The golden age of exercise

Support for Explain It to Me comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

When you find yourself starting to slump in the afternoon, you need the right thing to revitalize you, like a beverage.

And not just any beverage.

Pure Leaf Iced Tea is real brewed tea made in a variety of bold, refreshing flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, have a Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

Time for a tea break, time for Pure Leaf.

Thumbtack presents Project Paralysis.

I was cornered.

Sweat gathered above my furrowed brow and my mind was racing.

I wondered who would be left standing when the droplets fell.

Me or the clawed sink.

Drain cleaner and pipe snake clenched in my weary fist.

I stepped toward the sink and then...

Wait, why am I stressing?

I have Thumbtack.

I can easily search for a top-rated plumber in the Bay Area, read reviews, and compare prices, all on the app.

Thumbtack knows homes.

Download the app today.

Huge emphasis on wanting to look thin.

A lot of dudes walking around with abs.

And, you know, I work out to feel strong and confident.

This is Explain It to Me from Fox, the show that tackles the questions that matter to you most.

I'm John Glenn 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.

Recently, 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.

And 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.

Take 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.

Okay, 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.

It'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 been.

I've never been, no.

How do you feel?

Are you excited, nervous?

I've done reformer Pilates.

I've done Matt and Florid 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.

Sell Core is a full-body workout on three.

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, but that what she loved most about Solid Core 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.

This is the unsustainable.

You're here for six, four seconds.

Return the full race out for three, two, and one.

Incredible.

I'm going to

during 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.

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.

When 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.

Hottie, 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%.

I spoke to a fitness instructor back in Austin named Carla Mae O'Connor.

Working with your strong tempo this year.

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?

Everybody 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.

We want the height of the bicep.

If I want...

I visited another spot in Austin called Correct Fitness, and I talked with the owner and CEO, Alex Earle.

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.

You 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.

Now, 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.

Support for Explain It to Me comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

Picture this.

You've been working hard all day, you had lunch not too long ago, and now your shoulders are starting to droop and your motivation is starting to tank.

We've all been there.

But the clock only reads 3 p.m.

And as much as you might want to call it a day, you still have a lot of stuff left to do.

Well, you can bounce back from that slump with a refreshing beverage in hand.

And you can take a real break, a tea break, with Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

Pure Leaf Iced Tea is real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

You can renew your mindset and your motivation so you can be ready to take on what's next and close out the day strong.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, have a Pure Leaf iced tea.

Time for a tea break, time for Pure Leaf.

I'm not switching my team to some fancy work platform that somehow knows exactly how we work.

And its AI features are literally saving us hours every day.

We're big fans.

And just like that, teams all around the world are falling for Monday.com.

With intuitive design, seamless AI capabilities, and custom workflows, it's the work platform your team will instantly click with.

Head to Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.

We'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 Reshaped the World.

But if we go back to the 20th century, that's a different story.

It 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.

So 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 Lelaine.

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 Great 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.

There was a lot of fear.

What?

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 the

life of leisure because heading into the 60s, people like Jacqueline, Bonnie Pruden were saying, no, no, no, no, no, it'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.

And

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.

There 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.

What 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.

The 70s was in many ways the decade of dance.

A chorus line was this huge Broadway hit.

You know, there was disco, there there was Saturday Night Fever.

We just watched the hair.

Dance was cool.

Like everyday Americans wanted to have good dance skills.

And

that helped to fuel the rise of aerobic dancing.

And at the time, it was 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 is this sort of thing though a sport or is it just sort of self-love men who 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 it was very articulate, he was kind of the 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,

she,

more than anyone who came before her, made exercise aspirational, especially for women.

Next, what happens to wellness when you put mind over matter?

Support for this show comes from Robinhood.

Wouldn't it be great to manage your portfolio on one platform?

With Robinhood, not only can you trade individual stocks and ETFs, you can also seamlessly buy and sell crypto at low costs.

Trade all in one place.

Get started now on Robinhood.

Trading crypto involves significant risk.

Crypto trading is offered through an account with Robinhood Crypto LLC.

Robinhood Crypto is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services.

Crypto held through Robinhood Crypto is not FDIC insured or SIPIC protected.

Investing involves risk, including loss of principal.

Securities trading is offered through an account with Robinhood Financial LLC, member SIPIC, a registered broker dealer.

As a founder, you're moving fast towards product market fit, your next round, or your first big enterprise deal.

But with AI accelerating how quickly startups build and ship, Security expectations are also coming in faster, and those expectations are higher than ever.

Getting security and compliance right can unlock growth or stall it if you wait too long.

Vanta is a trust management platform that helps businesses automate security and compliance across more than 35 frameworks like SOC2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more.

With deep integrations and automated workflows built for fast-moving teams, Vanta gets you audit ready fast and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring as your models, infrastructure, and customers evolve.

That's why fast-growing startups like Langchain, Ryder, and Cursor have all trusted Vanta to build a scalable compliance foundation from the start.

Go to Vanta.com/slash Fox to save $1,000 today through the Vanta for Startups program and join over 10,000 ambitious companies already scaling with Vanta.

That's V-A-N-T-A.com/slash Fox to save $1,000 for a limited time.

We're back.

This is Explain 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.

Inhale, one.

So by 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 Mwagdi 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.

A 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.

Exhaling it out.

