Let's Get Physical

Before the 1970s, the average American stopped exercising after their high school days in gym class. But with modern technology came sedentary lifestyles and rising health issues. Matt Andrews breaks down the beginnings of the American fitness boom and how the jogging craze was partly about the need to feel in control.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, any place, world
history examined and science explained. This is one day University. Welcome,
and we're back on the untold history of sports in America.
I'm your host, Mike cosca Relli. Today we're looking at

(00:34):
the thing that you should do regularly to compete in
sports exercise. No, we're not giving you tips on how
to lose weight or keep that butt tight. We're talking
about the fitness revolution of the nineteen seventies. So get
a good stretch, dust off those barbells, and adjust your
leg warmers. Here's Matt. We begin in September of night.

(00:59):
It turns out, just a couple of weeks before Tommy
Smith and John Carlos famously raised their fists in Mexico City.
It's early September night, and a small group has gathered
at the National Mall in Washington, d C. And they
are there to publicize something brand new, National Jogging Day.
There were members of a Baltimore jogging club, a former

(01:21):
United States Surgeon General, there was some Democratic congressman, and
there was the Republican Senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond,
the then sixty six year old strom Thurmond, most known
for his firm beliefs in racial segregation. He was the
oldest of the group, and he was just the type
of man at risk for a heart attack that doctors

(01:44):
had in mind when they began recommending jogging in this era. Look,
it's a test case of only one, but strom Thurman
would live to be one hundred years old. He served
in the Senate for almost a full half century, so
maybe he was onto something here with this jogging thing.
Strom Thurman and the rest of the pack they ran

(02:05):
and a few laps around the reflecting pool in front
of the Washington Monument, and the reflecting pool is one
quarter mile around, the exact same distance as a regulation track,
and then it was back to work. Though actually this
was part of their job. As we have discussed, was
a cantankerous political year, with the nation dividing over the

(02:26):
war in Vietnam and things like black power. But on
this day we had Democrats and Republicans coming together to
make a bipartisan statement that physical fitness was a matter
of national importance. So let's use this moment, the first
National Jogging Day in n as our launching point to

(02:47):
explore the growing interests in physical fitness among Americans in
this era. It was not that long ago that most
Americans stopped exercising almost entirely after they graduated high school.
You know, they had endured pe classes and now they
were done. It's hard to imagine that because everywhere you
look people are running and mountain biking, lifting weights, doing yoga.

(03:11):
I saw a guy balancing on a tight rope the
other day. There are fancy gyms that cater to adult
clients all around US. Gold's gym, Planet Fitness l a
fitness title boxing that the list goes on. But this
dedication to being physically fit as an adult, this is
a relatively new phenomenon in American history. Yeah, we talked

(03:33):
a while ago about how physical educators they promoted the
idea that children needed to exercise in play games. At
the turn of the twentieth century, this was known as
the Gospel of play. And we talked more recently about how,
in the context of the Cold War and winning the
Metal Count against the Soviets, physical fitness for school children
it was promoted as a patriotic necessity. But what was

(03:57):
happening at the National Mall in night this was different.
Those were adults who were dedicating themselves to the idea
they needed to be fit, and they were telling other
adults that they needed to get in shape as well.
And in retrospect, I think this was the beginning of
a fitness boom or or a fitness craze in this nation,

(04:19):
a boom or a craze that we are still living through.
So today, let's kind of trace the contours of this
fitness boom, this emerging dedication to adult fitness in this era.
We've reached the nineteen seventies in this course, and that's
why I'm doing this lecture now, because it's in the
nineteen seventies that the modern American fitness boom really began.

(04:42):
And what I want to do today is try to
figure out why why did Americans start working out in
this decade. So let's intellectualize exercise. Let's think deeply about sweat.
That sounds weird, I know, but let's give it a shot. Alright.
The first thing to say here is that the push
for physical fitness among adult Americans it has its root

(05:06):
in a perceived physical fitness crisis. In the nineteen fifties,
doctors were warning that Americans were unfit now chalk this
up as a what we call now a first world problem,
because the general lack of fitness among Americans was the
result of growing comfort and and ease and material affluents

(05:30):
in the United States after World War Two, especially in
the suburbs. In the suburbs, men drove their cars from
their garages to the train station and then rode the
train to work, you know, sitting for two hours a day.
Then they sat nine hours a day in their offices.
Suburban women they drove their automobiles to the grocery store

