gym culture essay

“FitTok”: social media’s influence on gym culture

Brendan Talbot , ETC. Editor | May 26, 2022

Photo courtesy of Brendan Talbot

Apps like TikTok help perpetuate both the positive and negative aspects of gym culture.

Over quarantine, social media rekindled the old flame of gym culture. Apps like TikTok and Instagram have fueled a resurgence in weightlifting among any demographic with access to a screen. Male, female, old, young, everyone is going to the gym. 

Last year, the world began to reopen, and gyms re-emerged into a world that sorely needed them. Being stuck inside with plenty of extra time on their hands, COVID-19 left a populace ready to work off that quarantine 15.

COVID-19, while at first shutting down gyms, has helped them bounce back better than ever. Since historically low attendance during the pandemic, gyms like the YMCA have now experienced a 20% increase in membership. Quarantine cabin fever was the perfect kindling for a resurgence in gym culture, but social media has been what truly re-ignited the flame of physical fitness. 

Social media apps such as TikTok and Instagram use algorithms to constantly feed viewers curated content. In the time it takes someone to watch a YouTube video, that same person can watch tens, if not hundreds, of TikToks on all sorts of different topics. One of the genres that has garnered the most interest on TikTok is gym-related content. The gym, fitness, and weightlifting hashtags on TikTok have a combined 300 billion views. This instant access to advice and inspiration has been a powerful tool in the growth of the community.

“Social media has influenced me by keeping me consistent and motivated,” said sophomore Ricardo Ramos.

Fitness influencers have always held a prominent position on social media. The Kardashian copycats with fake buttocks or the Arnold wannabes who use so much Photoshop that they’re closer to art projects than bodybuilders have been around for just as long as social media has. In the last few years, however, a new type of fitness influencer has emerged. These new influencers promote healthy, safe, and inclusive self-improvement. 

Users like @noeldeyzel_bodybuilder, @jpgcoaching or @thejoeyswoll have gained cult followings on TikTok for their videos on all ranges of gym-related content. Noel Deyzel offers advice, humor, and even helps tackle more serious issues like depression and body dysmorphia. Joey Swoll often posts videos pointing out negativity in the fitness community, helping to promote inclusiveness and positivity. JPGcoaching especially is considered a weightlifting messiah by the community for advice and optimal training regimes. 

“Many social media influencers like Alex Eubank, Jermaine Gadsden and others have inspired me to set and reach my goals in the gym,” said sophomore Jacob Kerr.

‘FitTok,’ as some call it, has its dark side, however. The same problems that have plagued social media since its inception still wreak havoc today. Constantly being exposed to models with artificial and unrealistic hourglass figures or bulging biceps isn’t healthy for anyone’s psyche. 

Roughly half of all adolescents experience some form of body-dissatisfaction and over half of all bodybuilders experience full-blown body dysmorphia in part due to social media. 

Not only can this constant barrage of gym-related content lead to body dysmorphia, it also often ends up creating toxic echo chambers. Internet spaces that promote steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs (PED) have become more common in the online gym community. Additionally, these groups may also encourage eating disorders or over-training. These toxic tendencies corrupt and ruin what should be one of the best things one can do for oneself: working out.

“I started weight lifting in hopes to improve my health, physique, and my overall happiness. Getting teased for growing up on the heavier side heavily influenced me to start working out,” said Kerr.

Everyone has their reason for hitting the gym; whether they want to gain weight or lose weight, become stronger or just burn off some stress, the gym provides a safe space for healthy self-improvement. Social media can be a fun and helpful tool in this journey, as long as one doesn’t let its negative aspects overpower the positive.

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(Why I Work Out)

The Evolution Of Fitness Culture

How did we go from ThighMasters to meditation apps?

Jazzercise. ThighMaster. Buns of Steel . Jane Fonda. Zumba. Yoga. While recognizable on their own, together, all of these trends represent a much larger entity: an evolution of fitness culture that spans decades and generations. They also represent a fascinating (and sometimes misguided) female journey of self-worth, confidence, and self-care . And while, for years, the fitness industry pushed and thrived on the agenda of “thin is in,” in recent years, there’s been a significant shift. The fitness culture of today has started to prioritize mindfulness and the mental health benefits of exercise rather than the aesthetics. But how did we get here?

The answer, as you can imagine, is not so simple. In fact, to scratch the surface of the varying drivers behind fitness culture, you’d have to go back... way back. Which is exactly what women’s health and culture journalist Danielle Friedman did in compiling her new fitness opus, Let’s Get Physical . The idea for the book, which dives into the history of women’s workout culture, stemmed from a feature Friedman was working on surrounding the origins of her recent fitness obsession — barre , its creator Lotte Berk, and the method’s eventual entry into the modern fitness world. For those unfamiliar, Berk, a German-born professional ballerina, developed the now world-renowned method in the 1950s as a means to help women (not just dancers) tone, strengthen, and improve flexibility and range of motion.

“I found pretty quickly that there were other Lotte Berks in every other fitness movement of the 20th century,” she says to TZR. “I was convinced that there was a really fascinating and important story there.”

Fascinating indeed. TZR tapped Friedman and other fitness experts to get a brief rundown of some of the major trends that have defined fitness culture over the years, and how they’ve gone from body-focused to mindful.

1950s Fitness: No Sweat

Exercise culture has been around for centuries (there were reportedly stationary bikes on the Titanic!), but let’s start in the 1950s, a time of rigid gender norms, when female overexertion was highly discouraged. Exercise for women was often minimal and never intended to lead to anything as distasteful as sweating. It was also often done in regular dress attire — including heels! — and centered on keeping the figure slim and trim. Overall, women at the time held the common belief “that if they exerted themselves they would turn into men,” says Friedman. “You know, grow hair in unwanted places, get big legs, or their uterus would fall out.” Yes, you read that right.

To be clear, there were certainly female athletes and those who embraced physical fitness at the time. The ’50s marked the decade of Althea Gibson, the first Black woman to win a tennis Grand Slam title; track and field star Wilma Rudolph, who competed in the 1956 Olympic Games and took home the bronze medal in the 4x100 relay; and Jean Faut, who played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League from 1946 through 1953 and is considered by many to be the AAGPBL’s greatest overhand pitcher.

There was also a small but mighty (and very wholesome) fitness trend that hit Americans in this Happy Days -loving era: hula-hooping. Originating in Australia and touted as a worthy form of exercise, U.S. toy manufacturer Wham-O made its own version of the whimsical hoop and sold some 25 million in a matter of months. But even this brief craze exemplifies the sentiment surrounding female fitness in this era: Keep it light, fun, easy, and presentable.

1960s Fitness: Aerobics

The anti-sweat sentiment that reigned in the post-war era changed with the coming of a few key fitness pioneers and one very crucial invention: television. The little box that seemingly overnight became a fixture in the lives of many Americans had a hand in making fitness and exercise more accessible to everyone, women in particular. Pioneers like Jack LaLanne and Debbie Drake stepped into living rooms across the country and helped change the conversation, explains Friedman, helping women better understand and embrace the benefits of exercise.

“They basically said ... ‘It’s OK if you sweat’ and taught that ‘under every curve there’s a muscle, so no muscle, no curve,’” she explains. “And it was really planting the seed that exercise was something that respectable ladies could do and could turn to as a beauty tool.” Strengthening movements like pushups and jumping jacks were taught and encouraged to be done regularly at home, but within the mission to slim, tone, and prevent weight gain, says Friedman.

Then came the big shift. Up until the 1960s, there was still some debate about how healthy intense exercise was for men and women alike. Dr. Kenneth Cooper, an Air Force flight surgeon and director of the Aerospace Medical Laboratory in San Antonio, came forward with a game-changing book titled Aerobics . It laid out in clear terms his extensive research on cardio exercise and how putting stress on the heart and lungs in a strategic way was not only safe, but incredibly beneficial for men and women.

“The book became a huge bestseller,” says Friedman. “It introduced the word ‘aerobic’ into the cultural lexicon and really got both men and women moving for the first time.”

Coincidentally, another tidal wave in the form of the women’s movement was also taking form at this time. And while one might typically associate this revolution with reproductive health and rights, Friedman explains that physical strength was also a factor. This era saw a rise in female runners and long-distance running as a form of exercise.

“Before the ’70s it was believed to be dangerous for a woman to run more than 2 miles, so women were not allowed to enter road races and Olympic participation was limited when it came to running,” says Friedman. Trailblazers like Kathrine Switzer ( the first woman to run the Boston Marathon in 1967) proved these antiquated theories wrong, encouraging women to take up jogging for sport and feel-good endorphins — runner’s high is a thing .

1970s Fitness: Movin’ And Groovin’

This sudden enlightenment around fitness brought with it aerobic phenomena in the form of dance-cardio sensations Jazzercise (founded by Judi Sheppard Missett in 1968) and aerobic dancing (created by Jacki Sorensen in 1969). These two women, while very different, shared a similar approach to physical fitness that combined their knowledge of Cooper’s work and research with their backgrounds as professional dancers. It also laid the groundwork for a different type of fitness routine that incorporated music and high energy levels for a fun, full-body routine that was impactful both physically and emotionally.

The ’70s was a decade culturally defined by dance — the disco era, Broadway musicals, etc. “I means, A Chorus Line was the Hamilton of its day,” says Friedman. “Dance was in the zeitgeist and a lot of women were inspired by that. A market grew for women who were seeking a safe space to dance and get fit with abandon outside the home and among, well, other women. This led to the subsequent rise of in-person fitness classes. So, this was significant that [women] were, in really large numbers saying, ‘OK, I’ll be back in an hour and half’ and taking that time to do something that made them feel good and feel strong.”

1980s Fitness: The Fonda Effect

When mulling over the fitness culture of the 1980s, you’d be hard-pressed not to have Jane Fonda come to mind immediately. The actor, already known for her sleek physique, opened her regional workout studio in Beverly Hills in 1979, published a fitness book in 1981, Jane Fonda’s Workout Book , and followed it with her first workout video. This proved to be a catalyst for what was nothing short of a home-video phenomenon that included the typical ’80s trope of leotard-clad women in leg warmers and headbands romping around to upbeat tunes. Celebrities like Mark Wahlberg, Cher, Alyssa Milano, Estelle Getty, and even Angela Lansbury (!) all caught on the home-video hustle and released their own workouts during this time. “By the late ’80s, there was something like 500 workout videos produced every year,” says Friedman.

It also introduced American consumers to a new wave of workout programs and fitness pros, including the likes of Denise Austin, Richard Simmons, Billy Blanks, and Tamilee Webb. For Webb, who’s created a total of 22 videos for the cult-famous Buns of Steel franchise, this home-video craze allowed her the opportunity to bring fresh, alternative fitness methods to the masses. Yes, steel buns were the goal, but by way of various techniques and tools that extended past traditional squats and lunges, including light dumbbells, bands, and even Tae Bo.

1990s Fitness: Yoga

While there are many notable fitness trends that popped up in the ’90s — the aforementioned Tae Bo was a big one that picked up steam — there was certainly a standout that surfaced thanks to its celebrity following that included Madonna, Christy Turlington, and Jennifer Aniston: yoga . “Women were getting really burned out and even injured from working out in such an intense (and not always safe) way,” says Friedman. Yoga, with its meditative and centering elements, connected the body and soul and encouraged quiet introspection.

Although the practice of yoga is far from new — its Indian origins date back some 5,000 years — its softer focus on the mind-body connection attracted a whole new modern audience. Suddenly, yoga and Pilates were being offered on the class rosters at local gyms and YMCAs, and boutique studios were launching across the country, providing a gentler and more mindful alternative to the high-intensity workouts of the previous eras.

2000s Fitness: Specialized Boutique Fitness

The yoga and subsequent Pilates fad that hit in the late ’90s introduced an early-millennium movement that burns brightly to this day: specialized boutique fitness studios. The demand for alternative ways to work out the body and mind hit a new high, and more intimate, focused fitness studios began to surface to fill that need. Brands like SoulCycle, Barre Method, and Orangetheory emerged, offering luxury facilities and pricey memberships that typically started at about $100 per month or $30 a class, which was once unheard of.

“A lot of the fitness trends we’ve seen can be linked to millennials coming of age, having disposable income, and having been reared with this mindset of optimization,” Friedman says. “They’re seeing exercise as a way to achieve goals that feels really good and productive.”

This also coincided with the tech boom of the 2000s that allowed us to track everything from our steps and heart rate to our daily meditation practice and sleep cycle. These intense and tailored fitness regimens offered a way for millennials to feel accomplished and in control of their environments, says Friedman. Trailblazing apps like Fitbit, Strava, and Nike Run Club were responsible for creating a sort of tracking frenzy among devoted users. (We all know that person who can’t call it a night unless they put in their 10,000 steps.)

Fitness Today: The Mindful Era

So where does that leave us today? Well, the early 2010s saw the boom of Instagram, TikTok, and the entry of a buzzy term used at ad nauseam today: wellness. Increased rates in chronic diseases led to people seeking alternative ways to care for themselves from the inside out. And with social media taking trends and body-positivity movements viral in a matter of days, holistic healing methods, clean/natural diets, and mind-focused exercise have been pushed to the forefront.

Thanks to social media, consumers are now more aware that bodies come in all shapes and sizes and that the goal of fitness and wellness shouldn’t revolve around achieving a specific body image. “When one woman who wants to stand up for body positivity and makes a post about self-love and hundreds of thousands of other women cosign that, you now have this collective audience and group of people [advocating for this message],” says veteran celebrity trainer Jeanette Jenkins, creator of The Hollywood Trainer Club .

Feeling and looking physically fit will always be a driving force to exercise, but consumers are now better understanding the benefits a consistent fitness routine can have on one’s mental health and confidence. “Years ago, I would tell people I was training, ‘You have your physical body and you have your emotional body, and if you don’t combine those two together, you’re not going to make it,’” Webb says. “Our emotional body is what we’re thinking, what we’re feeling, and what we’re seeing. So if I’m training you and you tell yourself you can’t do a specific movement, the body will follow that. So, let’s rephrase that.”

The pandemic has only perpetuated the reign of mindfulness and mental health. With so many prioritizing mobility and fitness as a means to combat anxiety and depression, a new wave of digital-driven workouts has taken over. Brick-and-mortar fitness studios around the world quickly pivoted to digital formats, a trend that experts say isn’t going away anytime soon.

“Everyone was in quarantine and depressed and stuck in their homes, so I went live with my workouts to help uplift people,” Jenkins says. “People wanted other options.”

