The golden age of exercise

0:12This is Explain It To Me From Fox, the show that tackles the questions that matter to you most. I'm John Cullen Hill. For the past couple weeks, we've been talking about all the things we do in the name of wellness. This week, we're continuing our journey and exploring exercise. Dozens of you called into the hotline to tell us about your relationship with making your body move. I do this thing called exertainment where I do one class and then I do another and another. not to lose weight per se, but to be there for my daughter to be a role model in that regard. You know, I went from never working out, really not having much energy, having kind of crappy mental health to going about four to five times a week.

0:56Recently, I just completed my first marathon and I got a sub four and I love running and I build my whole life around it. My whole relationship to exercise has changed and that has transformed my relationship to my entire life. Producer Hadi Mawagdi is back to tell us how exercise is changing in 2025. So I looked into the numbers, JQ, and according to a recent report by the Health and Fitness Association, a record-breaking 77 million Americans, nearly a quarter of all people over the age of six years old, are members of fitness clubs like Equinox and 24 Hour Fitness, as well as boutique fitness studios like Core Power Yoga and Orange Theory.

1:39And then there are, of course, the budget-friendly gyms like Planet Fitness and Gold's Gym as well. People really love those places. Yeah, I can't lie. I love me a reasonably priced squat rack. Oh, yeah? I understand. I, too, had a membership at Gold's over the years. Though these days I've been working out at a climbing gym with exercise classes and a yoga studio. It's been a great place for, you know, making community. Anyway, the last category I mentioned, the budget-friendly gym, is actually the fastest-growing sector in the fitness industry. Experts say it's likely because of the cost of entry.

2:16Take Planet Fitness, for example. A monthly membership there starts as low as$15 per month. Okay, so budget-friendly gyms are the fastest-growing sector of the fitness industry. But what sector is the biggest right now? So these numbers come to us from an industry report, again, released last year from the Health and Fitness Association. And they say 23.1 million Americans had a membership at a fitness studio at some point during the year of 2024. OK, that is a ton of Americans. Do we know why these studios have the largest portion of memberships? Well, that's what I wanted to find out. We are heading to a solid core class.

3:02It's like a Pilates situation, reformer. But it's a little more intense. There's fun music. I have been a few times. You have not. I've never been, no. How do you feel? Are you excited, nervous? I've done reformer Pilates. I've done mat and floor Pilates. They all challenge me in a way that, like, traditional weightlifting or yoga does not. but yes I'm nervous because their catchphrase is fail with us. Oh yeah you're gonna fail but the point is the failure because it's muscle failure. We're gonna start with Core. Solid Core is a full body workout on... So as you know JQ we took a class at Solid Core's Navy Yard Studio with coach Makia Love an educator and fitness enthusiast who told us that there weren't too many kinds of exercise that she doesn't love.

3:55But that what she loved most about SolidCore is... I loved how hard it was. I loved that the coaches didn't apologize for the intensity. And I loved like feeling myself grow. Like you can feel yourself growing, getting stronger like class by class. So with that in mind, we began our class and honestly, it was pretty tough.

4:27During the class, my muscles were shaking. I struggled to control my breathing. But when we were working our obliques, I know you remember working your obliques. Oh boy, do I. I could feel my ability to hold the poses get longer. Plus, being in a group made me feel like I wasn't alone on the struggle bus. He's killing me. Your mind and your body's like, no, I want that, I want that, I want that. You need to know one more push, and we are on to our career. And after the class, I ran over to a woman who seemed to be Makia's star pupil. Her name was Genesis. She had been to about 50 classes in just a few months when we met her.

5:09When I started, I was 60 pounds heavier. I had upper body issues, muscular issues. It's been transformational. I come almost every other day and it's just a part of my livelihood routine now. Hadi, that's really awesome. I think when you think of what you want to get out of exercise, it's everything she just said. 100 percent. I spoke to a fitness instructor back in Austin named Carla May O 'Connor. She's taught all the trendy sorts of classes, dance, bar, high intensity interval training. And she told me that she has seen a shift in what her clients want from classes over the past decade. I think that cardio was so huge then, right?

5:56Everybody was focused on how many calories can I burn? How much can I sweat? Carla May says people working out today want different physical results from their workouts too. I would say, you know, eight years ago, I'm getting started. I'm talking to a lot of people like, why are you here? They're saying, oh, I want to lose weight. I want to be thinner. Now, when I talk to my clients, they say I'm coming here because it's made me feel stronger. Strength, functionality, community, even improved mental health. These are the sorts of things clients say they want from fitness studios. Bodybuilders want the peak.

6:28We want the height of the bicep. I visited another spot in Austin called Correct Fitness, and I talked with the owner and CEO Alex Earl. Alex showed me around the massive industrial building where Correct Fitness is located, and talked to me about some of the things the studio offers clients. Main gym, this is where a lot of the classes, the classes kind of move around throughout the whole space, but anybody who's a member here, regardless of the membership level, they can come in and use any of this equipment. This gym is serious business. There are cold plunges, saunas, free weights, but also like heavy items that look like medieval weaponry.