(05:50):
and then back. And modern appliances certainly made house were easier.
This was all good. This was all easy, that was
the point. But it was not good for one's physical fitness.
There was nothing especially physical or strength with about modern
suburban life. And American doctors started to realize, we have
a problem on our hands. And I think that this

(06:13):
is revealing. When doctors and cultural commentators worried about the
lack of fitness among men and women in the suburbs,
they focused on different parts of the body for each
For men, the concern was about their hearts. American doctors
in the late nineteen fifties they observed a rise in

(06:35):
the number of heart attacks among American men. They declared
that there was a cardiac crisis in the United States.
There was a pretty famous ninety eight book called The
Decline of the American Male, and it explained the problem
succinctly like this. Take the suburban commuter lifestyle, adding some

(06:55):
heavy cigarette smoking in the three martini lunch, and of
course the long hours at the desk, and you have
a heart attack in the waiting. According to this book,
it was the wife's responsibility to make her husband healthier.
I mean, after all, her husband was ruining himself at
his job for her and the kids. Or at least

(07:16):
that was the argument American housewives. They were instructed of
the importance of the low cholesterol diet. They were told
to avoid fried foods and to feed their man fruits
and vegetables. And one of the things that I find
really interesting here is that the remedy that doctors were
proposing it was dieting. It wasn't really exercise that comes later.

(07:41):
You know, most adult men in the nineteen fifties, they
just did not give much thought to to exercise. It
was grooming a well shaved face and slicked back hair.
These were the important physical qualities. I think this is
one of the things that the show mad Men got
so right about this era. If you've seen it, the

(08:02):
main character Don Draper, he sped is a lot of
time combing his hair, but we never once saw him exercise.
The concern for women in this era was not the heart. Instead,
the emphasis was on her appearance, and in particular, the
focus was on her waistline. In his best selling book

(08:26):
The Overweight Society, Peter Widen warned the American housewife that
she needed to get thin, and that was the buzzword
of the era. Thinness. You need to get thin and
regain your honeymoon figure. Your husband wants you thin. He
wants you to look exactly the way you did on

(08:46):
your honeymoon back when you were twenty one years old.
I mean, talk about an impossible task. And the way
to get thin, he said, was by eating less more
than any suggested exercise regimen. Women's fitness was wrapped up
in the idea that women just needed to eat less
and get thinner. Fashion magazines they told American women that

(09:11):
the goal was twiggy that wayfish it model of the
nineteen sixties. I mean, never mind that a woman would
have to almost kill herself through calorie depletion to look
like Twiggy, the very thin honeymoon figure. That was the goal.
All right, I did that part quickly. But with all
we have talked about in our course regarding gender, it

(09:32):
should come as no surprise that fitness for men and
fitness for women meant different things. For men, it was
about inner health the heart. For women, it was about appearance.
It was about thinning down and looking good for her man.
But there's a class component here as well. Let me

(09:53):
point out the middle classness of these concerns that I
just outlined. You know, the soft sedentary lifestyle was not
the concern of the garbage man in Pittsburgh or the
domestic work in Mississippi. Now, the figure around which the
physical fitness crisis orbited it was the middle class, suburban American.

(10:14):
And it's middle class Americans, with their abundance of leisure time,
who are going to be the foot soldiers of the
exercise boom in the nineteen seventies. In the nineteen seventies,
more and more adult Americans start exercising, and it's in
this decade that we get the rise of what one
historian calls the new strenuosity adult Americans exercising strenuously. The

(10:44):
guru of the new strenuosity was Dr Kenneth Cooper, a
former Air Force surgeon General. In nineteen sixty eight, he
published a simple but very influential book titled Aerobics. It
was Dr Cooper who introduced Americans to the idea of
aerobic exercise, which is the idea that you need us

(11:04):
a stained, elevated heart rate for true physical fitness. Aerobic
exercise will do it all. He said. It will reduce fat,
tone muscles, it will strengthen the heart, It will make
you healthy on the inside and look good on the outside.
And the Americans ran with this idea, get it. They

