century fitness boom. To be sure, these technologies are not tied exclusively to particular moments in time – dumbbells still exist alongside treadmills, for example. The aim of this chapter is to outline how certain technologies gained cachet at given historical moments against the backdrop of wider contextual factors. For example, the technologies used to sculpt muscular bodies at the turn of the twentieth century need be understood as part of a context where musculature was believed to be in peril as a result of industrialization.

The chapter proceeds through four subsequent sections. The first three of these deal, respectively, with the historical moments referenced earlier. The final section assesses points of continuity and disruption across these moments, the most notable of which is the lasting idea that pursuing a fit body and a fit way of life is a moral responsibility. The final section of the chapter also revisits the case of Oscar Wilde and the exercise treadmill – that foe of the English convict turned friend of the fitness enthusiast.

The ancient gym

The through-line from past to present fitness practices is often traced to Classical Era Greece, given, as Roy Shephard (2015) writes, that the ancient Greeks famously created the Olympic Games and were concerned more generally with systematizing and institutionalizing health practices, including physical activity. Indeed, documentary evidence for the first gymnasia dates from the sixth century BCE. The Akademia (Academy), founded by Peisistratos (d. c. 527 BCE), son of Hippocrates, and open to freeborn male Athenians, was Greece’s first ‘public’ gymnasium (Chaline, 2015).

The Greek word gymnazein means ‘to exercise naked’ – something that surely vindicates many of the outfits worn by today’s fitness enthusiasts. But this should not be taken to mean that the earliest of gyms were technology-free spaces. The body was not bare. In one sense, the kynodesme was a key part of the male athlete’s kit. Effectively an ancient jockstrap, the kynodesme was a leather thong that kept the penis stable during exercise. In another sense, the body was treated in a way that reflected scientific knowledge of the day. Oil and dust were applied for physiological purposes before physical activity began, the idea being that substances of this kind could help guard against excessive sweat, thus keeping one’s bodily fluids in balance: “Clay disinfected and prevented excessive sweat; terracotta opened the pores, thereby promoting perspiration; and asphalt was heating” (Chaline, 2015, pp. 25–26).

In another sense still, the ancient Greeks are usually given credit for pioneering modern weight training equipment (Todd, 2003), even if the assistive implement famously employed by the Greek strongman Milo de Crotona – lifting a bull on one’s shoulders, something Milo is alleged to have achieved by carrying the animal daily from the time it was young – has not stood the test of time. As Jan Todd (2003) recounts, by the fifth century BCE, the Greeks were using three main weight implements in training: “The diskos and javelin were thrown for distance, while the handheld alteres or halteres were used as a jumping aide and for muscle building” (p. 66). Halteres are perhaps the most compelling of these technologies in the sense that they stand as forerunners to modern-day dumbbells. Invented by pentathletes, halteres were generally made of stone, lead, or metal, and usually weighed between 3.5 to 5.5 pounds. Their purpose in jumping was to guide the hands, the logic being that this in turn would help keep the feet in good form (Sweet, 1987). Waldo Sweet (1987) adds that large halteres were used to exercise the arms and shoulders and that round ones were put to use in strengthening the fingers (also see Roach, 2008). Todd (2003) further remarks on the staying power of halteres in noting that there is evidence to suggest that the Romans copied the Greeks in using technologies of this kind in training.

Thus, in many ways, the ancient Greeks were fitness-technology pioneers, particularly in their use of simple tools for the purpose of training. But what is important in hindsight is not just the innovativeness associated with ancient Greek culture but also the contextualized nature of exercise technologies. It makes sense that halteres, among other devices, were used for gaining an edge in competition given the tremendous material rewards at stake in events such as the Olympic Games. Writes Chaline (2015), “Victory in competition brought the athlete an exalted position in his native city, one that elevated him well beyond the status of his fellow citizens and associated him with the gods themselves” (p. 32; also see Hubbard, 2008). Fitness was entwined with celebrity culture – something that, as we shall see, fitness luminaries in later centuries would quite literally capitalize upon.

As suggested earlier, fitness was also contextualized in the sense that bodywork was part of a broader project aimed at understanding life in scientific terms. As mythology increasingly ceded ground to evidence-based medicine, purposeful exercise was valued as a form of therapy. Hippocrates, for example, saw disease as a product of lifestyle and environment, as opposed to ancestral curses or divine punishment. This, in turn, paved the way towards advocating participation in activities such as wrestling while clothed in dust to avoid overheating (Kritikos et al., 2009; cited in Shephard, 2015, p. 192). At the same time, and by Shephard’s (2015) account, for ancient Greeks, “Perfection of the body was seen as important to development of the mind” (p. 195). For Plato, optimizing health meant balancing mind and body. Plato went so far as to establish his school at the Academy, thus tying intellectual pursuits with the term ‘academy’ forever more.