7:09You know, we use steel maces and kettlebells and steel clubs. Alex says these memberships are definitely more expensive than a traditional big box gym. But he says that the group workouts, which take months to develop and are led by world-class trainers and are included with every membership, sort of make the cost a pretty good deal. We do a workout on Friday called Fuck You Friday that has become insanely popular. But there's so much camaraderie. There's so much. I mean, it's grueling. But by the time you're done with it, you're like, oh, my God, this is great. I can get started on an amazing weekend.

7:47Now, I don't know how to calculate whether Alex is right, JQ, but I looked up the cost for booking an hour of personal training as well as an hour of group training. And a personal trainer would likely cost about$150 an hour. And if I did that twice a week, I would already be at the cost of the second tier membership at Correct Fitness. And that includes small group training classes too. So honestly, Alex might be right. this might be a pretty good deal. Okay, Hadi, thank you so much for helping us get a handle on how folks are exercising nowadays. Absolutely, JQ. Up next, we'll take a look back at the history of exercise and we'll get a handle on how we got to where we are today.

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11:32we're back okay so classes are full there's a line at the squat rack and someone you know probably has a stationary bike sitting somewhere in a corner of their apartment when it comes to exercise in 2025 we're kind of in a fitness golden age Danielle Friedman says that's a real progression she's the author of the book let's get physical how women discovered exercise and reshape the world. But if we go back to the 20th century, that's a different story.

12:07It was the post-World War II era. It was actually a time when Americans were moving less than ever before. That helped give rise to what would come. But after all of the hardships of the Great Depression and the war, Americans were really embracing what they called the modern way of life, which largely meant sort of exerting yourself physically as little as possible, particularly in the middle and upper classes. You know, push button appliances became popular, ranch houses, eliminated stairs, driving, replaced walking in a lot of cases, and TV, you know, exploded. It became this huge national pastime.

12:48So the good life meant a life of little sweat, you know, for the most part. And it was at that point when the first real fitness influencers stepped onto the scene through TV. Thanks very, very much for letting me come into your home. My name is Jack LaLanne, and I'm here for one reason, and one reason only, to show you how to feel better and look better so you can live longer. In the late 1950s, there were a few really popular TV fitness personalities. Host Grape Nuts presents Bonnie Prudence. Want to take some off of here and possibly a little there? Feet apart, hands up, twist, twist. Who had to work really hard to convince the country that exercise, first of all, would not kill you.

13:44There was a lot of fear. Yeah, there was a lot more fear about overexertion than underexertion at the time. There were still, you know, outdated kind of beliefs about the idea that you were only born with a certain number of heartbeats and you didn't want to waste them on exercise. Okay. Oh, yeah. And for women, exercise was seen as especially dangerous. There was a widespread belief strenuous exercise would make your uterus fall out. Muscles were seen as unseemly and unladylike beyond just the life of leisure. Because heading into the 60s, people like Jack LaLanne, Bonnie Pruden were saying, no, no, no, no, no.

14:30It's safe. You need to do it. And as people started following their lead and discovering that a regular exercise habit made them feel good, in some cases improved measures of health, slowly the cultural messaging began to take off. A push-up is a little thing, but little things add up the way little words mount up to make important sentences. We also had a president at the time, JFK. Well, he famously wrote a piece in Sports Illustrated before he even was inaugurated called The Soft American. There is nothing, I think, more unfortunate than to have soft, chubby, fat-looking children. So all of these cultural forces were sort of helping to shape what happened in the early 60s.

15:20And we started to see some of the first really early group fitness classes. Let's fast forward one decade. Parliament Funkadelic is on the radio. People are wearing bell bottoms. It's the 1970s. This is a decade you've written that has changed fitness forever. What happened in the 70s? There was the rise of the women's movement and books like Our Bodies, Ourselves, you know, the seminal feminist health tome actually had a chapter about exercise and they were telling women, you know, muscles, it's okay for women to have muscles. And it was all sort of part of this messaging that women can be independent and self-sufficient.

16:03There was the passage of Title IX in 1972, which created, you know, so many more opportunities for girls to play high school and college sports. So there was a whole new generation of women who were active and wanted to continue to be active. And there was also the birth of exercise science, which is huge. And so for the first time, really, in the late 60s, there started to be research into the physiological effects of, it was mostly aerobic exercise at that point. And in the 70s, we saw what we would now look at as like, almost like the virality of so many workouts and modes of exercise that laid the groundwork for how we move today.

16:56What are some of those exercises that laid the groundwork? Running or jogging. Before the early 70s, people who ran for fun and ran in public were really seen as kind of kooky. And they would sometimes like have cans thrown at them. The idea that you would run for the sake of running, for health, for fitness was not established yet. And particularly for women, women were not allowed to run most marathons. Wow. It was in 1972 that for the first time women were officially allowed to enter the Boston Marathon.