As it happens, more and more fitness brands are catching on to this physical and digital hybrid approach. The Class , a cathartic workout experience that melds classic high-intensity movements like jumping jacks, squats, and burpees with intentional moments of meditation and introspection, picked up quite a following over the last two years. Its streaming classes have garnered the attention of Naomi Watts and Alicia Keys.

Breath-focused apps like Wim Hof have also created some buzz, encouraging a path to optimal body and mind health via breathing exercises, a concentrated mindset, and gradual exposure to cold. This trifecta is said to result in a plethora of benefits that include improved immune function, increased energy, reduced stress, and better sleep.

In addition, the last two years has seen a meteoric rise in at-home fitness equipment and programs. Does the name Peloton ring a bell? For context, the uber-popular fitness company, known for its stationary bike and treadmill, went from 511,000 connected fitness subscribers in 2019 to 2.33 million in 2021. Other key players in the home gym game include boxing app Liteboxer, Mirror, and Tonal.

That said, Jenkins foresees a return to the “human experience” in the coming year and beyond. “People crave human interaction,” she says. “They want to see someone working out while they do it too.” The trainer explains the future will likely include “a balance” of in-person exercise in a more contained and intimate environment (not auditorium-filled Jazzercise status) while people also continue to enjoy virtual and digital workouts that can be tailored and stacked to meet one’s specific needs.

“It’s beautiful, because health is now a higher priority than it was before,” Jenkins says. “I think we’re going to continue to grow in that way.”

This article was originally published on Jan. 3, 2022

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• v.11(3); 2015 Aug

Training at the Gym, Training for Life: Creating Better Versions of the Self Through Exercise

Ceren doğan.

a Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, United Kingdom

The present study draws on Scott’s (2011) notion of the Re-Inventive Institution and explores how gym members make sense and give meaning to their exercise regime. Overall, it is argued that for many participants gym exercise is more than physical training; it is also training for life. Based on a thematic analysis of 32 semi-structured interviews it is argued that gym workout is a means to create better versions of the self on mainly three levels. First, gym participants perceive themselves to be efficient and productive in general. Second, gym training is believed to increase the control they have over their lives. Third, gym members associate their gym workout with amplified emotional resilience, believing that fitness workout makes them not only fitter in a physical sense but also fitter and better equipped in a psychological sense. Surprisingly, a small group of regular gym users displayed more critical sentiments and distanced themselves from the images and values the gym stands for. The results of this study can be linked to broader political discourses on health and fitness that make use of corporate managerial vocabularies and are based on ideals of rationalization and efficiency.

Introduction

Whether in the basement of a commercial complex, half-hidden between two corner stores, next to the tube station or on a wide green field in the suburbs, gyms have conquered urban space. Every European and North American city, and even small towns, seem to have a fitness gym. Gyms are one of the most pursued leisure places in Western societies and can be said to have established themselves as part of a white, middle-class culture ( Featherstone, 2010 ; Howson, 2013 ; Phillips, 2005 ; Sassatelli, 2010 ; Shilling, 2005 , 2008 , 2012 ; Stebbins, 2009 ). In the UK, for example, almost 13% of the UK population is registered as members of a private health and fitness gym or a publicly-owned fitness facility, with London having the most registered users ( European Health & Fitness Association, 2014 ).

Fitness gyms vary in location, membership fees and serve different social and economic milieus. Most urban gyms are located in the city centre and are at their busiest during lunch time and after work hours. In order to attract customers, most gyms offer more than a plain and functional working out environment but present themselves as lifestyle or family oriented places. Depending on the size and the target group, multi-purpose amenities encourage pre- or post-training activities, for example at their spas and beauty centres or they organize social activities at the weekend ( Stewart, Smith, & Moroney, 2013 ). As Bryman (2004) notes, “hybrid consumption”, that is, consumption of several goods and services within one single place, tends to extend the time spent by the customers there. Consequently, one may think that the more time gym users spend at their gym, the more they engage with its material and social environment, and the more they are affected by the same so that the gym becomes more than just a training site for them.

Literature Review

A substantive body of work on gyms deals with participants’ motivation to go to the gym ( Crossley, 2006 ; Dworkin, 2003 ; Dworkin & Wachs, 2009 ; Laverty & Wright, 2010 ; Stern, 2008 ; Stewart, Smith, & Moroney, 2013 ). It is argued that one of the main motives is the desire to achieve a certain physique that conforms to contemporary aesthetic ideals (e.g. Dworkin, 2003 ). Crossley (2006) asserts, that for some participants the gym is an escape from everyday life where people can ‘turn off consciousness and submerse themselves in exercise’ ( Crossley, 2006 , p. 43). Laverty and Wright (2010) assert that going to the gym may provide individuals with a heightened sense of morality as going to the gym is in itself ‘a demonstration of desire to be a good citizen, to achieve and practice individual health responsibilities’ ( Laverty & Wright, 2010 , p. 79).

Drawing on the premise that femininities and masculinities are historically and culturally produced, the impact of fitness performances upon gendered identities has been addressed by various scholars (e.g., Craig & Liberti, 2007 ; Dworkin 2003 ; Heyes, 2007 ; Johansson, 1996 ; Johnston, 1996 ; McCreary & Saucier, 2009 ; Salvatore & Marecek, 2010 ; Tiggemann & Williamson, 2000 ). Dworkin (2003) writes that for most of its existence the gym has been associated with masculinity. The body building gym especially promoted and celebrated characteristics associated with male-ness, such as strength, power, competition and aggression, so that one could argue that through cultivating a muscular physical exterior, men were able to re-emphasize their superiority and dominance. Whilst this still may be true for bodybuilding gyms, contemporary fitness gyms seem to work in more complex ways. Women’s participation in gyms has widely increased and women entering the weight training area have become more common. Nonetheless empirical studies show that men and women tend to have very different objectives and motives for attending the gym (e.g., Haravon Collins, 2002 ; Salvatore & Marecek, 2010 ). Whilst male gym goers seem to be disproportionally concerned with arm, back and chest strength in contrast to lower body strength female participants are primarily interested in weight loss, and thus engaging more in cardio-vascular exercises.

As Featherstone (2010) puts forward, in contemporary Western societies, the body is understood as a reflection of one’s inner self so that one may argue that body modification technologies and body enhancement regimes can be understood as attempts to construct not only a beautiful, strong and fit appearance but also a beautiful, strong and fit self. One may then ask if people work out at gyms for more than body-related reasons, that is to say, if gyms also function as places in which people seek to alter and “re-invent” themselves in a more general sense.

From Total to Re-Inventive Institutions

With her notion of Re-Inventive Institutions Scott (2011) draws on and expands Goffman’s (1961) concept of Total Institutions. In the following, I shall first outline Goffman’s conceptualization and then present Scott’s elaboration on it.

According to Goffman (1961) , institutions fulfil certain functions in society. They serve either the majority ˗ the general public comprising normal, healthy and well-functioning citizens ˗ or they are designed to contain malfunctioning, deprived, sick or threatening minority groups. Schools, army barracks, work camps, and ships are only a few examples of the first mode of functioning whereas prisons, psychiatric hospitals, orphanages, retirement homes and hospitals are illustrative of the second. These localities are in some cases established to protect the majority from a threatening minority or, in other cases, to support an underprivileged population.

Goffman’s analyses are mainly concerned with the latter category and most notable, in the theorization and empirical study of what he terms Total Institutions. A Total Institution is ‘a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life’ ( Goffman, 1961 , p. 11). Goffman describes different types of Total Institutions in which each of them can be qualified according to their function, degree of totality and mode of entering. By function he refers to the societal rationale of the institution (e.g. to care for the underprivileged, to contain those with an infectious illness, to protect society from dangerous others etc.). By totality Goffman refers to four common principles of institutional life: (1) a daily round ‘in the same place and under the same authority’; (2) activities carried out in the company of similar others; (3) timetabled activities that follow clear rules in the presence of designated officials; (4) scheduled activities that are part of a plan, designed to realise the goals of the institution ( Goffman, 1961 , p. 6). The last category of which Goffman speaks is the mode of entering, or, what may also be called the mode of recruitment. Access to a Total Institution can either be performed involuntarily with the prison being the typical case, or voluntarily. However, even where entering is a voluntary act it can nevertheless be subject to a selection procedure (see for example application procedures to high-ranking universities or monasteries). In any case, a Total Institution ‘can be viewed as a place for generating assumptions about identity’ ( Goffman, 1961 , p. 170).

Scott argues that in late modernity Total Institutions have become rare. The twenty-first century, she argues, is characterized by ‘institutions without walls’ ( Scott, 2011 , p. 3) that participants seek out to re-invent themselves on a voluntary basis. Examples of Re-Inventive institutions range from therapeutic clinics to spiritual retreats, academic hothouses, secret societies and virtual communities. Those institutions are characterized by members’ active engagement, by self-regulation and a desire to undergo deep personal change. In contrast to Total Institutions, they are often permeable, have flattened hierarchies and a cohesive inmate culture. As they are voluntary, and often costly there tends to be lack of overt resistance. High degrees of interaction amongst participants enable mutual surveillance and conformity to institutional norms. Indeed, as Scott argues, members of Re-Inventive Institutions actively look for out for other people’s company because they consider it pivotal to their own success, ‘wherein members gaze at each other and monitor their relative progress towards a shared role. This mutual surveillance implies a network of connections between inmates, who exercise an equally penetrating, ubiquitous gaze’ ( Scott, 2011 , p. 49).

Given that participants of Re-Inventive Institutions actively and willingly reproduce institutional discourses, one may consider the power through which the sense of self is transformed as qualitatively different from the power operating in Total Institutions where changes of the self are somehow motivated from without, and not necessarily from within.

Whereas traditional TI [Total Institution, author’s note] inmates were committed against their will, and new identities imposed upon them, now we find people choosing voluntarily to enter institutions, believing that they need to change, and that it is their responsibility to do so. ( Scott, 2011 , p. 2)

Scott suggests here that people seek out those institutions because they feel a responsibility towards changing and shaping their identities. This moral imperative, she further argues, stems from the fact that we live in what Furedi (2004) calls a therapy culture , a culture that calls for constant introspection and self-engineering in order to obtain happiness and personal satisfaction. Discipline and goal-orientedness is a pivotal element in organisations when the idea of success or progress is being emphasized. Progress can refer here to any category such as the physical, mental or psychological.

Scott’s concept is fruitful because it invites us to think of seemingly neutral, or innocent, practices and places as psychologically meaningful. Indeed, Scott’s own examples of Re-Inventive institutional sites are often everyday spaces on the boundary between work and leisure and may be easily overlooked. They involve ostensibly relaxing, even self-indulgent activities, pursed on one’s spare time and hence are prone to be regarded as irrelevant for people’s sense of self. However, each Re-Inventive Institution:

offers a different way of rethinking and transforming an incomplete self, and discursively produces different subjectivities (…) Individuals are encouraged to regard their fate as lying in their own hands, accept responsibility for their mistakes and free themselves from their shackles of deviant or unhealthy behaviour…Taking control of one’s own correction is viewed not as a punishment but as a privilege, a positive opportunity to boost self-esteem. ( Scott, 2011 , p. 98)

As stated above, members undergo re-inventive regimes not only because they regard it as a positive opportunity to boost self-esteem but also partly because they believe they have a moral responsibility to be healthy or to feel better. In the context of the gym one may then ask what participants hope to gain through the correction of their bodies and the advancement of their fitness levels, and relatedly, in which ways they feel incomplete or insufficient if they fail to do so. In this vein, the present study addresses the questions of how and to what extent the gym functions as an active and reiterative attempt to create better versions of the self. In other words, it asks to what extent gym participants seek to re-invent themselves other than on a physical level.

Methodology

Participants.

The data for this study consisted of 32 semi-structured interviews with active gym members of whom 20 were women and 12 men, all students or working adults, ages 23 to 69. Respondents were recruited through a combination of personal contacts and snowball technique/referrals. The snowball technique itself has its limitations, self-selection being the most significant in the context of this project. The inclusion criteria for interviewees were minimal: 18 years old or over, English speaking, current gym membership and regular gym attendance with at least one gym workout session per week. Gym members who frequented the gym less often than once a week were excluded from this study. Members using the gym for other than exercise, such as the sauna or the Jacuzzi, were also not included to the data set.

This research project followed the recommended ethical guidelines of the Birkbeck School of Social Science, History and Philosophy Ethics Committee . All interviewees were afforded the right to anonymity and confidentiality. Whilst participants’ actual age and occupation are provided throughout the research report, every participant is given a pseudonym so that their responses cannot be matched to their personal details by anyone other than the researcher.

After establishing initial contact, by phone or email, and setting up a date, time, and location, interviews were conducted either in the cafeterias of their gyms or at a public place, at the respondents’ convenience. Each interviewee was provided with a form of consent that explained the rationale of the study, a confirmation of confidentiality and contact information. The interview schedule entailed questions about participants’ initial reasons to join a gym, the impact they considered their gym training had on their everyday lives and what they liked most about going to the gym.

Interviewing Process

Initially an interview schedule was constructed in accordance with the research questions, the literature on gyms and the theoretical concerns of this project. After conducting three pilot interviews, some questions and issues were narrowed or expanded while others were changed substantially or abandoned altogether. Each participant was interviewed once; the shortest interview lasted 24 minutes and the longest 110 minutes. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. I employed Braun and Clarke’s (2006) steps of theoretical thematic analysis for all transcripts, which means that the analytic procedure was driven by my theoretical and analytic focus. The benefits of thematic analysis is not only that it helps to identify, organise, analyse and report patterns (themes) within a data set but also its theoretical flexibility which means that it can be applied across a range of theories and epistemologies. In the following, I shall present the three key themes that I have identified as a result of this analytic process.

The results of the analysis revealed three key themes related to participants’ expectations and motives for exercising at the gym. Participants believed that exercise at the gym grants: a) more efficiency and productivity, b) a higher sense of control over their lives and c) an increase of psychological well-being. In addition, there was also a group of respondents who displayed (self-) critical sentiments towards the gym.

Increasing Efficiency and Productivity

All participants agreed that the gym visit would positively affect the quality and “flow” of their day. Many talked about how they actually plan their gym visits in order to optimize this perceived effect. According to Rosie i (age 24, post-graduate student), the gym gives her day a point of reference, a place either to depart from or arrive at.

Interviewer: When do you usually go to the gym?