Taking more deep breath in through the nose.

So 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?

It'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 breath work.

Why 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 breath work 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 breath work in those.

And also at the time, there was some reporting going around of people having sort of psychedelic experiences from doing breath work.

And so I was really curious about that.

I want to take a step back.

What is breath work?

Describe to us what it actually means.

So breath work 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.

A 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.

Ash it 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 breath work practitioners also kind of make a lot of the same promises that a lot of other wellness folks makes, 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?

Breathing exercises date very, very far back.

They're very ancient.

And I don't know that they were always considered sort of a cure-all, but

what I do think is really interesting is breathing exercises

sort of popped up around the globe.

So the ancient Greeks did it.

Ancient Greek athletes would do it to sort of help with performance.

In China, there are Qigong breathing exercises, which date back thousands and thousands of years.

So around the world, people very early on realized, oh, our breath can be a tool.

This is something we can use to our advantage.

I have to say, I feel a lot better after breathing personally.

Does it actually affect our health and well-being?

Is there science behind this?

Yeah, there's actually a...

lot of science behind it.

It's a pretty well-researched area, and there's a lot of findings that deep breathing can help reduce stress and lower our blood pressure and lower our cortisol levels, and that's our stress hormone in the body.

And some of how this works is our brain associates different breathing patterns with different mental and emotional states.

So, you know, when you're really stressed out, you tend to breathe pretty quickly and shallowly.

And when you're more relaxed, you breathe more deeply and slowly.

And so, what breath work can do is sort of reverse engineer that.

And so, say you're feeling really stressed.

If you start breathing very deeply, that activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your body's fight-or-flight response.

It lowers cortisol.

You're telling your body, I'm actually okay.

We don't need to be stressed.

See how I'm breathing slowly.

We're good.

So you started talking about the class and you know, we did those energetic breaths.

We're going to move to the two inhales through the nose,

exhale out through the mouth.

It sounds like this.

I didn't love that at first.

It really sort of like stressed me out.

Yeah, my chest was kind of like constricting.

I'm like, am I doing this wrong?

Why am I not?

Yeah.

And I think it's that, like, what we were talking about, where it's like, in part, just when you're taking quick breaths, there's something that gets triggered in your brain that's like, oh, am I stressed out?

Like, what's going on here?

I think that was part of it.

I felt like, I don't know about you, my nostrils got cold after a while.

Yes.

Okay.

My whole, like, my nostrils were cold.

The breath coming in felt cold.

I was cold.

I was like, did they change the temperature in here?

How did this happen?

I wouldn't say for me that was the most enjoyable, but I definitely felt my energy level rise.

And I also noticed that after when she let us release that breath and do sort of deeper breathing exercises, I felt like much calmer in the wake of that than I think if I had just gone straight into deep breathing.

I think sort of my favorite part might have been, you know, I love doing like three breaths in, four breaths out, like, or just, you know, taking a shorter breath in, a deeper one out like how did you feel doing those i love that you know a common practice with breath work is if your exhale is longer than your inhale that's very relaxing that's very calming so i'll try to do sort of like four

inhale for four exhale for six and i try to do that in my day-to-day life so i i love that that's great Well, I guess the question of all questions, would you do a breath work class again?

I've been thinking about this.

I might.

I also think though that breath work is one of those things where doing a class once in a while is great, but if you can find a way to integrate it into your day-to-day life, I think that's where you're going to see most of the benefits in terms of just being able to center yourself, being able to ground yourself.

And that's true of a lot of wellness practices.

Going to a class once in a while is great, but unless it's something that you integrate into how you move through the world,

there's limited value.

I ask you what your anxiety level is now.

Like, non-existent.

Amazing.

JQ?

Okay, before I was at a 3.75,

I think now I would put myself at a 1.25.

Oh.

Yeah.

I like the perception.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This episode was produced by Hadi Mwagdi, edited by our executive producer Miranda Kennedy with help from Nareen Khan.

It was fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch and engineered by Andrea Kristen's daughter.

Special thanks to the folks at A Warehouse for having us.

At Explain ItToMe, we love to answer your questions, but now we have one for you.

If you're currently a student at a state school or a small liberal arts college, NHBCU, maybe community college, give us a call.

What made you or your kid pick that school?

Was it because of the academics?

Maybe it's the football games.

Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545.

Explain it to me as part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

For more award-winning podcasts, visit podcast.voxmedia.com.

We're off next week because of the Labor Day holiday, but we'll see you back here in two weeks' time.

I'm your host, John Glenn Hill.

Bye.

Support for Explain It To Me comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

We only have so many minutes in our day.

So, when you need to take a minute to breathe, you can do it with a refreshing, revitalizing beverage in hand.

Pure Leaf Iced Tea is a real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

So, the next time you need to hit the reset button, have a Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

Time for a tea break?

Time for Pure Leaf.

Support for the show comes from Mercury.

What if banking did more?

Because to you, it's more than an invoice.

It's your hard work becoming revenue.

It's more than a wire.

It's payroll for your team.

It's more than a deposit.

It's landing your fundraise.

The truth is, banking can do more.

Mercury brings all the ways you use money into a single product that feels extraordinary to use.

Visit mercury.com to join over 200,000 entrepreneurs who use Mercury to do more for their business.

Mercury, banking that does more.