(11:26):
took his ideas to heart. All right, I'm on a roll.
The new strenuosity is clearly a response to the physical
fitness crisis of the preceding decades. But let's dig deeper here,
because we might also think of the new strenuosity as
a reaction to larger social and political issues from the

(11:47):
nineteen sixties and the early nineteen seventies. And here's what
I mean. Let me begin with a comparison. The most
direct predecessor to this new interest in exercise and physical
fitness was Teddy Roosevelt's call for the strenuous life. At
the turn of the twenty a century. We talked about
this how vigorous and robust physical activity. It was being

(12:11):
promoted as a way to transform young men into the
leaders of tomorrow. So the goal of Teddy roosevelt strenuous life,
it was social because the goal was to invigorate oneself
in the name of preparing oneself for national leadership. You know,
young men need to engage in these strenuous activities and

(12:32):
then the whole nation will benefit later from their leadership.
But there was no such civic mindedness to the new strenuosity.
With the new strenuosity, the focus was entirely on the self.
The focus was on the individual and not society. And

(12:52):
here's the argument that I find these ideas fascinating. The
argument goes like this. In the nineteen sixties, young people, well,
they had very serious goals to work towards your racial
justice and the oftl rights movement, or ending the war
in Vietnam, or pushing for feminist legislation. But now here
it was the men in late nineteen seventies, and for

(13:15):
many Americans, this was a time of disillusionment. You know,
civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.
They had been assassinated in ninety The Vietnam War had
been a long, draining tenure, bloody mess. Watergates had exposed
the corruptness of the political system. The Equal Rights for

(13:37):
Women Amendment it had gone down to defeat. And so
in response, frustrated and disillusioned Americans they turned away from
civic engagement and the public and instead they turned inward
toward the self. They had learned a lesson. All Right,

(13:57):
maybe I can't make society perfect or even make it better,
but I know I can perfect or better the self.
I can perfect or better my body because I have
control over that. That's the theory. One historian of the
nineteen seventies get named Christopher lash He called this turn

(14:19):
inward the culture of narcissism, though I've always thought that
was too harsh of a designation. I prefer how Tom
Wolfe described it. He called the nineteen seventies the me decade.
It was a decade when a generation of Americans, he said,
they tried to distance themselves from the larger troubles of

(14:40):
the era, and they turned inward. They sought personal satisfaction
and well being in their own lives. This turn inward
and searching it took many forms. This is one Americans
began reading self help books. They began attending motivational seminars.
This is when Americans turned to Eastern religions and began

(15:03):
practicing forms of bodily arts like yoga. It was in
the nineteen seventies that Americans began through hiking on the
Appalachian Trail. You know, the first person to ever hike
the entire two thousand and eight one mile trail, he
had done it way back in His name was Earl Schaffer,
and he was a World War Two veteran, and he

(15:24):
said he hiked it to quote, walk the army out
of my system. Well, in the nineteen seventies, thousands of
Americans did it for the same general reason. It was
an escape. It was a disconnection from the troubles of
the world. It was a strenuous form of physical therapy

(15:47):
after the break jogging, just do it. But the most

(16:07):
popular manifestation of this turning inward and and improving the
self through exercise in this era was jogging. The running craze,
or the jogging boom, whenever we want to call it.
It began in the nineteen seventies, and it was spurred
by a few things. It was partly the result of
a book talking a lot about books today, in nineteen

(16:31):
sixty seven, Bill Bowerman. He published a slim book titled
Very Simply Jogging. Bowerman was a cardiologist and the track
coach at the University of Oregon, and he urged Americans
to take up jogging, non competitive running. Said take it
up as a way to combat the cardiac crisis of
the era. Bouerman is going to go on to also

(16:53):
be one of the founders of Nike at that story
as a few lectures from now. The jogging boom was
fueled by the successes of a few American distance runners.
At the nineteen seventy two Unich Olympics, Americans were treated
to an amazing performance by the Yale graduate Frank Shorter,
who came from far behind in the pack to win

(17:13):
the gold. Frank Shorter would be exceeded in popularity by
a long haired, mustachio University of Oregon runner named Steve Prefontaine.
They called him pre and pre like to say that
running was not about talent, it was about guts. Prefontaine
died at the height of his career in an automobile accident.