Rosie: I like going [to the gym] in the mornings - I use the gym to structure my day. I get up around seven, then go to the gym for an hour or one hour and fifteen minutes. And then I will have my breakfast and a shower and get some work done between nine-thirty and ten. And I find when I don’t go, I get up later and then things move a lot slower. Like the process of going to the gym speeds up the day. It sets like a precedent to the way you want your day to go. Like if you get up and you have to do something, like going to the gym and you do it very quickly, it’s quite a motivating thing, running or whatever. Maybe it’s because maybe you are physically moving so far and everything is so fast, that sets a precedent and you are like wanting things to get done.

What is striking about Rosie’s account is the richness of details, describing how she follows a clearly structured morning routine split into different units of time. It indicates how carefully she organizes her day, making sure the gym is an integral part of it. The reason why she likes exercising in the morning before work is because it enables her to start and continue her day in a fast, efficient manner. ii If she does not go to the gym, she feels that ‘things move a lot slower’. The gym, so it seems, accelerates other daily routines and sets ‘a precedent to the way you want your day to go’. Rosie reflects upon her own perception and hypothesizes that it might be related to the quick physical movements during the training that make her more driven over the course of the day. For Rosie, the gym regimen is strongly related to her work in-so-far as it creates a sense of efficiency. Indeed, the idea that the gym provides users with a sense of productivity, a sense of achievement that highly impacts the course of their daily lives in positive ways was a reoccurring theme in the interviews. A similar experience is captured in the following two quotations:

Rebecca: There is something kind of sluggish about the pace of your day unless you go. You kind of feel that things need to speed up at some point. Or you just sit around all day and sit on the tube, sit at work, sit at home, sit on the couch (…)

Boris: In life the urge to procrastinate is very strong and the gym helps me, becomes part of my program and for that, makes me more efficient (…) And since I’ve started exercising I am better at writing my thesis actually.

Whilst Rebecca (age 29, administrator) comments rather generally on how the gym responds to her ‘need to speed up’ things, Boris (age 27, full-time PhD student) refers to how the gym exercise increases his personal and professional efficacy. He has established the gym as part of his “program” by which he refers to his work schedule as a PhD student. Boris exercises at the gym not just to control and enhance his physical fitness but primarily to increase his work productivity. Such an approach to the gym was not exceptional in my sample. Many respondents, most notably young professionals, hold a similar view. One of the reasons why participants feel a higher sense of efficacy in their lives may be related to the ways in which gym reinforces ritualized self-discipline, something a large number of respondents referred to.

Being Disciplined and in Control

As my interviews revealed, being disciplined during training is considered to be helping gym participants to be more disciplined outside the gym, as well. Gym practice was often described as something that may require extra effort and time, but it was often regarded as an investment that will ultimately decrease the effort and time that is needed for other things in life. When I asked Alexander (age 28, sales manager) whether he reported that the gym has an effect on his life in a broad sense:

Alexander: I find that you've started going to the gym and it's become part of your routine it gives you more energy to do other things just because you’re used to being active after a while and so all of a sudden say it's like ten at night and I need to go to the shop to get something, all of a sudden, I'm like yah, I'll just go and get it whereas beforehand, I'd be like, forget it I'll do it tomorrow, or another day or another day or another day.

As this quote illustrates, discipline and efficiency in- and outside the gym are thought to reinforce each other. The discipline, and perhaps rigour, gained at the gym is thought to be “contagious”, spilling over to other areas of life, bringing about an ease of handling everyday tasks.

Shawn: Going to the gym even though you're like spending loads of energy makes you a lot more disciplined in general I find. And it makes you just a lot more up for doing things in general. I like going to the gym because it keeps me going a bit more even when I'm not at the gym. And then you're probably a lot happier with yourself when you've been going to the gym a lot really. Whereas when I start going to the gym everything becomes more do-able.

Shawn associates the gym workout with being disciplined, efficient and ‘up for things.’ Crucially, he believes that the gym makes him happier, too, something that will be elaborated upon below.

Alexander: I think there's a hell of a lot of self-control that you achieve from going to the gym. I always think it's almost like you know how in like eating disorders you know it's so much about control which people never talk about in the media for some reason it's always about the self, the image that magazines are giving off and stuff and it's not, it's about control (…) I think it's about a feeling that going to the gym makes you feel. I get really proud of myself when I've been to the gym a lot in the week and done and feel really good about myself. You know it is sort of, a bit of it's not a challenge, well it is a challenge but not you know a sort of type of challenge which you do feel good when you pass your challenge.

Alexander reflects here on what might motivate him and other people to go the gym. He argues that aesthetic reasons are only one side of the coin, however, self-control is just as important. Pride and feelings of accomplishment are actually the ‘real’ reasons why people go to the gym, he believes. Popular discourse fails to see gym regime and eating disorders as closely related, he says, for both are based on self-discipline. Given that gym exercise is typically highly structured containing goals and sub-goals, it is likely for participants to see the gym as a challenge. Indeed, as the interview excerpts throughout this chapter have illustrated, feelings of accomplishment generated in the gym are not restricted to the locale but transcend its boundaries, leaving traces in the everyday life of its users.

One may also argue that discipline is inscribed into the gym’s material practices. What is common in all exercise equipment is a minute and precise utilisation, and management of bodily forces. The numerous calibrations, calorie counts, heart rate measures, repetitions and so on reveal one of the gym’s most significant logics, namely the utilization of optimum forces to effect self-improvement – a process that requires disciplining of bodies and minds and calls for the micro-management of movements, self-evaluating practices and self-rectification. Each machine sets little ‘challenges’ (weights, repetitions, sets, etc.) that users can either master or fail to master. Training at the gym, in other words, encourages a form of discipline that is directed towards the self. Gym members are complicit in the process of the disciplining their bodies; they learn how to work upon themselves according to given calibrations. This form of discipline elicits and fosters participants’ sense of accomplishment and gratification. In other words, because gym exercise is underpinned by a range of disciplinary procedures that primarily target the body and enhance its qualities, it evokes affective response related to self-mastery such as self-contentment, pride and enjoyment.

When I asked Meredith (32, client executive) how often she trains at the gym, she describes how her working-out pattern depends on the workload at her job:

Meredith: I try to go three to four times a week. It helps me to perform better at work (…) I exercise more when I am stressed. I certainly do, because - I certainly exercise more when I am stressed, I can make that correlation. It makes me feel as if I had a bigger sense of control in my life.

It seems that for Meredith exercise at the gym helps her to control her life. Although it takes time and effort to incorporate the gym into her daily schedule, she is convinced that the gym will ultimately help her to accomplish more and perform better in the realm of professional life. My analysis indicates that some participants regard it as a form of what might be called ‘rehearsal’, or training, for life; if one succeeds at this type of training, so the thinking of many participants goes, one will also succeed in other areas of life, become more productive and efficient. Personal qualities demanded by a serious fitness regime such as diligence, devotedness, and discipline, are expected to be echoed in the world outside the gym.

Gaining Emotional Resilience

The majority of the interviewees mentioned a general quest for better health and fitness as their primary motivation to join a gym. However, there was a wide range of other issues participants expect to resolve, or tackle, with their gym regimen that go beyond fitness concerns. Matthew (age 31, part-time PhD student and IT manager), for example, described the gym’s benefits as follows:

Matthew: I sleep better, I eat better, yes, I look better, larger, bigger. I quite like it to be honest; it makes me more confident somehow. But this point is not as important as it was when I was twenty. It’s now more, I can feel that my testosterone level has increased constantly. And this makes me more confident, too. I’m more like ready to combat daily stress and I’m ready for situations where I need more power and stability. So the increased testosterone level is an important point for me in terms of the gym.

Being more confident, prepared, better equipped and resilient to external threats is regarded by him as a major gain of the gym. As he says, looking better, larger and bigger gives him the confidence and the ability to combat stress. Further, being ready for situations that require power and stability are, according to Matthew, achieved through the strong gym-shaped physique, and the increased level of testosterone. The firm, muscular body – so the thinking goes – not only projects but also causes psychological strength. The emphasis on the male sex hormone testosterone can be read at least as implying, if not openly stating, the supposed effects of exercise for the male sexual drive and potency. Matthew seems to imply that what one overcomes with exercise is ‘weakness’ and what one gains is power, stability and confidence, which can be translated into sexual energy and confidence, or, ‘manliness’. Indeed, the link between sexual potency and muscularity is continually being made in the world of fitness. One of the main strategies is to do so, is through the visual display of the muscly body. Shaved, smooth and tanned, the male body carries the aura of physical potency and yet goes further than that, implying sexual strength. Referring to the bodies of muscular public figures, Miles observes that “each [body] becomes a public phallus, huge, rock-hard, gleaming and veined with blood” ( Miles, 1991 , p. 111). In other words, the body’s ‘material’ qualities such as its contours, surfaces and textures become the locus of potency display. At the same time, it is implied that once one has all those physical qualities, one is also in possession of sexual power.

A further implication of the gym that was mentioned by interviewees is an expected increase in psychological well-being. Diane joined the gym to get fitter but also, as she explicitly states in the interview, to overcome a difficult time in her life.

Diane: Psychologically you feel better (…) I lost three of my closest relatives within four years. It was a difficult time - - And it’s good to do some exercise, to go out. It helps. Your brain – I don’t know much about it. The articles that I have read, it’s good for your body. Endorphins, isn’t it? (…).

At the time of the interview Diane (age 64, free-lance translator) has been a gym member for nine months. It was after the losses of some close family members that she decided to sign up. Following the advice in magazines, she hoped the gym would have therapeutic effects, helping her in this vulnerable life situation. Olivia (age 33, administrator) employed the gym also as a therapeutic strategy:

Olivia: Back then I had some serious problems with my job - and my relationship <laughing> Basically my contract had ended and with the recession and all that I had a really really tough time finding new employment. I don’t know how many applications I’ve sent out (…) I got seriously depressed. My GP wanted to prescribe some medication but I didn’t want that (…) That was when I gave the gym a thought, just to do something for myself and keep on going.

Instead of taking the antidepressants her General Practitioner advises her to take, Olivia decides to work out at a gym, hoping that the exercise will help her to “keep on going”. Given the recent break up with her boyfriend and the loss of her job she uses the gym as a ways to ‘pull herself together’. Both Diane and Olivia remain vague in their descriptions about how the gym workout exactly might have helped them to overcome a difficult time in their lives. Shawn (35, technical assistant) and Jessica (43, art historian) emphasize the gym’s positive effects on their psyche, too:

Shawn: It [the gym] blows off steam. You have a way of blowing off steam; you have a way of escaping. But not having that escape, I think allows frustration and depression and everything builds into you, it's not good.

Jessica: If I am not exercising at all, I am usually more stressed out and in worst moods. My stomach is more sensitive and upset to the foods I eat. I am like getting super bloated because all the stress goes to my stomach. … Physically I feel good because I take out my stress out in a workout; it doesn’t manifest itself in my stomach.

Stress, depression, bad moods and frustration are expected to be combatted by the gym regime. It is almost as if these negative states run the risk of manifesting themselves into the body (e.g. ‘the stress goes to my stomach’). Exercise, so the thinking goes, is purgative; it releases stress and frustration by relocating it to the exteriors of the body and soul.

Critical Voices

Although most respondents emphasized the positive effects of the gym, a small number of interviewees expressed more ambivalent and self-critical sentiments. Interestingly, many of these critical voices came from respondents who are members of up-market fitness clubs but nonetheless wish to distance themselves from what their gym stands for.

Meredith: It’s mostly society saying that in order to fit in, or put your life together you need to have a gym membership just as you have a house, the best car, the spouse, the best children. If you are part of the really nice gym, like the one here, that has a spa and things like that. The more I talk about the gym the more I realize how much I hate it <laughing>

However, some interviewees commented critically on how their gyms seek to establish a link between the gym membership and a distinctive sense of identity - and how they had personally refused to take it up. Shawn, for example, is a member of an up-market club and describes the place as follows:

Shawn: The club is very sleek and cool. Some of the exercise rooms are decorated with purple lights, like a night club. The place promotes this kind of yuppie lifestyle. You have got the job, the apartment, you have the cool gym, you have this and that. But it’s all bullshit really. Most of these people don’t have cool jobs and all that.

Kate: The one I go to, it’s mostly young, professional crowd. I would prefer a gym that is not about how it looks, having the latest machinery and all, like aesthetically looking very cool, urban and hip but just like people that are just there to work out and aren’t focussed on images.

Alex: I think some people go to maintain image and appearance and this gym specifically promotes this nouveau, sophisticated very hip and cool and – I mean you walk into the gym and everything is white, it’s not functional at all.

The quotes above prompt us to think that gyms can function as re-inventive spaces in a sense that they that invoke the sense in people that they have bettered themselves and moved ‘up’ as well as ‘out’ of their own social class and thus obtained a more desirable social standing ( Watt, 2007 ). By signing up to up-market gyms people may feel more urban, hip and, perhaps, as if they were wealthier and more sophisticated than they actually are. It might be worthwhile in future studies to explore why people continue go to the gym even though they ‘look through’ these strategies, that is to say, even though they experience a dissonance between what they do and what they think.

A few respondents also mentioned discomfort in relation to the ways in which trainers treat gym members.

Jennifer: Fitness trainers seem to want to arrive at where they are and the conversation seems to be ‘you must do this’, ‘you must push yourself’. I can push myself hard enough and I am not in this big competition in life. And this feeling I have always had with them was ‘work harder’, ‘work faster’, ‘push more’. I just want to get to this level. It might not be hugely ambitious but I’m ok with that. And I didn’t like the fact that they were always like. ‘C’mon I can do this, I can do this.’ And you are like, ‘ok but I’m not you’.

Kate: This whole motivational thing goes onto my nerves sometimes. ‘Run faster’, ‘Keep it up’, ‘Smile’. Really?!

Due to the limited scope of this study, the tensions between trainers and trainees could not be elaborated upon in more detail. However, the accounts above suggest that some participants may not follow the ambitions of their trainers, or the ethos of their gym. They may not want to “re-invent” themselves in the ways their trainers want them to, for example. To what extent people resist their trainers’ views or reject the idea of self-optimization that their gyms perpetuate must remain a topic for future research.

According to the results of this study, the gym can be said to be a Re-Inventive Institution first and foremost because of its, what might be called, “spill-over effects”. All respondents agreed that gym exercise has positive effects on other areas in life. Members expect the gym to optimize their work performance, their psychological well-being and ultimately their selves. As Scott (2011) writes, institutions that are concerned with physical appearance, beauty, fashion and ‘healthiness’ promote ideas and discourse that consume an actor’s consciousness throughout the day. Hence, one may argue that the impetus on self-discipline, self-optimization and on “becoming” becomes omnipresent for members’ also outside the gym.