Yet perhaps the most compelling point in contextualizing ancient fitness practices involves the Greek gymnasium’s status as a site for sculpting a (male) body of ‘ideal’ proportions. Sculptures memorializing Greek athletes show well-defined muscles, “exemplifying in monumental form an ideal male body to which all aspired” (Lee, 2015, p. 59). As detailed by Mireille Lee (2015), exercise practices were in fact linked to a wider regimen of healthy behaviours called diaita, inclusive of diet and hygiene as well. When it came to diet, both over- and under-indulgence in eating were derided; obesity, for example, was satirized in comedy. Taken together, and remembering that women were barred from gymnasia, and thus the exercise and bathing sites therein, the ideal body stemming from adherence to a daily lifestyle regimen was male, muscular, and tanned; “its opposite was the female body, fleshy and pale” (Lee, 2015, p. 62). Importantly, and in a theme that shall run throughout this chapter and book in general, bodywork was furthermore tied to moral virtue – “a fine body could not be sorted with anything but a fine soul” (Chaline, 2015, p. 35).

Don’t be a criminal: fitness as physical culture

Thus, in ancient Greece, technologies were brought together with emerging scientific knowledge and with broader exercise, dietary, and hygienic regimens in the pursuit of ‘virtuous’ ways of living. Bodywork certainly did not disappear with the fall of the Greek and Roman Empires. As Shephard (2015) writes, for example, during the Renaissance, ancient Greek ideals glorifying the body were taken up anew by scientists, artists, and poets. Physical education at this time became a place for bodily exertion with the aim of inuring (male) students to the physical hardships that awaited in battle. Even so, in tracing a through-line from present to past, the turn of the twentieth century stands out as yet another important moment in the history of fitness technologies. As Oscar Wilde climbed his infinite staircase, a wider physical culture movement was afoot.

As the name ‘physical culture’ intimates, the physical culture movement was in one sense about promoting different forms of physical activity – gymnastics, calisthenics, weight training, and competitive sports among them (Churchill, 2008). Yet physical culturalists were apt as well to think broadly when it came to fit living. For example, in his 1897 text, Sandow on Physical Training, the Prussian-born strongman Eugen Sandow weaved together his own mythology – a drawing on p. 98 of his book shows a man, presumably Sandow, balancing himself on two chairs, and balancing a horse and adult rider on a board across his mid-section – with didactic instruction on exercise, diet, and hygiene, among other matters. Sandow’s contemporary, Bernarr Macfadden, was equally ostentatious, and equally keen on promoting constant attention to the quest for self-betterment (e.g., see Macfadden, 1915).

In terms of technology, the physical culture movement is significant in that it witnessed a shift from simple tools like halteres to simple machines – which is to say, mechanical devices designed mainly for resistance training through features like cables and pulleys. This is not to say that the hand-held tools of times’ past were suddenly irrelevant. The Milo Adjustable Barbell, for example, was available for those looking to ‘shape up’. Echoing the mythologized exercise regimen of Milo de Crotona, though replacing a growing animal with an adjustable barbell, the Milo Barbell was ‘scientific’ and ‘progressive’ in nature and was allegedly tried and tested by strongmen of the day (Green, 1986). Implements like gymnastics wands (for bending and stretching exercises) and Indian clubs (literally adopted from India via British imperialism, and used in ways similar to gymnastic wands) were likewise popular at the time (Todd, 2003).

But mechanical devices grew more prominent as well, in part through the commercial efforts of celebrity physical culture icons. The strongman Eugen Sandow was at the forefront of this trend, as his body was allegedly made possible by his use of intricate fitness apparatuses. The 1894 text, Sandow on Physical Training: A Study in the Perfect Type of the Human Form, was penned under Sandow’s direction and supervision and named with characteristic modesty. Therein, author G. Mercer Adam (1894) describes a ‘leg machine’ used by Sandow alongside dumbbells and barbells in training:

The machine consists of a base-board or platform, from five to six feet in length, having at either end an upright post or standard, secured by screws to the baseboard, and capped by ferrules with attached hooks or eyes, and a cross-bar for the hands to rest upon and give steadiness to the upright posts. About the middle of the cross-bar or brace, and a little apart, are two fixed hooks upon which are hung stirrups, connected by one or more rubber straps or elastic cables; into these stirrups the feet are placed for the purpose of exercise, either by a direct up-and-down tread or by alternate lateral thrusts to the outer base of the machine.

(p. 236)

Adam’s description of the leg machine is instructive first in showing the constituent technologies brought together with the body in the quest to strengthen the legs: upright posts, a crossbar, ferrules with attached hooks, elastic cables, and on down the line. It furthermore shows the importance of fitness media – whether instructional books or popular magazines like Sandow’s M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the new fitness boom
• 1 Historicizing fitness technology
• 2 A game for everyone: the fitness-technology complex
• 3 Be your best self: gamification, optimization, surveillance
• 4 Anywhere, anytime: fitness technology and mobile privatization
• 5 This is hard work: negotiating technology consumption
• Conclusion: amusing ourselves to life
• Index