Petrzela has clearly done extensive and exhaustive research for this book. Her knowledge of the field is clear and obvious. 'Fit Nation' serves as an excellent overview of the history of exercise culture in the United States. That being said, I personally struggled to get through it. I was anticipating something, for lack of a better term, even more compressed. This is definitely a more granular and intense history than I was expecting.

Loved this book, it was such a fascinating insight into the fitness world and how it has been shaped and contorted. It helps see how the convoluted mess we are in has been shaped. Thoroughly recommend this as a read.

Fantastic, well researched and timely. Americas obsession with fitness has long needed a chronicler and this is so well done. Both interesting, skeptical and compassionate. Just the right tone,

This was fantastic! It covers similar ground to Danielle Friedman's Let's Get Physical, but offers a more in-depth look at the why behind many of the American fitness trends. Petrzela connects the dots between the fitness zeitgeist and how capitalism and consumerism responded and helped shape it. I loved this book start to finish.

When fitness guru Jack LaLanne opened a gym in Oakland, Calif., in the 1930s, he had to hire a blacksmith to build the equipment: fitness machines did not yet exist. As Natalia Mehlman Petrzela writes in “Fit Nation,” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exercising, except in the context of organized sports, was “marginal, and even suspicious,” and being fat was taken by many as “a positive sign of affluence.” Being lean or muscular was likely the result of manual labor, hardly something to which the middle classes aspired. Weightlifting was for the circus or the effeminate; ladies didn’t perspire, much less sweat. “Fit Nation” is the story of how all that changed.

There were always outliers: bodybuilders and diet advocates like Bernarr Macfadden (publisher of Physical Culture magazine), exercise proponents like Charles Atlas (a former “97-pound weakling” whose mail-order regimen promised “everlasting health and strength” in 15 minutes a day). But they were viewed from a distance; it would be the postwar prosperity of the 1950s that shifted the public attitude to fitness, and created a consumer base with the time and money to pursue it. From the White House, Jack Kennedy promoted a glamorous outdoor athleticism, while pioneers like LaLanne brought fitness into the home via television. No longer a niche pursuit, fitness grew to be a standard part of a middle-class lifestyle (even if many of us, it must be said, observe it in the breach). Between sometime in the 1960s and the mid-1980s, working out went from eccentric interest to “social imperative.” Today, we all know we should be exercising, especially when we see someone else out running.

Ms. Petrzela, who teaches exercise classes when she’s not lecturing on cultural history at the New School, offers an informative overview of this transformation. In 1961, she tells us, 24 percent of American adults were regular exercisers, but “that number jumped to 50 percent by 1968, and 59 percent in 1984.” Those dramatic rises were driven by inventive fitness styles, catering to different consumers: Jazzercise for the housewife; Nautilus gyms for the yuppie; jogging for pretty well anyone.

Other cultural and political trends converged. Jogging, for instance, got a boost thanks to an increase in urban marathons and fun runs from the 1970s onward. Ms. Petrzela suggests that these races became popular because they were cheap for cities to host and helped to promote “an image of fiscal and personal health that offset depictions of urban crime and decay.” Local governments are happy to promote fitness as a social good and community-building activity.

Celebrity health-boosters also modeled fitness for different audiences: Arnold Schwarzenegger with the extreme masculine imagery of the film “Pumping Iron” (1977), Jane Fonda with a “Workout Book” (1981)—and later iconic aerobics videos—offering her embodied ideal of Hollywood fitness. The consumerist 1980s also made fitness another thing to buy—and linked fitness increasingly to appearance. Beauty standards for women began to shift from thin to toned, and classes proliferated to focus on the looks that would result, from “Buns of Steel” to flat stomachs to sculpted upper arms. Women resolutely pulled on their legwarmers and started stepping to the beat. The speed with which the industry grew is staggering: “By 1984, Jazzercise was the second largest franchise business in the country, just after Domino’s Pizza.”

The exercise industry itself has also kept up with—indeed, ahead of—technology. Like LaLanne, other trailblazers saw the market before it existed. Fitness tapes helped propel the popularity of the VHS recorder in the early 1980s. Infomercials turned out to be the perfect medium to sell home-gym equipment. Fitness also took to the internet, and online classes were already available when the pandemic shutdowns struck.