Ritzer (1983) writes that a society characterized by rationality is one which values efficiency, predictability, calculability and control over uncertainty and puts a great deal of emphasis on finding the best or optimum means to any given end. This resonates with the results presented above. As interviewees state, fitness training at the gym can be considered a means by which transformation of and control over one’s life is achieved. One of the reasons why this may the case is that exercise in gyms itself requires disciple, self-surveillance and ambition. Indeed gym membership usually starts with the diagnostic procedure of a health check where weight, height, body fat, blood pressure, body mass index, etc., are measured and compared to what has been established as a scientific norm so that goals for further training can be identified and changes noticed. This may facilitate an experience of having control over one’s body and the power to alter. The gym, in this sense, can be said to be a path to perfection.

In his historical analysis of fitness gyms, Chaline (2015) writes that the gym has always been more than a place to train physicality. Ancient gymnasiums, as the author notes, were places for social interaction, recreation and leisure, but they were first and foremost educational institutions where the intellectual and athletic training of a military character was supposed to be accomplished. The Greek gymnasium, for example, was a popular recreational space for the members of the aristocratic class as it provided them with an opportunity to perform and enhance “one’s own outstanding persona and family” ( Kah & Scholz, 2004 , p. 14, translation of the author). The interconnectedness between physical training and personal development or self-optimization seems still to persist.

My results resonate with a particular stream in the literature on gyms that puts the idea of self-improvement, self-regulation and self-assessment at the center (e.g., Gill, Henwood, & McLean, 2005 ; Markula, 2003 ; Markula & Pringle, 2006 ). It has been noted that neoliberal understandings of health as a private matter increased people’s willingness to engage in ‘care of the self’ practices which lead to an increase of what may be referred to as the ‘body industry’ ( Straughan, 2010 ). It is argued that the health and fitness industry is at pains to show how ‘imperfect’ bodies can be sculpted and corrected by the right diet, exercise and cosmetic products. Advertisements suggest that individuals are personally responsible for monitoring and controlling their bodies so that a slim and fit-looking physique does not only signify attractiveness but also self-control and ambition (e.g. Becker, 1993 ). In this context, it is also argued that the logics of paid labour have infiltrated leisure time in general and the relationship to one’s body in particular (e.g., Miller & Rose, 2008 ; Smith-Maguire, 2008a, 2008b). Baudrillard (1998) is one of the best-known advocators of this approach, arguing that the way in which individuals’ relations to their bodies is organized in a society mirrors the ways in which social relations and the relation to things are organized. He argues that private property and the accumulation of capital as the key tenets of capitalism are applied to the physical sphere, too: individuals understand their bodies as “things” that can be invested in, worked-upon and optimized. Fitness, according to this line of thought, is far from being playful or disengaged but a strategy to enhance the body’s qualities and value on the social and economic market, where it is surveyed and consumed by the gaze of the other ( Frew & McGillivray, 2005 ; Sassatelli, 2010 ; Turner, 1999 ). The gaze of the other can be said to be crucial for people as it is linked to self-esteem. People strive towards other’s approval and recognition to enhance and regulate their self-worth ( Brown, 2014 ). If one of the gym users’ motives and hopes is to create better, stronger and more resilient versions of their selves, as it is argued in this study, one may assume that there is a relative perceived lack thereof. The gym might then work as a place in which people work upon themselves to generate others’ recognition through self-enhancement, and therefore to increase their self-esteem. One may further speculate whether the correlation between physical exercise and self-esteem, that is repeatedly demonstrated in empirical studies, is indeed related to the fact that one gains social approval though physical fitness (e.g. Bowman, Cole, Dodsworth, Fenzi, & Burns, 2014 ; Joseph, Royse, Benitez, & Pekmezi, 2014 ).

One can argue that the logics of the free-market exceed the economic sphere and are internalized by individuals who go to the gym in a two-fold way: First, individuals allocate their time to the gym, that is to say, they choose to train there partly because they hope to produce a state of being that harmonizes with desirably attributes of the free market such as efficiency, productivity and emotional resilience. Second, the very ways in which gym participants engage with their bodies can be characterized in analogy to the working principles of the market. The division of the gym into separate areas as well as the different machines that address a limited number of muscles and not others, for example, strongly remind of the division of labour. To give another example, most machines “translate” bodily effort and time into calories and other numbers. This invites a way of thinking about the body as something that can be quantified, invested in and produced.

One may speculate what other forms of relating to the body and the self may be invented in future, not just in terms of fitness but perhaps also in terms of mental capabilities or even interpersonal relationships. The “quantified self” movement is perhaps the beginning of such a trend ( Till, 2014 ). The use of digital self-tracking devices here takes the quantification of the body to its extreme: little detectors track what one eats, how one sleeps, how often one exercises, which friends one meets, how often one calls one’s parents, what books one reads and which emotions and physical reactions during these activities occur. These activities are then transformed into digital data, which are uploaded to servers that allow users to analyse their progress and share their information with other users ( Till, 2014 ). As Lupton (2013) argues, the quantified self movement might be said to be an expression of neoliberal entrepreneurialism, celebrating self-maximisation and promoting self-critique through the presentation of “objective” measures of performance. To produce data about one’s self, to know one’s self better and eventually to improve seems to be one of the core tenets of contemporary society.

This study has shown that the reasons for why people join the gym as an ‘institution without walls’ are manifold. To invoke Scott (2011) , when people join institutions to alter themselves, it is often that they feel a personal desire and responsibility to create an optimized self. What participants expect to achieve at the gym is a better version of their selves in several ways. Firstly, many of the interviewed gym participants hope, and indeed perceive themselves to be more productive and efficient. Second, they feel they have more control over their lives when they train at the gym regularly. Third, they associate their gym workout with increased psychological resilience. It can therefore be said that these people engage in regular gym training to create a better, fitter and stronger version of themselves, that enables them to “keep on going”, to master their everyday lives, to cope psychologically with their stresses and strains.

Important to note, the sample of this study was limited for it consisted of students and working adults only, that is to say, of people who either sell or prepare to sell their labour force at the market. It would be interesting to explore how people out of employment such as retirees and other non-workers make sense of their gym exercise. Tulle and Dorrer’s (2012) study, for example, reveals that gym participants over 65 years old tend to come to the gym not only for physical training but also to form social bonds that exceed the boundaries of the fitness locale. In general, people who have been referred to the gym as a result of a medical condition might experience the gym differently than participants who come there for leisure, perhaps more as a compulsory “homework”. In an interesting case study, Nash (2012) shows that pregnant women do not only use the gym to get fitter for birth but also, quite paradoxically, to manage anxieties about weight gain. The author shows how pregnant gym users, more than non-pregnant women, compare the size and shape of their bellies to those of other pregnant women in aerobics classes. As she writes, the fact that body related anxieties manifest themselves in the embodied experience of group exercise challenges research suggesting that prenatal exercise has largely positive effects on mood and body image. For some of her informants, Nash maintains, pregnancy fitness means a third shift of work on top of their continuing commitment at home and in paid employment.

For the recruited participants exercise in a gym was obviously an important enough part of their lives for they volunteered and were interested to talk about fitness in general and their own fitness practices and histories in particular. It would be worthwhile to look at the motives of gym members for whom the gym is not that important or who train only occasionally as this may yield different results. Relatedly, it might be interesting to interview people who have strong feelings towards the gym because of their negative experiences there.

In future studies, it would be fruitful to explore to what extent gym-related practices resonate with broader discourses on health and fitness in a given society. It has been noted that in the last three decades or so, corporate managerial vocabularies have infiltrated governmental understandings and handlings of health with ideals of rationalization and efficiency, customer satisfaction, producer/consumer relations and performance targets ( Numerato, Salvatore, & Fattore, 2012 ; Tonkens, Bröer, van Sambeek, & van Hassel, 2013 ). With the progressive abolishment of the social welfare state in many European countries, health is increasingly treated as a private responsibility and as something that one can purchase it might be worth discussing the gym as a social practice ˗ as an element of the commercialization of health services. Gyms can be said to speak directly to such neoliberal agendas, which try to increase the number of active and self-reliant citizens and to decrease the number of those who are dependent on the state and others. When gyms motivate their members to take responsibility for their own physical strength, they frame health as a feature of the self that individuals can and should responsibly manage. Taking on responsibility for one’s health has a normative and moral impetus, too, for lack of health ‘clashes too uncomfortably with the image of the “good citizen” as someone who actively participates in social and economic life, makes rational choices and is independent, self-reliant and responsible’ ( Galvin, 2002 , p. 107). Comparing and contrasting the results of this study with contemporary discourses and policies on health would help us to widen our understanding of not only participants’ motives to do gym exercise but also of the societal functions of gyms.

Acknowledgments

The author has no support to report.

Ceren Doğan is a clinical psychologist and a doctoral student at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is about to complete her training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Her research interests include the social, cultural and ideological construction of femininities and masculinities, the (female) body, and the intersection between space and subjectivities.

i To ensure confidentiality, all interviews were anonymized.

ii At the time of the interview Rosie was working on her application to get into a very competitive postgraduate programme at an Ivy League University.

The author has no funding to report.

The author has declared that no competing interests exist.

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The unlikely origins of fitness culture could give us a different view on what it is to be a man

Senior Lecturer in Theatre, Brunel University London

Disclosure statement

Broderick Chow receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to pursue the two-year Leadership Fellows project Dynamic Tensions: New Masculinities in the Performance of Fitness. The Dynamic Tensions Physical Culture Show was also supported by Kings College London's Arts and Humanities Research Institute, and Brunel University London.

Brunel University London provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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It has never been more urgent to discuss what it is to “be a man”. As the poet Austin Allen says: “no one is happy with the conventions of masculinity, least of all the men who strictly obey them.”

The fit, muscular, athletic body has been a long-held manly convention. But living up to this ideal can be destructive – there is evidence of increased use of anabolic steroids by young men, and gym-goers are considered narcissistic and self-obsessed . Muscular men are apparently less likely to support social and economic equality , yet muscle-bound masculinity is still everywhere from superhero films to advertising.

Should we throw away gym culture with those “toxic” aspects of masculinity that desperately need to go? This risks also discarding the positive benefits of men’s fitness. I propose instead that we reassess the meaning of the ideal muscular male body, by looking back at the unlikely place where it was born: the 19th-century popular theatre.

Fitness and fakery

Men’s fitness training was invented and popularised by the popular music hall entertainment tradition of the 19th and early 20th century. “Physical culture” performances ranged from weightlifting displays at local clubs to vaudeville strongman shows. Some performers were huge celebrities - for example, the bodybuilder Eugen Sandow . They used these theatrical shows to spread their message of ideal health, fitness and manliness.

The great bodybuilder and strongman George Hackenschmidt (1896-1968) reinvented himself through the theatre. He was an apprentice blacksmith in Dorpat (now Tartu), Estonia, when he was discovered and became “The Russian Lion”, performing feats of strength and wrestling in theatres across Europe. Eventually, he settled in London, and became one of theatre impresario CB Cochran ’s best-known acts.

Hackenschmidt was deeply conflicted about his life in the theatre. In his unpublished autobiography, he sneers at other strongmen and their “swagger, showmanship, or theatrical manner”, claiming the most eye-catching feats were mostly “slight of hand”. While he posed for physique photos like other bodybuilders, Hackenschmidt stated that his muscles resulted from his “natural” strength, and maintained that he never fixed or deliberately threw a match.

After retiring Hackenschmidt took up philosophy, lecturing at Columbia University and Trinity College, Cambridge, and published several books. His philosophy is concerned with authenticity, and how to live freely and truthfully . Not surprisingly, actors were his example of how not to live: “They do not represent their own, individual qualities and attributes”, he wrote in an unpublished essay, “because of their great degeneration […] they are particularly well suited for pretence and deception.”

Hackenschmidt’s hatred of theatre – even though it made his name – is similar to why the theatrical history of men’s fitness is a mere footnote today. Historically, theatre has been maligned and even hated for its association with deceit, fakery and excess . Hackenschmidt, like other physical culturists, was trying to show his audiences how to be a man (his first book is even called The Way to Live ). But if physical culture came from the theatre then the manly ideal it built seems like not just “acting”, but bad acting.

Performing masculinity

As much as the physical culture movement might wish to forget its association with theatre, it presents an opportunity to think differently about being a man. On the surface, thinking about a “theatrical” nature of masculinity sounds like American philosopher Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity : Butler saw gender as the socially constructed set of behaviours in everyday life that define and comply with social norms.

But “theatre” does not just mean “performance.” Being theatrical implies a conscious attempt to convince an audience to suspend its disbelief in something that is not real, rather than unconscious compliance to social norms. Things like props and costume are employed to help. But the attempt to convince often fails, even (or especially) when it’s trying hardest.

“Posing” and “showing off” is usually seen in a negative light. But seeing fitness culture as a theatrical performance of gender demonstrates that the ideal of the strong, muscular, athletic male is not natural but socially constructed, as are the values we attach to it. While the muscular male body sometimes symbolises military power, national strength, and aggression (as in Nazi Germany), a bodybuilder on stage poses for the attention of the audience, whose validation can produce other meanings. Extreme theatrical expressions of men’s fitness, such as bodybuilding or strongman contests, are therefore not unlike drag – a performance that Butler would argue exposes the degree to which gender is culturally scripted. Only in this case, it’s men playing at being men.

So presenting manly ideals on a stage as entertainment exposes them as cultural scripts rather than as an expression of some authentic “toxic masculinity”. I believe that by presenting them in their original context as entertainment these scripts are robbed of their power – and with this in mind I recently directed the Dynamic Tensions Physical Culture Show at Kings College London’s Anatomy Museum.

Featuring performers with an athletic background (strongman, bodybuilding, wrestling, rugby and weightlifting), the performance staged “masculine acts” of physical culture, while emphasising other subtexts such as injury, ageing and friendship. It aimed to present a different perspective on bodies that often signify aggression, violence and narcissism. While theatre strongmen, bodybuilders and wrestlers may be responsible for the physical ideal associated with a masculinity that desperately needs to change, remembering their theatrical origins helps us see past the stereotype.

Physical culture can have many positive effects (aside from health), like building friendship and community among people who might not otherwise meet. Gyms used to scare me, but they are not so different from the theatre stages and rehearsal spaces where I found community in my youth. Like theatres, gyms are full of people working on presenting something to the world, each with a different motivation and story.