(17:36):
He was just twenty five years old, and like the
young musicians Jimmy Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janice Joplin,
pre gained semi mythical status after his death. But more
than the call coming from Bill Bowerman or or the
success of elite American runners, I think the jogging boom

(17:58):
was spurred by the simple fact that jogging offered salvation
to many Americans. Jogging was a different kind of physical
activity on many levels. It was non competitive. In order
to win at jogging, one only has to get off
the couch and just do it. And hey, that's a

(18:19):
good phrase. Just do it some some sports market or
how to use that one. So the jogger is in
total control of their craft. And to go back to
my point about exercise as a retreat from society, I
think this idea of control is really important. Yeah, the
seventies were tough. There there's a sharp economic downturn in

(18:42):
the nineties seventies. People were losing their jobs as factories
were shipping them overseas, the jobs, not the people. There
was rising unemployment. Americans were stuck in lengthy lines for gasoline.
The American hostages were stuck in Iran. But jogging gave
many Americans a sense of control over their own lives,

(19:05):
a feeling of control that they lacked in the nineteen seventies.
So that's the argument. Americans felt as if they lacked
control over their own lives. They felt like they lacked
the ability to transform American society. But these new strenuous
activities like jogging, it gave them the feeling of control.

(19:27):
It gave them transformative power over their bodies. And so
Americans engaged in strenuous activities, you know, the the the
emphasis on strenuous exercise and reshaping the body. It would
of course continue in the nineteen eighties, but the desire

(19:48):
to reshape and perfect the body would take different forms
in that decade. It's in the nineteen eighties that we
see a shift in the exercise regimens of many American men,
for example, a shift away from aerobic exercising like jogging,
in a move towards anaerobic pastimes like weightlifting, anaerobic, meaning

(20:10):
basically muscle building. It's in the nineteen eighties that the
very muscular physique starts to be viewed as the ideal
American body, and I mean very muscular. Dolph Lungren, Carl Weathers,
still Vester Stallone. The new fad was pumping iron and

(20:30):
getting buffed. One of the inspirations for this shift may
have been the president of the United States for most
of the nineteen eighties, Ronald Reagan. When he took office
in Ronald Reagan was well at the time the oldest
man to become president. But despite his age, it was

(20:51):
Ronald Reagan who masterfully used interest in physical fitness for
political gain. Photos of Reagan lifting barbells, working out on
nautilus machines, throwing footballs in the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan
riding a horse, Ronald Reagan getting all badass with a chainsaw.

(21:11):
These photos were everywhere during the early years of his presidency,
and Ronald Reagan promoted the idea of a strong, rejuvenated,
hyper competitive America. He was much more militaristic than his
immediate predecessors. He dramatically built up America's nuclear weaponry and

(21:33):
so the argument that cultural historians make is that there's
a link. Just as Reagan was flexing America's muscle and
building up its arms, it's arsenal, many American men were
inspired to build up and flex their arms and muscles
as well. I just think it's a fascinating thought. Um

(21:56):
maybe it's true, or maybe we all just wanted to
look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know who, by the way,
translated that hulking physique of his into political power and
the governorship of California. For women in the nineteen eighties,
the number one exercise fad was aerobics aerobicizing. There were

(22:17):
exercise videos coming from TV and movie stars like Victoria
Principle of Dallas and Jane Fonda. Jane Fonda's workout videos
were immensely popular, and there was a very interesting argument
out there about aerobics. Now, some American women celebrated aerobics

(22:37):
as liberating. They emphasized the idea that women sweating and
engaging in this strenuous form of exercise it's a very
important means towards physical health and greater self confidence. But
at the same time, there were some feminists who were
troubled by the aerobics fad. They had worked to get
title nine passed and have it applied to competitive sports

(23:01):
in the United States, and now, all of a sudden
in the nineteen eighties there seemed to be a shift
away from competitive sports and are exercising in the name
of building character, and a shift toward exercising to look
good and more than that as they feared exercising in
the name of being more sexually alluring. Yeah, there's all

(23:25):
these pieces of evidence we could point to here. You
actually saw this shift in Barbie dolls. In the mid
nineteen seventies. The most popular Barbie doll was gold Medal Barbie,
a female Olympic athlete who had won a gold medal
in competitive scheme. But the most popular Barbie in the
mid nineteen eighties it was Great Shape Barbie, an aerobics instructor,

(23:50):
decked out in a spandex leotard and leg warmers. The
critics said that aerobics emphasized passive femininity. They said, but
first of all, like with the Honeymoon figure of the
nineteen fifes, aerobics emphasizes a body ideal that is just unattainable.