Ms. Petrzela’s account moves at a quick-lap pace: she scans the market from top to bottom, from the Equinox gym to the Zumba class in a local church hall. The pursuit of fitness has been so normalized that there are hundreds of different options, each catering to a slightly different demographic. The author’s own hybrid career gives her insider access to the fitness industry and how it operates, particularly the marginal economics for those teaching the classes. Fitness instructors exist in a liminal space as both service providers and aspirational symbols.

Meanwhile, for the affluent, fitness and its accessories have become, like organic food, a form of acceptable conspicuous consumption. Fitness is “self-care” and therefore somehow virtuous rather than frivolous. Fitness (and its spawn, “wellness”) became just another path to demonstrating success, from the thrusting ’80s, when white-collar types sweated it out at racquetball or marathons, to the extreme hot-yoga craze of the early 2000s. And we all like to look like we’re exercising by wearing athleisure. (Of course, we’re not. Gyms are the only industry to operate on a business model that assumes most paying customers won’t show up: Self-reported fitness participation rates are apparently matched in their upward trajectory by adult obesity rates.)

But we want to be better. If you’ve read this far there’s a good chance you have a ThighMaster somewhere in the attic, maybe in a box next to the P90X DVDs and a copy of the “South Beach Diet.” And, this being January, you’ve resolved to get busy on that trendy, new-style rowing machine. Because another story in this endless cycle of changing fitness fads is the American obsession with novelty. An exercise style will come into fashion, and just as quickly fall away as a new one comes down the pike. Our pursuit of fitness is the story of our optimism. Each time people sign up for something new, hoping that this, this will be the one that works.

I was given an eBook from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

first came across Natalie through a podcast she did about the Chippendales, and then I followed her on Instagram and signed up for her mailing list, so i was thrilled to receive an Advanced reader Copy of this book, and it did not disappoint. Petrezela approaches her topic with a gender, class and privilege at the forefront of her research. This book is accessible, sympathetic and most of all - interesting.

Meticulously researched by an historian who is herself a fitness instructor, this book chronicles the past and present state of the American fitness industry and culture, with an emphasis on its impact on women over the generations.

Fit Nation does a fantastic job of laying out our obsession, as a country, with fitness and weight loss. While some people/fitness crazes were familiar to me, I still learned quite a bit. There were parts that did drag on a bit but I believe it was mostly due to my interest in certain parts of history over others. Thanks to Netgalley and The University of Chicago Press for the E-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Fatally compromised by presentism and lazy citations, the only thing that Fit Nation exercises is the political bona fides of its admittedly exercise-obsessed author.

A much-needed investigation into our culture of exercise and weightloss. Cultural ideas of beauty, mascluinity (and femininity !) dictate that we must treat our bodies like machines, contorting and pushing them to the limits in order to squeeze into the narrowest definition of 'health'. This book attacks those myths, smashing them to pieces.

I was so excited to read this book as this is an interest of mine. But I ended up finding myself having to push through to finish.

Although I appreciate all the work this author has put into the research of this book, it felt like almost TOO much. Some chapters felt repetitive throughout. I felt like the author just wanted to have everything in there but maybe some of it didn’t need to be?

professor and fitness instructor Natalia Petrzela combines her vocations in her second book, Fit Nation, which fuses extensive primary research and thorough engagement with secondary literature to offer the first complete history of American fitness culture. book engages so deeply with American culture and politics that it could effectively serve as a textbook for twentieth-century history of the U.S. also very long: four hundred pages. perhaps what’s most outstanding about Fit Nation is that during a key moment for history and ‘the public,’ while most scholars yearn to translate academic history for ‘the public,’ Petrzela actually applies a rigorous academic lens to everyday people and daily life. doing so, she bridges distance between historians and the ‘public’ better than most can imagine.

This book wasn't a huge interest to me, but I appreciated the author's research and insights. I wish that fitness and health didn't have such a causal relationship with one's privilege and socioeconomic status.

This is broken down history of fitness in, mainly the us, and how its connected to class and inequality. While the knowledge that the thin is a sort of privilege, especially a white privilege a lot of times, this book goes into deep detail.

This book is for someone who wants a little bit more of the harsh truths of reality destroyed or smeared. like the general thesis of the book, health and fitness is a well intended effort but the execution creates these disparities.