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Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America

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Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America, Journal of American History , Volume 101, Issue 1, June 2014, Pages 328–329, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau259

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Early twenty-first-century conceptions of physical fitness are often assumed to be scientific truths that individuals ignore at their own peril. Shelly McKenzie's Getting Physical reveals that these truths have a specific cultural history encompassing a range of understandings and experiences of the fit body from the 1950s to the present. Focusing on the invention of fitness culture in the postwar period, McKenzie details the racial, class, and gendered conceptions of exercise across this time—conceptions that have made fitness a key part of American national identity. That this history corresponds with an age of increasing American affluence is no coincidence. McKenzie identifies the growing social, political, and cultural investment in physical wellness as a largely white, middle-class concern, stemming from sedentary postwar life-styles and increasingly figured as an individualized responsibility. Describing the problem these Americans faced, she asks, “How could they enjoy the fruits of postwar affluence while also managing their bodies for optimal health?” (p. 2).

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Fitness Culture. Gyms and the Commercialization of Discipline and Fun

Largely organized via commercial relations of some kind, gyms are key sites for studying consumer culture and practices as well as subjectivity in contemporary societies. Gym-goers are typically addressed as individuals who take control of both the market and themselves. Through a variety of qualitative sources – ethnographies, interviews and discourse analysis – this book explores how consumers and producers collaborate in the production of the fitness scene. It examines how individuals become fitness participants, at locally sustained relationships, the framing of discipline as fun, the meanings attached to the idea of fitness and the negotiation of broader body ideals, to provide a critical discussion of fitness as lived consumer culture. Choice is revealed as a process, rather than a cost-benefit decision; a transformative, ongoing practice rather than an accomplished, rational calculation. Consumption is revealed as an ambivalent practice, with consumers increasingly asked to be active producers of cultural forms that are nevertheless largely circulated and managed by producers who need to consume much of the very same sort they produce. PAPERBACK EDITION, 2014, WITH NEW FOREWORD

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Exercise Is Good for You. The Exercise Industry May Not Be

Lucky are those for whom the benefits of vigorous exercise are more or less the unintentional effects of something they love to do. I am not one of them. My friends have heard me declare that I like to swim, but what I really like is not so much moving purposefully through water as being immersed in it, like a tea bag. I like to walk, but would I do it quite so much if I had not, in a self-sabotaging form of rebellion against the Southern California car culture in which I grew up, refused to learn to drive? During the pandemic, I secretly relished the fact that my yoga classes had switched to Zoom; at home, with my camera turned off, I could look at my phone or play with the dog when other students were asking the instructor to help them refine their asanas. (The dog showed a keen interest in my “practice.”)

My husband, on the other hand, has a positive mania for basketball. Now sixty-two, he has been playing multiple times a week for more than two decades. He went back to the sport after breaking his ankle in a one-on-one game years ago, and again after a basketball sailed into his eyeball and detached his retina a couple of months ago. Sure, he knows that the cardiovascular workout is a boon—on days when his shot is off, he’ll say, “Well, at least I ran around”—but it’s the game he loves.

Unlike him, I have pretty much always had to cajole and guilt-trip and science-splain myself into exercising, even though I know from experience that I feel better, lighter, calmer afterward. (There have been long periods of my life when I didn’t even try.) This means that I am as familiar with the discourse about exercise as with exercise itself. I’m surely not the only one: the history of fitness is in large part the history of admonishments to become fit, and of advice on how and why to do so.

On this much we should agree at the outset: exercise is good for you. Virtually all medical professionals would sign off on that proposition, and so would most of the rest of us, even at a time when some portion of the population rejects plenty of other health-related expertise, like calls for vaccinations. Being physically active has been shown to decrease the risks of developing cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and some cancers; combat anxiety and depression; strengthen bones and muscles; sharpen cognition; improve sleep; and extend longevity. All exercise is not created equal: my twenty-minute afternoon strolls hardly compare to my husband’s two-hour basketball games. But a little is better than none, which is comforting to remember. Getting up from your desk every hour or so is better than not doing so. Even fidgeting is better than sitting still—a bit of foot-jiggling increases blood flow.

Exercise has not always been recognized as an unassailable good. For much of the twentieth century, as the journalist Danielle Friedman writes in her canny and informative new book, “Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World” (Putnam), vigorous exercise for women was considered not only unfeminine—women were supposed to glow, not sweat—but dangerous to female reproductive organs. (My own grandmother used to tell me to avoid lifting heavy things, so as not to impair my childbearing ability.) Men in the nineteen-fifties and sixties could invite questions about their sexuality if they seemed too interested in developing their physique, according to a 2013 book on American fitness culture by the scholar Shelly McKenzie; taking up exercise in a regular way wasn’t generally seen in a favorable light. And mid-century medical advice stressed the perils of overexertion as much as underexertion, especially when it came to the gray-flannel-suited man in the executive suite, who was thought to be chronically stressed, and therefore perpetually at risk of a heart attack. (If he survived one, his doctor was likely to tell him that he shouldn’t do much of anything strenuous ever again.) Friedman describes a 1956 radio interview in which Mike Wallace, later of “60 Minutes” fame, expresses incredulity at the vision set forth by the pioneering fitness advocate Bonnie Prudden. “You think there should be a formal exercise, a kind of ‘joy through strength’ period for husband, wife, and family when the father gets home from work at six-thirty at night, before the Martinis?” he marvels. “You think we should have a routine, all of us?” So many time-stamped assumptions are packed neatly into that response: that a (male) breadwinner would be home with his feet up by 6:30 p.m. , that an exercise “routine” couldn’t possibly supplant the ritual of a nightly cocktail.

Part of what changed is that science began producing evidence for the credo that Charles Atlas-inspired bodybuilders and dedicated weekend hikers and eccentric devotees of brisk calisthenics and even brisker swimming had long lived by. Some physicians, too, had known about the benefits of exercise. Anecdotally, they had observed that differences in physical activity on the job could lead to differences in life span. As early as the sixteen-nineties, the Italian doctor Bernardino Ramazzini, comparing the health of various tradesmen, had noted that professional foot messengers fared better than tailors and cobblers. “Let tailors be advised to take physical exercise at any rate on holidays,” Ramazzini counselled, in 1713. “Let them make the best use they can of some one day, and so to counteract the harm done by many days of sedentary life.”

In the charming and idiosyncratic new book “Sweat: A History of Exercise” (Bloomsbury), the writer and photographer Bill Hayes tells the little-known story of an “unassuming British epidemiologist” named Jeremy Morris, who, starting in the late nineteen-forties, brought quantitative methods to observations of physical activity. Morris has sometimes been called “the man who invented exercise.” That would be a stretch, Hayes says, but he can be called “the man who invented the field of exercise science.” Morris and his research group studied thousands of London transit workers, who operated in pairs on the city’s trams and double-decker buses. The drivers sat for ninety per cent of their shifts, while the conductors hopped on and off the vehicles and climbed up and down the stairs of double-deckers collecting tickets. In a study first published in The Lancet, in 1953, Morris’s team showed that the conductors had far less coronary disease than the drivers—and that, when they did have it, they developed it much later. Moreover, he went on to demonstrate, this outcome was independent of body size: the London transportation agency obligingly provided him with the waistband sizes of its employees, so he was able to determine that the conductors had a lower risk of heart attack whatever their girth. Morris went on to compare postal workers who delivered mail by foot to civil servants with office jobs, and turned up similar results. His findings were not immediately embraced—many experts were dubious that exercise alone could make so much difference—but the work inspired waves of new research that corroborated and expanded on it.

Morris, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, was born in 1910 and grew up poor in Glasgow. He died in 2009—when, as he apparently liked to say, he was ninety-nine and a half. It might be relevant that Morris paid attention to his own research, swimming, jogging, and cycling into old age. But he does not seem to have viewed fitness as an outward sign of individual worth, or to have treated good health as a state independent of its social determinants. As Morris’s obituary in The Lancet put it, he was a self-professed “radical” with a “lifelong passion” for investigating and addressing inequality.

The same cannot be said of many contemporary exercise proselytizers and of the fitness-industrial complex in general. Modern fitness is shaped by neoliberal ideas of the optimizable self, by consumer capitalism, by race and class privilege, and by gender norms. In my lifetime, I’ve seen the image of the thin yet ripped body transformed from something desirable and maybe athletic into a powerful signifier of ambition, affluence, and self-respect. Both images are sellable, but the second is more insidious. “The fitness industry has a history of exclusion, catering to middle- and upper-class white people with disposable income,” Friedman writes in “Let’s Get Physical.” “Just as the rich get richer, the fit tend to get fitter and too often, the poor get sicker. And then there’s the problematic fact that exercising has, for several decades, been linked to virtue, creating stigmas against people who can’t or don’t want to or even don’t look like they work out.” As Mark Greif writes in his wonderfully caustic 2004 essay, “Against Exercise,” the modern exercise regime lumps the non-exerciser “with other unfortunates whom we socially discount . . . the slow, the elderly, the helpless, the poor.”

For women, good advice about exercise has been particularly hard to separate from the pressure to diet and look hot. Even the sensible-sounding, mountain-climbing Bonnie Prudden had a fitness show on TV whose theme song trilled, “Men love you / when there’s less of you.” Friedman’s history of women and exercise chronicles the rise of various fitness trends since the fifties—and the entrepreneurs, athletes, and enthusiasts who invented them without ever quite escaping that trap. There’s Lotte Berk, a German-Jewish dancer whose family had fled to London as refugees from Nazism. In 1959, when there were few freestanding exercise studios anywhere, Berk, then forty-six, had the bright idea of opening a dance studio “not for dancers, but for women who wanted to look like dancers,” Friedman writes. Berk’s studio, a former hat factory in the Marylebone neighborhood, was soon drawing trendsetting students, including the writer Edna O’Brien and the Bond girl Britt Ekland. Berk was gung ho about sex. “If you can’t tuck, you can’t fuck,” she liked to say of one of her signature pelvic exercises. Thus was launched the barre method, now the staple offering of hundreds of thriving studios that attract serious women in pricey fitness wear, who care less about the exercise’s louche origins than about its ability to tighten their cores.

Friedman also introduces us to Judi Sheppard Missett—“a lanky dancer from Iowa with permed blond hair and a megawatt smile”—who, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, developed Jazzercise, the peppy aerobic workout set to music, and became a Lycra-clad multimillionaire in the process. The popularity of Jazzercise and its successors, including Jane Fonda’s lucrative exercise tapes, “created a greater appreciation for women’s physicality and strength,” Friedman observes. At the same time, “America’s body ideals inched further out of reach for most women” as “pop culture began to idolize female bodies that were slim but also vaguely athletic looking.” That’s the story with so many of the fitness phenomena that Friedman writes about: they offer women an outlet for their energy, or an affirmation of their physical competence, and then pastimes harden into life styles, empowerment becomes a commercial slogan, particular body types get exalted and fetishized, and some of the fun seeps out.

Which is not to take away from the genuine thrill of certain breakthroughs that Friedman describes. When Kathrine Switzer, a twenty-year-old journalism and English major at Syracuse University, set out to run the Boston Marathon in 1967, women were barred from it. Switzer registered under her initials and showed up anyway, only to be outed by reporters shouting, “It’s a girl! It’s a girl!” The race director tried to eject her physically from the course. Switzer and others later appeared on television to promote female runners, and the seventies jogging craze attracted women, too. President Richard Nixon signed Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments into law, promising female athletes equal access to facilities and funding in schools. In 1984, the Olympic Games held a women’s marathon for the first time. Today, more than half of all marathon runners are women. A woman sweating in running gear isn’t radical now; if anything, she might seem like a wellness cliché. At the same time, running isn’t quite the democratic, “anybody with a pair of sneakers can do it” pursuit that some of its boosters like to imagine. You not only need the physical capacity but also, in many places, have to be white to feel safe doing it. Still, as Friedman writes, “every woman who dared to run in public before the 1970s deserves credit for opening doors for women to move freely and fully; to experience the profound sense of physical autonomy that comes from propelling yourself forward using only your muscle and will.”

It’s this tantalizing evocation of exercise as freedom and play that most makes “Sweat,” Hayes’s book, worth reading. It does not count its steps, Fitbit style, but, quite appealingly, meanders. Hayes, while chronicling his pursuit of boxing, biking, swimming, running, yoga, and lifting, sprinkles in bits of exercise history that happen to capture his genial curiosity, from the late-nineteenth-century career of the circus strongman and bodybuilding impresario Eugen Sandow to the surprising significance of bicycles for women in the same era. The journey is, in part, a scholarly one: his fascination with a volume he finds in the rare-books room of the New York Academy of Medicine, a 1573 edition of “De Arte Gymnastica,” by the Italian physician Girolamo Mercuriale, gets him moving, literally—off to England, France, Italy, and Sweden to visit archives and to meet librarians and translators. Mercuriale turns out to be one of those voices from the distant past which resound with pragmatic and humanistic good sense. Swimming, Mercuriale believes, can “improve the breath, firm up, warm and thin the body” and make people “less liable to injury.” And he writes eloquently of the way water “produces by its gentle touch a sort of peculiar pleasure all its own.” (I’m with him there.)

One senses that the real impetus for Hayes’s inquiry is personal, as exercise always is, once you stop reading the article about the latest five-minute miracle workout and lace up your trainers. A decade and a half ago, Hayes’s boyfriend, Steve—forty-three at the time and “by all appearances, perfectly fit”—died suddenly one morning, after suffering a heart attack in his sleep, with Hayes beside him. There had been no “signs, no premonitions.” They’d gone to the gym the night before, made dinner, read in bed. After Steve’s death, Hayes set out to complete a to-do list that Steve had left on his desk, a series of household tasks, and then made his own list of things that he’d always wanted to do, which included learning to box. It’s this quest—an outlet for grief, or perhaps a redoubled zeal for life—which leads to a distinctive, often moving blend of historical and memoirist writing. Hayes has much to say about gym culture among gay men during the AIDs crisis, and about a particular San Francisco gym he frequented, Muscle System, which was decked out with floor-to-ceiling mirrors. “If nothing else, muscles could make a man look strong, healthy, and attractive, even if he didn’t feel that way inside,” he writes. “Directly or indirectly, every gay man was in some stage of the disease—infection, illness, survival, caregiving, denial or mourning.”