(24:10):
Although at least this was attempted through exercise and not starvation.
But mainly they bemoaned the fact that women seem to
be aerobicizing in hopes of making their body more appealing
to men. So they said, it's not exercise for the self,
it's exercise for the male gaze. The athletic female was

(24:33):
becoming a sexual and sexualized object. Look whatever you think
of the argument, no doubt about it. There were a
bunch of videos and movies from the nineteen eighties that
equated women exercising with sex. Oh chief, there was Olivia
Newton John's song and music video Let's Get Physical, a

(24:54):
song that explicitly links the gym with for play. She
is exercising now, she says in this song, in the
name of getting horizontal later. I mean that's her lie.
There was movie Perfect, starring Jamie Lee Curtis as a
hotshot aerobics instructor. John Travolta was one of her students,

(25:15):
and the title Perfect is revealing, like with the smash
hit from the era, the movie ten, in which Bo
Derek jogs, whether it's jogging she jogs down the beach
in her swimsuit. The idea here is that the goal
of exercise is female physical perfection. Critics said, sports and

(25:37):
exercise are not supposed to be about achieving some level
of physical perfection. They're supposed to be about building character,
just getting healthy and doing your best. But American culture
made it about beauty and sex. Once again, agree, disagree.
I find these ideas fascinating. But the eighties were still

(26:01):
to come. So let's end like this. Let's go back
to the end of the nineteen of these and wrap
up with the story of one more jogging politician. Back
in the sixties, joggers were seen as odd balls at worst,
kind of health freaks at best, kind of like vegetarians
used to be seen. But by the late nineteen seventies,

(26:22):
jogging had gone totally mainstream. It was an American craze,
you know. In nineteen seventy seven, the TV celebrities Lee Majors,
the six Million Dollar Man, my personal hero of that era,
and Farah Fawcett, one of Charlie's angels. I may have
had her poster on my wall. They appeared together on
the cover of People magazine jogging with the headline Farah

(26:45):
and Lee and Everybody's Doing It. Stars joined the jogging craze,
but the nation's most famous jogger in this era was
the President of the United States, Jimmy Carter. And Jimmy
Carter had a complicated relationship to the pastime of jogging.
Carter's public syst like the boast of his jogging skills.

(27:07):
They told the press every week the number of miles
that Carter had jogged, and we learned that the president
he could run a sub six thirty mile. We learned
that through jogging, Carter had reduced his weight from a
hundred and fifty seven to one forty nine pounds, his
resting pulse rate had been lowered from sixty to forty
beats per minute. All this was announced to the press

(27:30):
because Jimmy Carter's publicists were making the argument that because
Jimmy Carter was physically fit, he was fit to rule
the nation. Presidents make this argument using sports all the time,
but this jogging propaganda it came back to haunt Jimmy Carter.
In v nine, while at the presidential retreat at Camp David,

(27:53):
Jimmy Carter participated in in a local ten k run
right six point two miles, and the press was invited
to tag along and see their physically fit president to
his thing. It was a he steep and hilly course,
and it was a humid day. And at the four
mile mark, the president became dehydrated, His legs wobbled, his

(28:15):
his face drained of color, and he sagged helplessly into
the arms of his aids. And photographers captured the entire
scene as Jimmy Carter was whisked into a car and
rushed back to Camp David. I mean, there was a
real fear that the President had suffered a heart attack.
Now Jimmy Carter quickly recovered, and in fact he handed

(28:37):
out trophies to the winners ninety minutes later, but the
damage had been done. Instead of Carter demonstrating his strenuosity,
many Americans saw his inability to complete the race as
a metaphor, a metaphor for, as they saw it, his
weak and ineffective leadership. I'm not here today to debate

(28:58):
Carter's presidency. I actually think he was a much better
president than most people give him credit for. But I
know one thing. Sagging helplessly into the arms of your aids.
That is not a good look for someone trying to
make the argument that because he's physically fit. He's fit
to rule the free world. That's all for now. Next

(29:20):
time on the Untold History of Sports in America, presented
by One Day University, The Wide World of Sports, School
of Humans,