17:41The 70s was in many ways the decade of dance. A chorus line was this huge Broadway hit. You know, there was disco, there was Saturday Night Fever. We just washed the hair. Dance was cool. Everyday Americans wanted to have good dance skills. And that helped to fuel the rise of aerobic dancing. And at the time, Jazzercise was the most successful of the aerobic dancing brands. And for a lot of women at that time, going to a Jazzercise aerobics dance class was the first time that they had ever worked out as adults. Before the 70s, while there were some bodybuilding competitions, of all of the workouts we've talked about, it was probably the most kind of fringe.

18:38Is this sort of thing though a sport or is it just sort of self-love? Men who really focused on strength training and building muscles were viewed sort of suspiciously, either as being narcissists or kind of in pop culture, in movies, they were often portrayed as like thugs or bodyguards. Enter Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm like getting the feeling of coming in the gym. I'm getting the feeling of coming at home. I'm getting the feeling of coming backstage when I pump up. So I'm coming day and night. Who was a champion Austrian bodybuilder at the time and kind of defied a lot of the stereotypes that had existed about male bodybuilders because he was very charming.

19:20He was very articulate. He was kind of a ladies' man. And he really, not completely single-handedly, but almost helped to make bodybuilding and strength training aspirational in this country. none of them had quite the impact as Jane Fonda so Jane Fonda at the time and this is the late 70s was already an Oscar winning actress and she had become kind of notorious for her anti-Vietnam War protests. So she was the first Hollywood celebrity also to become a fitness influencer. And part of her success was kind of selling herself and the idea that if you do like me, you can be like me. But her biggest impact came in 1982 when she released the Jane Fonda workout video.

20:20So she, more than anyone who came before her, made exercise aspirational, especially for women.

20:32Next, what happens to wellness when we put mind over matter?

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22:25We're back. This is Explained It To Me. So far, we've spent some time talking about the kinds of workouts that make you sweat and where you do those workouts. But now we're going to explore a practice that's less about burning calories and more about the mind.

22:43By taking a deep breath, undeniably, when you're moving energy, you're going to feel that more aliveness. You're just going to activate that part of your nervous system that's going to allow you to feel more of you and more energy. Producer Hadi Mawagdi and I met up with The Guardian's lifestyle and wellness reporter Madeline Agler at a holistic wellness space in Arlington, Virginia. Right before we started class, Hadi asked us how we were feeling. I am feeling pretty tense right now. I'm coming down from it. I've been running a little anxious lately, I will say. I've been a little high strung lately.

23:16A lot of running around, a lot of just like, okay, what's next? Not great odds for relaxing, but we did our best. Just take a deep breath into the nose.

23:36So a lot of today's wellness treatments and exercises and practices, they promise this idea of physical health and inner peace and improved performance and self-actualization. How much of that is true? You know, the hard thing about wellness is that a lot of the practices, there's a kernel of truth there. The problem is a lot of wellness marketing takes these tiny kernels of truth and just sort of runs with them and makes really outsized claims about them. You know, I remember writing a story about lemon water at one point and it's like, is having a glass of lemon water in the morning good for you?

24:13It's probably fine. But people were making claims like this can, you know, reduce your cancer risk. And like, that's a really big claim. That's pretty dangerous. Yeah, it's refreshing. It's delicious. It's a great way to hydrate. But yeah, that's probably a bit much. Right. And I think the truth is that a lot of these things might make your life one or two percent better. But ultimately, it's best to think of them as sort of the cherry on top of a healthy lifestyle otherwise, because you still need to take care of the baseline of your life. You wrote an article for The Guardian about breathwork.

24:50Why did you decide to write that? How does breathing fit into the overarching concept of wellness for you? So, I mean, for me, the best part of covering wellness is I love trying things. I love trying different classes, different trends. So I'm always on the lookout for sort of what people are doing. And breathwork was something I was a little familiar with. I've meditated and done yoga for years. And so I've done sort of little bits of breathwork in those. And also at the time, there was some reporting going around of people having sort of psychedelic experiences from doing breathwork. And so I was really curious about that.

25:28I want to take a step back. What is breathwork? Describe to us what it actually means. So breathwork is any, you know, intentional manipulation of the breath. So, you know, right now, if you try to calm down by breathing more deeply, that's breath work.

25:52A lot of people are familiar with box breathing, where you inhale for four breaths, hold it, exhale for four breaths, hold it. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. You got it. Oh, that shit works. That's breath work. It doesn't necessarily need to be an hour-long class. It can be these very little exercises where your breathing sort of helps ground and center you. So breathwork practitioners also kind of make a lot of the same promises that a lot of other wellness folks make, you know, that inner peace, that improved performance. Where did the idea come from that breathing exercises can be a little bit of a cure-all?