More recently, Hayes and his partner, Oliver Sacks, the brilliant neurologist and writer, began swimming “whenever we could—in cold mountain lakes, in salty seas, and in New York’s overchlorinated public pools.” After Sacks died, in 2015, Hayes lost his passion for exercise. When he first went back to it, he was mainly attempting to regulate his weight and blood pressure, both of which had crept up. But, when he started to swim again, he soon recovered the intrinsic rhythms; his body remembered how to do a dolphin kick, his mind how to wander. As I read Hayes’s account, his lightheartedness made me think of certain kinds of movement that we indulge in as kids but very seldom revisit as adults. Skipping, for instance, which looks ridiculous but is hella fun. Or rolling like a barrel down a grassy hill. Hayes doesn’t do either of those, but he does try running naked, which was how athletes competed in the original Olympics. At Sacks’s house in the country one day, Hayes runs down the quarter-mile driveway and back in the buff. In case you were wondering, “there was some jostling down below,” he reports, “but within seconds my testicles retracted and scrotum followed, as if shrink-wrapping my balls,” and he soon finds himself “sporting nature’s own jockstrap.”

So that’s how they managed at Marathon! The experiment proves “vital, wild, powerful.” For many of us, with our gym memberships, our wearable technology, and our hopescrolling through longevity research and dieting tips, joy in movement is no longer the primary motivation to exercise. Hayes’s exuberant book tells us what awaits if we can only make it so. ♦

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Article contents

Gender and cultural diversity in sport, exercise, and performance psychology.

• Diane L. Gill Diane L. Gill University of North Carolina at Greensboro
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.148
• Published online: 26 April 2017

Gender and cultural diversity are ever-present and powerful in sport, exercise, and performance settings. Our cultural identities affect our behaviors and interactions with others. As professionals, we must recognize and value cultural diversity. Gender and culture are best understood within a multicultural framework that recognizes multiple, intersecting identities; power relations; and the action for social justice. Physical activity participants are culturally diverse in many ways, but in other ways cultural groups are excluded from participation, and especially from power (e.g., leadership roles).

Sport, exercise, and performance psychology have barely begun to address cultural diversity, and the limited scholarship focuses on gender. Although the participation of girls and women has increased dramatically in recent years, stereotypes and media representations still convey the message that sport is a masculine activity. Stereotypes and social constraints are attached to other cultural groups, and those stereotypes affect behavior and opportunities. Race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and physical characteristics all limit opportunities in physical activity settings. People who are overweight or obese are particularly subject to bias and discrimination in sport and physical activity. Cultural competence, which refers to the ability to work effectively with people of a different culture, is essential for professionals in sport, exercise, and performance psychology. Not only is it important for individuals to develop their own cultural awareness, understanding, and skills, but we must advocate for inclusive excellence in our programs and organizations to expand our reach and promote physical activity for the health and well-being of all.

• cultural competence
• stereotypes
• weight bias

Introduction

Cultural diversity is a hallmark of society and a powerful influence in sport, exercise, and performance psychology. Participants are diverse in many ways, and physical activity takes place in a culturally diverse world. People carry their gender and cultural identities everywhere. Importantly, culture affects our behaviors and interactions with others. Thus, it is essential that professionals recognize and value cultural diversity.

This article takes a broad view of culture, including gender and extending beyond race, ethnicity, and social class to include physicality (physical abilities and characteristics). The article begins with a guiding framework, then reviews scholarship on gender and culture, and concludes with guidelines for cultural competence.

Culture: Basics and a Guiding Framework

This first section draws from psychology and cultural studies to provide a guiding framework for understanding culture and moving toward cultural competence in professional practice. Culture , however, is complex and not easily defined. Narrow definitions emphasize ethnicity, but we will adopt the common practice and broaden the definition to shared values, beliefs, and practices of an identifiable group of people . Thus, culture includes gender as well as race and ethnicity, and extends to language, spirituality, sexuality, physicality, and so on. Multicultural psychology further emphasizes intersections of identities and the totality of cultural experiences and contexts, which leads to the guiding framework for this article.

Psychology, cultural studies, and related areas all emphasize multiple, intersecting cultural identities; highlight power relations; and call for social action and advocacy. First, we all have multiple, intersecting cultural identities . The mix of identities is unique to each person. For example, two young women may both identify as black, Christian women athletes. One may very strongly identify as a Christian athlete, whereas the other more strongly identifies as a black woman. Moreover, the salience of those identities may vary across contexts. For example, religious identity may be salient in family gatherings but not in athletics. Also, when you are the only person with your identity (e.g., the only girl on the youth baseball team, the only athlete in class), that aspect of your identity is more salient.

The second theme of our framework involves power relations . Culture is more than categories; culture is relational, and cultural relations involve power and privilege. That is, one group has privilege, and other groups are oppressed. Privilege refers to power or institutionalized advantage gained by virtue of valued social identities. Oppression refers to discrimination or systematic denial of resources to those with inferior or less valued identities. Given that we all have many cultural identities, most people have some identities that confer privilege and other identities that lead to oppression. If you are white, male, heterosexual, educated, or able-bodied, you have privilege in that identity; you are more likely to see people who look like you in positions of power and to see yourself in those roles. At the same time, you likely have other identities that lack privilege. Most of us find it easier to recognize our oppression and more difficult to recognize our own privilege.

Recognizing privilege is a key to understanding cultural relations, and that understanding leads to the third theme— action and advocacy . Action and advocacy calls for professionals to develop their own cultural competencies and to work for social justice in our programs and institutions.

Understanding cultural diversity and developing cultural competence is not easy. As well as recognizing multiple, intersecting cultural identities, power relations and action for social justice, sport, exercise, and performance psychologists also must retain concern for the individual. The importance of individualizing professional practice is rightfully emphasized. Cultural competence involves contextualizing professional practice and specifically recognizing cultural context. The ability to simultaneously recognize and consider both the individual and the cultural context is the essence of cultural competence.

Gender and Cultural Diversity in Sport and Physical Activity

Physical activity participants are diverse, but not as diverse as the broader population. Competitive athletics are particularly limited in terms of cultural diversity. School physical education and community sport programs may come closer to reflecting community diversity, but all sport and physical activities reflect cultural restrictions. Gender is a particularly visible cultural influence, often leading to restrictions in sport, exercise and performance settings.

In the United States, the 1972 passage of Title IX prohibiting sex discrimination in educational institutions marked the beginning of a move away from the early women’s physical education model toward the competitive women’s sport programs of today. Participation of girls and women in youth and college sport has exploded in the last generation, particularly in the United States and western European nations. Still, the numbers of female and male participants are not equal. Sabo and Veliz ( 2012 ), in a nationwide study of U.S. high schools, found that overall boys have more sport opportunities than girls, and furthermore, progress toward gender equity, which had advanced prior to 2000 , had reversed since then, resulting in a wider gender gap. Following a 2013 conference in Europe ( http://ec.europa.eu/sport/news/2014/gender_equality_sport_en.htm ), a group of experts developed the report: Gender Equality in Sport: Proposal for Strategic Actions 2014–2020 ( http://ec.europa.eu/sport/events/2013/documents/20131203-gender/final-proposal-1802_en.pdf ).

In considering cultural diversity, it is important to go beyond participation numbers to consider power and privilege. Richard Lapchick’s Racial and Gender Report Card shows racial and gender inequities with little progress. For example, the 2015 report card (Lapchick, 2015 ) indicates that African Americans are slightly overrepresented in U.S. Division I athletics, but other racial and ethnic minorities are very underrepresented (see more statistics and reports at the Institute for Diversity and Ethnics in Sport website: www.tidesport.org ). Reports also show clear power relations. Before Title IX ( 1972 ), more than 90 percent of women’s athletic teams in the United States were coached by women and had a woman athletic director. Today less than half of women’s teams are coached by women (Acosta & Carpenter, 2014 ). White men dominate coaching, even of women’s teams, and administration remains solidly white male. The 2015 racial report card indicated that whites hold 90 percent of the athletic director positions, and less than 10 percent are women.

Although data are limited, the international coaching trends are similar (Norman, 2008 ) and suggest even fewer women coaches at the youth level than at the collegiate and elite levels (Messner, 2009 ). The 2012 London Olympics showcased women athletes and also demonstrated intersecting cultural relations. The United States sent more female than male athletes to London, but women were vastly underrepresented in several delegations; coaching positions are heavily dominated by men, and Olympic officials are not as diverse as the athletes.

Considering exercise, recreation, and the wider range of activities, we see more diversity, but all physical activity is limited by gender, race, socioeconomic status, and especially physical attributes. Lox, Martin Ginis, and Petruzzello ( 2014 ) summarized research and large national surveys on physical activity trends from several countries, predominantly in North America and Europe, noting that evidence continues to show that physical activity decreases across the adult life span, with men more active than women, while racial and ethnic minorities and low-income groups are less active. Physical activity drops dramatically during adolescence, more so for girls than boys, and especially for racial or ethnic minorities and lower income girls (Kimm et al., 2002 ; Pate, Dowda, O’Neill, & Ward, 2007 ).

The World Health Organization (WHO, 2014 ) identifies physical inactivity as a global health problem, noting that about 31 percent of adults are insufficiently active. Inactivity rates are higher in the Americas and Eastern Mediterranean and lowest in Southeast Asia, and men are more active than women in all regions. Abrasi ( 2014 ) reviewed research on barriers to physical activity with women from unrepresented countries, as well as immigrants and underrepresented minorities in North America and Europe. Social responsibilities (e.g., childcare, household work), cultural beliefs, lack of social support, social isolation, lack of culturally appropriate facilities, and unsafe neighborhoods were leading sociocultural barriers to physical activity. Observing others in the family or neighborhood participating had a positive influence.

Despite the clear influence of gender and culture on physical activity behavior, sport, exercise and performance psychology has been slow to recognize cultural diversity. Over 25 years ago, Duda and Allison ( 1990 ) called attention to the lack of research on race and ethnicity, reporting that less than 4 percent of published papers considered race or ethnicity, and most of those were sample descriptions. In an update, Ram, Starek, and Johnson ( 2004 ) reviewed sport and exercise psychology journal articles between 1987 and 2000 for both race and ethnicity and sexual orientation content. They confirmed the persistent void in the scholarly literature, finding only 20 percent of the articles referred to race/ethnicity and 1.2 percent to sexual orientation. Again, most were sample descriptions, and Ram et al. concluded that there is no systematic attempt to include the experiences of marginalized groups.

Considering that conference programs might be more inclusive than publications, Kamphoff, Gill, Araki, and Hammond ( 2010 ) surveyed the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP) conference program abstracts from the first conference in 1986 to 2007 . Only about 10 percent addressed cultural diversity, and most of those focused on gender differences. Almost no abstracts addressed race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, social class, physical disabilities, or any other cultural diversity issue.

Just as publications and conference programs reflect little diversity, our journal editorial boards and professional organizations have been dominated by men, with few women leaders until very recently. The International Society of Sport Psychology (ISSP), which was the first organization founded in 1965 , had all men presidents for over 25 years. AASP began in 1985 with John Silva as president, followed by seven male presidents before Jean Williams became president in 1993 . Similarly, APA Division 47 (Exercise & Sport Psychology) had all male presidents from 1986 until Diane Gill became president more than 10 years later. Nearly all of those presidents have been North American or European and white.

An additional consideration is that our major journals have little international reach. Papaioannou, Machaira, and Theano ( 2013 ) found that the vast majority (82 percent) of articles over 5 years in six major journals were from English-speaking countries, and the continents of Asia, Africa, and South America combined had less than 4 percent. Papaionnau et al. noted a high correlation between continents’ representation on editorial boards and publications, suggesting possible systematic errors or bias in the review process.

The International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology (IJSEP) recently (Schinke, Papaioannou, & Schack, 2016 ) addressed this issue with a special issue on sport psychology in emerging countries. Sørensen, Maro, and Roberts ( 2016 ) reported on gender differences in an HIV/AIDS education intervention through soccer in Tanzania. The program is community-based and delivered by young peer coaches. Their findings highlight cultural intersections and the importance of considering gender along with local culture in programs. Other articles in that special issue report on Botswana’s active sport psychology in both educational programs and with national teams (Tshube & Hanrahan, 2016 ), and the established and continuing sport psychology in Brazil, which includes major research programs on physical activity and well-being as well as applied sport psychology (Serra de Queiroz, Fogaça, Hanrahan, & Zizzi, 2016 ).

Gender Scholarship in Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology

In reviewing the scholarship on cultural diversity, we first focus on gender, which is especially prominent in sport and physical activity, and thus, particularly relevant for sport, exercise, and performance psychology. Gender scholarship in psychology has shifted from early research on sex differences to more current social perspectives emphasizing intersecting identities and cultural relations.

Sex Differences

In their classic review of the early psychology research on sex differences, Maccoby and Jacklin ( 1974 ) concluded that few conclusions could be drawn from the literature on sex differences. Ashmore ( 1990 ) later concluded that average differences are elusive, and the evidence does not support biological dichotomous sex-linked connections. More recent reviews confirm those conclusions.

Hyde ( 2005 ) reviewed 46 meta-analyses of the extensive literature on sex differences and concluded that results support the gender similarities hypothesis. That is, males and females are more alike than different on psychological variables, and overstated claims of gender differences cause harm and limit opportunities. Zell, Krizan, and Teeter ( 2015 ) used metasynthesis to evaluate the many meta-analyses on sex differences. They found that the vast majority of differences were small and constant across age, culture, and generations, and concluded that the findings provide compelling support for the gender similarities hypothesis.

Social Perspectives and Stereotypes

Today, most psychologists look beyond the male–female dichotomy to social-cognitive models and cultural relations. As sociologist Bernard ( 1981 ) proposed over 30 years ago, the social worlds for females and males are different even when they appear similar. Today, the social worlds are still not the same for girls and boys in youth sport, male and female elite athletes, or women and men in exercise programs.

Gender stereotypes are particularly pervasive in sport and physical activity. Metheny ( 1965 ) identified gender stereotypes in her classic analysis, concluding that it was not appropriate for women to engage in activities involving bodily contact, force, or endurance. Despite women’s increased participation, those gender stereotypes persist 50 years later. Continuing research (e.g., Hardin & Greer, 2009 ; Riemer & Visio, 2003 ) confirms that expressive activities (e.g., dancing, gymnastics) are seen as feminine; combative, contact sports as masculine; and other activities (e.g., tennis, swimming) as neutral.

Sport studies scholars have continued that research, with emphasis on sport media. Early research (e.g., Messner, Duncan, & Jensen, 1993 ) showed that female athletes receive much less and different coverage, with the emphasis on athletic ability and accomplishments for men and on femininity and physical attractiveness for women. Despite the increased participation of girls and women at all levels, the media coverage has not changed much. In the most recent update of a 25-year longitudinal study, Cooky, Messner, and Musto ( 2015 ) found televised coverage of women’s sport “dismally low” with no progress. Media representations are a major source of stereotypes, and evidence indicates that all forms of the media send the message that sport is for men.

Stereotypes are a concern because we act on them, restricting opportunities for everyone. Fredericks and Eccles ( 2004 , 2005 ) found that parents held gender-stereotyped beliefs and provided more opportunities and encouragement for sons than for daughters. Chalabaev, Sarrazin, and Fontayne ( 2009 ) found that stereotype endorsement (girls perform poorly in soccer) negatively predicted girls’ performance, with perceived ability mediating the relationship.

Chalabaev, Sarrazin, Fontayne, Boiche, and Clément-Guillotin ( 2013 ) reviewed the literature on gender stereotypes and physical activity, confirming the persistent gender stereotypes in sport and the influence of stereotypes on participation and performance. They further suggested that stereotypes may influence participation and behavior even if they are not internalized and believed. We know the stereotypes, and when situations call attention to the stereotype (e.g., there are only three girls on the co-ed team), it is especially likely to affect us. Beilock, Jellison, Rydell, McConnell, and Carr ( 2006 ) showed that telling male golfers the females performance better on a golf-putting task decreased their performance, and a follow-up study (Stone & McWhinnie, 2008 ) found females similarly susceptible to stereotype threat.

Gender and Physical Self-Perceptions . As part of Eccles’s continuing developmental research on gender and achievement, Eccles and Harrold ( 1991 ) confirmed that gender influences children’s sport achievement perceptions and behaviors and that these gender differences reflect gender-role socialization. Gender differences are larger in sport than in other domains, and as Eccles and Harold noted, even in sport the perceived gender differences are much larger than actual gender differences in sport-related skills.

Considerable research also shows that self-perceptions affect sport and physical activity behavior. For example, Jensen and Steele ( 2009 ) found that girls who experienced weight criticism and body dissatisfaction engaged in less vigorous physical activity. No similar results were found for boys, and so the researchers concluded that body dissatisfaction is important in girls’ physical activity. Slater and Tiggemann ( 2011 ) looked at gender differences in teasing, body self-perceptions, and physical activity with a large sample of adolescents and concluded that teasing and body image concerns may contribute to girls’ lower rates of participation in physical activity.

Physical activity also has the potential to enhance girls’ and women’s physical self-perceptions and activity. Several studies (e.g., Craft, Pfeiffer, & Pivarnik, 2003 ) confirm that exercise programs can enhance self-perceptions, and Hausenblas and Fallon’s ( 2006 ) meta-analysis found that physical activity leads to improved body image. Greenleaf, Boyer, and Petrie ( 2009 ) looked at the relationship of high school sport participation to psychological well-being and physical activity in college women. They found that body image, physical competence, and instrumentality mediated the relationship for both activity and well-being, suggesting that benefits accrue as a result of more positive self-perceptions.

Related research suggests that sport and physical activity programs can foster positive youth development, particularly for girls. A report for the Women’s Sports Foundation— Her Life Depends on It III (Staurowsky et al., 2015 )—updated previous reports and confirmed that physical activity helps girls and women lead healthy, strong, and fulfilled lives. That report, which reviewed over 1500 studies, documented the important role of physical activity in reducing the risk of major health issues (e.g., cancer, coronary heart disease, dementias) as well as depression, substance abuse, and sexual victimization. The report further concluded that all girls and women are shortchanged in realizing the benefits of physical activity and that females of color or with disabilities face even greater barriers.

Sexuality and Sexual Prejudice

Sexuality and sexual orientation are often linked with gender, but biological sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation are not necessarily related. Furthermore, male–female biological sex and homosexual–heterosexual orientations are not the clear, dichotomous categories that we often assume them to be. Individuals’ gender identities and sexual orientations are varied and not necessarily linked. Gender identity is one’s internal sense of being male or female. For transgender people, gender identity is not consistent with their biological sex (Krane & Mann, 2014 ).

Sexual orientation refers to one’s sexual or emotional attraction to others and is typically classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Herek ( 2000 ) suggests that sexual prejudice is the more appropriate term for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, but related scholarship typically refers to homophobia . As Krane and Mann ( 2014 ) point out, heterosexism , which refers to privilege of heterosexual people, is common in sport—we assume people are heterosexual, and we discriminate against those who do not fit heterosexist stereotypes. Also, we clearly discriminate on the basis of gender identity against transgender people.

Messner ( 2002 ) argues that homophobia leads boys and men to conform to a narrow definition of masculinity and bonds men together as superior to women. We expect to see men, but not women, take active, dominant roles expected of athletes. Despite the visibility of a few prominent gay and lesbian athletes and the very recent expansion of civil rights, sexual prejudice persists. Anderson ( 2011 ) suggests that men, and particularly gay men, have more latitude in sports today, but sport is still a space of restricted masculinity and sexual prejudice.

The limited data-based research confirms that sport is a hostile climate for lesbian/gay/bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. In one of the few empirical studies, Morrow and Gill ( 2003 ) reported that both physical education teachers and students witnessed high levels of homophobic and heterosexist behaviors in public schools. Gill, Morrow, Collins, Lucey, and Schultz ( 2006 ) subsequently examined attitudes toward racial and ethnic minorities, older adults, people with disabilities, and sexual minorities. Overall, attitudes were markedly more negative for both gay men and lesbians than for other minority groups, with males especially negative toward gay men. Vikki Krane ( 2001 ) (Barber & Krane, 2005 ; Krane & Barber, 2003 ; Krane & Mann, 2014 ; Krane & Symons, 2014 ) have done much of the related work in sport and exercise psychology, and that research indicates that sexual prejudice is common in sport at all levels. Most of that research is from North America and Europe, but hostile climates have been reported around the world. For example, Shang and Gill ( 2012 ) found the climate in Taiwan athletics hostile for those with nonconventional gender identity or sexual orientation, particularly for male athletes.

In a review of research on LGBT issues in sport psychology, Krane, Waldron, Kauer, and Semerjian ( 2010 ) found no articles focused on transgender athletes. Lucas-Carr and Krane ( 2011 ) noted that transgender athletes are largely hidden. Hargie, Mitchell, and Somerville ( 2015 ) interviewed 10 transgender athletes and found common themes of intimidation, alienation, fear of public spaces, and overall effects of being deprived of the social, health, and well-being aspects of sport. As Lucas-Carr and Krane concluded, creation of safe and compassionate sport settings for all athletes, including trans athletes, is an ethical responsibility. On a promising note, Krane and Symons ( 2014 ) described several programs that promote inclusive sport climates, including Fair go, sport! an Australian social inclusion project focusing on gender and sexual diversity.

Sexual Harassment

Sexual harassment, which has clear gender and sexuality connotations, has received considerable attention in psychology (e.g., Koss, 1990 ). Kari Fasting and Celia Brackenridge have led much of the related research and programs on sexual harassment in sport. The related scholarship indicates that the sport climate fosters sexual harassment and abuse; that young, elite female athletes are particularly vulnerable; that neither athletes nor coaches have education or training about the issues; and that both research and professional development are needed in sport and exercise psychology to address the issues (Brackenridge, 2001 ; Brackenridge & Fasting, 2002 ; Fasting, Brackenridge, & Sundgot-Borgen, 2004 ; Fasting, Brackenridge, & Walseth, 2007 ). That research comes from several European countries and Australia. Rodriguez and Gill ( 2011 ) subsequently reported similar findings with former Puerto Rican women athletes.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC, 2007 ) recognizes the problem and defines sexual harassment as “behavior towards an individual or group that involves sexualized verbal, non-verbal or physical behavior, whether intended or unintended, legal or illegal, that is based on an abuse of power and trust and that is considered by the victim or a bystander to be unwanted or coerced” (p. 3). Fasting ( 2015 ) recently reviewed the research and suggested building on the recent policies of major organizations such as the IOC to curb harassment, as well as continued research to advance systematic knowledge.

Race, Ethnicity, and Social Class

Race and ethnicity are just as salient as gender in sport and physical activity but have largely been ignored in our literature. As noted in the earlier section on gender and cultural diversity in sport and exercise psychology, there is a striking void in our journals on race and ethnicity, and virtually no research has been published on social class in sport, exercise, and performance psychology.

Although race and ethnicity are often conflated, they are not the same, and race is not a clear, biologically determined category. As Markus ( 2008 ) argued, race and ethnicity are not objective, identifying characteristics, but the meanings that we associate with those characteristics carry power or privilege. The psychology scholarship on race and ethnicity most relevant to sport, exercise, and performance psychology involves health disparities and stereotypes.

Race, Ethnicity, and Health Disparities

Health disparities are well documented, showing that racial and ethnic minorities and low-income people receive suboptimal health care (see 2011 National Health Quality and Disparities Reports; available at www.ahrq.gov ). Health disparities are relevant to sport, exercise, and performance psychology in that physical activity is a key health behavior.

Few studies have looked at race and ethnicity or social class disparities in relation to sport and physical activity. Heesch, Brown, and Blanton ( 2000 ) examined exercise barriers with a large sample of women over age 40, including African American, Hispanic, Native American, and white women. They found several common barriers, but they also reported variations by racial and ethnic group, and cautioned that their results and specific community needs precluded definitive guidelines for interventions. Crespo ( 2005 ) outlined the cultural barriers to physical activity for minority populations, including those with lower socioeconomic status, and called for professionals to consider unique needs and cultural constraints when giving advice on exercise. Ethnicity and social class are particularly relevant when considering migrant and refugee populations in Western countries. For example, Frisby ( 2011 ) interviewed Chinese immigrant women in Canada to better understand barriers and guidance for promising inclusion practices in sport and recreation. Promising practices included promoting citizen engagement, working from a broader social ecological framework, improving access policies, and fostering community partnerships to facilitate cross-cultural connections.

Stereotypes and Stereotype Threat

Steele’s ( 1997 ; Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002 ) extensive research on stereotype threat , which is the fear of confirming negative stereotypes, has been extended to sport. Steele’s research indicates that stereotype threat particularly affects those minority group members who have abilities and are motivated to succeed. Steele also suggests that simple manipulations (e.g., telling students test scores are not related to race) can negate the effects. Beilock and McConnell ( 2004 ) reviewed the stereotype threat in sport literature, concluding that negative stereotypes are common in sport and lead to performance decrements, especially when the performers are capable and motivated.

Racial and ethnic stereotypes are well documented. For example, Devine and Baker ( 1991 ) found that the terms unintelligent and ostentatious were associated with black athlete , and Krueger ( 1996 ) found that both black and white participants perceived black men to be more athletic than white men. Johnson, Hallinan, and Westerfield ( 1999 ) asked participants to rate attributes of success in photos of black, white, Hispanic, and composite male athletes. Success for the black athlete was attributed to innate abilities, but the white athlete’s success was reported to come from hard work and leadership ability. Interestingly, no stereotyping was evident for the Hispanic athlete.

More important, these stereotypes affect behavior. When Stone, Perry, and Darley ( 1997 ) had people listen to a college basketball game and evaluate players, they found that both white and black students rated black players as more athletic and white players as having more basketball intelligence. Stone, Lynch, Sjomeling, and Darley ( 1999 ) found that black participants performed worse on a golf task when told the test was of sport intelligence, whereas white participants performed worse when told the test was of natural ability.

Although much of the work on stereotype threat involves race and ethnicity, gender and athlete stereotype threat effects have also been found. Heidrich and Chiviacowsky ( 2015 ) found that female participants in the stereotype threat condition (they were told women do worse than men) had lower self-efficacy and performed worse on a soccer task than those in the nonstereotype threat condition. Feltz, Schneider, Hwang, and Skogsberg ( 2013 ) found that student-athletes perceive stereotype threat in the classroom, and those with higher athletic identity perceived more threat. They also found that perceived coach’s regard for their academic ability affected athletes’ susceptibility and could serve as a buffer to stereotype threat.

Physicality and Weight Bias

Sport, exercise, and performance are physical activities, and thus physical characteristics are prominent. Moreover, opportunity is limited by physical abilities, skills, size, fitness, and appearance. Exclusion on the basis of physicality is nearly universal in sport and physical activity, and this exclusion is a public health and social justice issue.

Physical Abilities and Disabilities . Rimmer ( 2005 ) notes that people with physical disabilities are one of the most inactive segments of the population, and argues that organizational policies, discrimination, and social attitudes are the real barriers. Gill, Morrow, Collins, Lucey, and Schultz ( 2010 ) examined the climate for minority groups (racial and ethnic minorities, LGB people, older adults, and people with disabilities) in organized sport, exercise, and recreational settings. Notably, the climate was rated as most exclusionary for people with disabilities.

Semerjian ( 2010 ), one of the few scholars who has addressed disability issues in sport and exercise psychology, highlights the larger cultural context as well as the intersections of race, gender, and class with physicality. Physical skill, strength, and fitness, or more correctly, the lack of skill, strength, and fitness, are key sources of restrictions and overt discrimination in sport and exercise. Physical size, particularly obesity, is a prominent source of social stigma, and weight bias is a particular concern.

Obesity and Weight Bias

Considerable research (e.g., Brownell, 2010 ; Puhl & Heuer, 2011 ) has documented clear and consistent stigmatization and discrimination of the obese in employment, education, and health care. Obese individuals are targets for teasing, more likely to engage in unhealthy eating behaviors, and less likely to engage in physical activity (Faith, Leone, Ayers, Heo, & Pietrobelli, 2002 ; Puhl & Wharton, 2007 ; Storch et al., 2007 ). Check the Rudd Center website ( www.uconnruddcenter.org ) for resources and information on weight bias in health and educational settings.

Weight discrimination is associated with stress and negative health outcomes. Sutin, Stephan, and Terracciano ( 2015 ), using data from two large U.S. national studies, found that weight discrimination was associated with increased mortality risk and that the association was stronger than that between mortality and other forms of discrimination. Vartanian and Novak ( 2011 ) found experiences with weight stigma had negative impact on body satisfaction and self-esteem, and importantly, weight stigma was related to avoidance of exercise.

Exercise and sport science students and professionals are just as likely as others to hold negative stereotypes. Chambliss, Finley, and Blair ( 2004 ) found a strong anti-fat bias among exercise science students, and Greenleaf and Weiller ( 2005 ) found that physical education teachers held anti-fat bias and believed obese people were responsible for their obesity. O’Brien, Hunter, and Banks ( 2007 ) found that physical education students had greater anti-fat bias than students in other health areas, and also had higher bias at year 3 than at year 1; this finding suggests that their bias was not countered in their pre-professional programs. Robertson and Vohora ( 2008 ) found a strong anti-fat bias among fitness professionals and regular exercisers in England. Donaghue and Allen ( 2016 ) found that personal trainers recognized that their clients had unrealistic weight goals but still focused on diet and exercise to reach goals.

Weight Stigma and Health Promotion

Anti-fat bias and weight discrimination among professionals has important implications for physical activity and health promotion programs. Thomas, Lewis, Hyde, Castle, and Komesaroff ( 2010 ) conducted in-depth interviews with 142 obese adults in Australia about interventions for obesity. Participants supported interventions that were nonjudgmental and empowering, whereas interventions that were stigmatizing or blamed and shamed individuals for being overweight were not viewed as effective. They called for interventions that supported and empowered individuals to improve their lifestyle. Hoyt, Burnette, and Auster-Gussman ( 2014 ) reported that the “obesity as disease” message may help people feel more positive about their bodies, but they are less likely to engage in health-promoting behaviors. More positive approaches that take the emphasis off weight and highlight health gains are more promising.

Cultural Competence

Cultural competence, which refers to the ability to work effectively with people who are of a different culture, takes cultural diversity directly into professional practice. Culturally competent professionals act to empower participants, challenge restrictions, and advocate for social justice.

Cultural Sport and Exercise Psychology

A few dedicated scholars have called for a cultural sport psychology in line with our guiding framework (e.g., Fisher, Butryn, & Roper, 2003 ; Ryba & Wright, 2005 ). Schinke and Hanrahan’s ( 2009 ) Cultural Sport Psychology , and Ryba, Schinke, and Tenenbaum’s ( 2010 ) The Cultural Turn in Sport Psychology , brought together much of the initial scholarship. Special issues devoted to cultural sport psychology were published in the International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology (Ryba & Schinke, 2009 ) and the Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology special issue (Schinke & Moore, 2011 ). These works provide a base and call for cultural competence and social justice.

Cultural Competence for Professionals

Cultural competence is a required professional competency in psychology and many health professions, and is essential for anyone working with others, including sport, exercise, and performance psychology professionals. Cultural competence includes understanding and action, at both the individual and organizational level.

Most psychology resources follow Sue’s ( 2006 ) model of cultural competence with three key components: awareness of one’s own cultural values and biases, understanding of other worldviews, and development of culturally appropriate skills . In line with Sue’s model, the American Psychological Association (APA) developed the APA ( 2003 ) multicultural guidelines that call for psychologists to develop awareness of their own cultural attitudes and beliefs, understanding of other cultural perspectives, and culturally relevant skills. Furthermore, the guidelines call for action at the organizational level for social justice.

The ISSP developed a position stand (Ryba, Stambulova, Si, & Schinke, 2013 ) that describes three major areas of cultural competence: cultural awareness and reflexivity , culturally competent communication , and culturally competent interventions . Awareness and reflectivity refers to recognition of between- and within-culture variations as well as reflection on both the client and one’s own cultural background. Culturally competent communication involves meaningful dialogue and shared language. Culturally competent interventions recognize culture while avoiding stereotyping, take an idiosyncratic approach, and stand for social justice.

Cultural Competence and Inclusive Excellence

Cultural competence extends beyond individual competencies to all levels, including instruction, program development, hiring practices, and organizational policies and procedures. The APA multicultural guidelines call for professionals to recognize and value cultural diversity, continually seek to develop their multicultural knowledge and skills, translate those understandings into practice, and extend their efforts to advocacy by promoting organizational change and social justice. Cultural competence at the individual level is a professional responsibility. Inclusive excellence moves cultural competence to the institutional level. That is, we work for changes in organizations and policies that make our programs accessible and welcoming for diverse people. Taking inclusive excellence into sport, exercise, and performance psychology calls for recognizing and valuing diversity and social justice as goals that will enhance our programs and institutions, as well as bring the benefits of physical activity to participants. Therefore, we work not only to develop our individual cultural competencies, but also to effect change at the institutional level to ensure that our programs are inclusive and excellent.

Gender and culture are highly visible and influential in sport, exercise, and performance settings. Gender, race, ethnicity, social class, and physical characteristics often limit opportunities, sometimes through segregation and discrimination, but often through perceptions and stereotype influence. Sport, exercise, and performance psychology research confirms the influence of culture and offers explanations, but sport, exercise and performance psychology has made little progress in promoting cultural competence and social justice.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Sports — Gym

Essays on Gym

Gym essay topics for college students.

As a college student, selecting the right essay topic is crucial to the success of your assignment. This page aims to provide you with a variety of gym-related essay topics for different types of essays, as well as examples of and paragraphs to help you get started. We believe that choosing a topic that interests you and allows for creativity is key to writing a compelling essay.

Essay Types and Topics

Argumentative essay.

• The impact of gym culture on college campuses
• The effectiveness of different workout routines
• The role of nutrition in achieving fitness goals

Paragraph Example:

In today's fast-paced society, the gym has become a central hub for individuals looking to improve their physical health and overall well-being. The question of whether gym culture on college campuses promotes a healthy lifestyle or perpetuates unrealistic body standards is a topic of ongoing debate. In this essay, we will explore the impact of gym culture on college campuses and analyze its implications for students' physical and mental health.

The gym serves as more than just a place to exercise—it is a reflection of societal values and expectations. By critically examining the impact of gym culture on college campuses, we can gain a better understanding of the complexities surrounding health and fitness in our modern world.

Formatting Instructions

Use HTML tags to structure the content (e.g., <h1>, <h2> for headings; <p> for paragraphs; <ul>, <li> for lists).

Engagement and Creativity

We encourage you to explore your interests and critical thinking skills through essay writing. Select a topic that resonates with you and allows for creative expression. Use your unique perspective to engage your readers and make your essay stand out.

Educational Value

Each essay type offers valuable learning outcomes. An argumentative essay can help you develop analytical thinking and critical evaluation skills, while a descriptive essay can enhance your ability to vividly depict gym environments and experiences. Through persuasive and narrative essays, you can hone your persuasive writing and storytelling techniques, respectively.

Why Gyms Are Essential: Physical, Psychological, and Social Benefits

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A Study of The Culture Surrounding The Gym Community

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The Reasons Why Girls Should Go to The Gym

Popularity of nutrition supplements among youth in gyms, exercising at home vs. exercising at the gym, the benefits of going to the gym, gold’s gym marketing strategy, relevant topics.

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Gym Review Essay: Benefits and Importance of Going to the Gym

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Introduction

Benefits of going to the gym, why gym is important, works cited.

Nowadays, everyone is obsessed with having a good body. Dieting, exercising, and lots of stuff they do to achieve their goal. Gym memberships usually grow, especially after the holidays when people eat so much. Then they go to the gym to burn the fat. Going to the gym is a commitment that people should make if they are serious about getting in shape.

Many reasons to go to gym. Of course, exercise is a priority. The gym has plenty of exercise machines that people can use to develop different muscle groups. Kulas (para. 1), in her article, “The Advantages of Going to the Gym Every Day,” says at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise should be done by adults five days a week, so going to the gym every day will meet that goal. It will result in good physical and mental health.

Aside from exercising, one can meet new friends like fitness instructors and others. It’s good to be with people with the same interests so that all can motivate each other to keep their fitness goals.

When one exercises, the heart becomes stronger, so it efficiently pumps blood to the body to keep vital organs healthy and in order. For example, blood pressure is maintained instead of spike high, cholesterol and triglyceride levels are kept low, and heart disease is kept at bay. It means there is less chance of a heart attack, stroke, or any other disease when one exercises regularly (Kulas, para. 3).

Combining aerobic exercise with other kinds of exercises like strength training with weights and stretching keeps muscles, ligaments, joints, and tendons healthy, flexible, and strong, so when one becomes older, he is stronger and has less risk of being out of balance and falling causing fractures or other injuries. One also gets good posture when muscles are well-formed. That is why the person should select the right exercises for each muscle group.

Suppose one does not like to work with exercise machines but still likes to exercise. In that case, gyms also offer group exercises, including boot camp exercises in teams, cycling sessions on stationary bicycles, martial arts exercises like body combat, boxing, etc., and plenty of dance routines like Zumba, HipHop, Ballroom Dancing, etc. It can be fun to meet new people, so social life comes alive.

One sleeps better also when the body gets good exercise. When one sleeps well, he wakes up with more energy to face the day and go about his work better in high spirits. The mood becomes better, too, so he is not grouchy with others. As one loses weight from exercising regularly and having a good balanced diet, one looks more fit and attractive, so a good body deserves good clothes that fit well.

On the other hand, some people go overboard in exercising, thinking all the positive results will double or they lose weight faster to get a leaner body. Andersen, in her article “9 Reasons to Skip Your Workout.. Sometimes”, advises that rest days should be inserted in between exercise days, especially if the workout is heavy.

She says muscles need rest periods in order to grow to heal the tiny tears that exercising causes. When they are repaired, it makes them stronger. She also says over-exercising may lead to too much weight loss or even weight gain due to the body’s built-in protective systems (para. 3). For women, over-exercising may interrupt their menstrual cycle because it affects the hormones.

As opposed to having moderate exercise that brings good sleep, over-exercising can affect one’s sleep cycle as well, and some people have trouble sleeping. Some even develop Insomnia or the inability to sleep well at night, so they resort to napping during the day only to catch up on the loss of sleep. This affects their performance at work or in school because they become very sleepy all the time. It also affects their mood because they always feel tired.

If one thinks over-exercising will curb their appetite so they become slim sooner, they are wrong. Andersen also says it can lead to overeating because one’s appetite is stimulated more if the body requires more energy to sustain its exertion in exercise, so the more exercise one does, the bigger his appetite.

Spending too much time in the gym also takes time away from more important things that a person needs to attend to, such as quality time for family and friends, engaging in a hobby that one enjoys, praying or meditating, or going to places one enjoys or has never been to before. Everything needs to be balanced: diet, exercise, work, leisure, and time for everything in order to lead a happy and fulfilled life.

As in everything else, too much of something good is bad, and in the case of over-exercising, it can lead to burnout. This means one has gone beyond his limits, and the body is not able to handle it. The person may have a breakdown, get sick, and become unable to exercise, work or be productive. So, it is much better to stick with a manageable exercise program at a time period that one can handle. That is about 30 minutes to an hour every day of moderate exercise coupled with a good diet plan.

The feeling that one gets after a good workout is fantastic. This is due to the release of endorphins, hormones that make people feel great. That is why many people can get addicted to working out, so they get that good feeling after. However, good workouts do not necessarily take place in the gym.

There are many other things one can do to exercise, such as following exercise routines on the DVD in the comfort of one’s home, running, jogging or biking around the block, swimming, dancing, or engaging in some sports like basketball, tennis, or badminton. One just needs to be creative in thinking of ways to move their body and exercise to get fit. They should also be able to do it regularly. Having various types of exercises within the week would be better so that it does not get boring.

However, if all else fails, there is always the gym so that one is really encouraged to actively exercise and not just sit around and watch others exercise. For one, there are gym instructors who can help members with the right exercises for their targeted body parts or for their whole body workout.

Another thing is there are other people who can motivate one to exercise, especially if they have good and fit bodies, to inspire others to achieve the same goals. Still, another is the membership fee that one needs to pay, so one should not waste it by not actively using the gym facilities to the fullest.

Once an individual reaches his goal of having a physically fit body, he should be able to maintain it and not let go of the diet and exercise routines he has mastered. He will realize the many benefits of having a good, healthy, and fit body. Not only will other people notice his new, improved appearance and be impressed, but more importantly, his health ensures that he will be less likely to get sick. This helps in keeping a happy, healthy, and productive life.

Andersen, Charlotte. “9 Reasons to Skip Your Workout… Sometimes”, Shape. 2012. Web.

Kulas, Michelle. “The Advantages of Going to the Gym Every Day”, Livestrong. 2013. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2020, April 2). Benefits and Importance of Going to the Gym. https://ivypanda.com/essays/advantages-of-going-to-the-gym/

"Benefits and Importance of Going to the Gym." IvyPanda , 2 Apr. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/advantages-of-going-to-the-gym/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'Benefits and Importance of Going to the Gym'. 2 April.

IvyPanda . 2020. "Benefits and Importance of Going to the Gym." April 2, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/advantages-of-going-to-the-gym/.

1. IvyPanda . "Benefits and Importance of Going to the Gym." April 2, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/advantages-of-going-to-the-gym/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Benefits and Importance of Going to the Gym." April 2, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/advantages-of-going-to-the-gym/.

Home / Essay Samples / Sports / Gym

Gym Essay Examples

Gym as a way of life.

Exercise is one of the most effective (and most enjoyable) ways to promote health and function. It may be a targeted weapon to prevent or treat a particular symptom or disease, but above all, it is a generic medicine that, when properly dosed, can have...

The Pros and Cons of Gym

Every individual in this world wants to stay fit. There’s no single human on this earth who would not want to have a Tonned body and an appealing personality. Staying fit also contributes in how you hold yourself in front of other human beings. For...

Analysis of People’s Motivation to Sign Up for Gym Membership

In my opinion, the most suitable trait that explains one’s motivation to sign up for gym membership is the influence of self-consciousness. It is a trait that explains people who are concerned with the way they appear to others are less likely to complain directly...

This is 16. This is Growing Up

16 is growing up. 16 is finally being able to drive but still being mad at myself for not taking the driver’s test when I was 15 and a half because I was lazy. If I did take it, I would have been able to...

A Research Paper on Body Builders Subculture in Contemporary South Korea

The gym was near the Annam station where my friend and his team regularly train. As I walked in to the gym, I encountered a group of people who were working out hard and their entire body were super big, not looked like regular people....

Gym Negative Influence on People Body

The exercise has ready been a common thing we do in the society. Exercise has plenty of benefit to people. Exercise not only can strengthen people body and increase body function but also seems to have a lot of effect of releasing pressure. Therefore, more...

Rethinking Your Relationship with Food & Gym

Out of all the fitness myths, one of the most destructive is that you need to live at the gym to sculpt a strong, healthy body. That’s because it has a polarizing effect: Some women reject working out altogether, either because they’re too daunted to...

Tips on How to Start Going to the Gym

All forms of exercise – be it cycling, jogging, swimming or dancing, have a positive impact on your overall wellbeing. Intense physical activity improves your immune system, fights depression and anxiety, and is also known for reducing the risk of chronic illnesses and heart complications....

Motivation is an Important Criterion to Sign Up for Gym Membership

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