The golden age of exercise

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Speaker 3 Huge emphasis on wanting to look thin.

Speaker 2 A lot of dudes walking around with abs.

Speaker 4 And, you know, I work out to feel strong and confident.

Speaker 2 They'll help me.

Speaker 5 This is Explain It to Me from Fox, the show that tackles the questions that matter to you most. I'm John Glenn Hill.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Dozens of you called into the hotline to tell us about your relationship with making your body move.

Speaker 7 I do this thing called exertainment where I do one class and then I do another and another.

Speaker 7 not to lose weight per se but to be there for my daughter to be a role model in that regard.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 My whole relationship to exercise has changed and that has transformed my relationship to my entire life.

Speaker 5 Producer Hadi Mawagdi is back to tell us how exercise is changing in 2025.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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 i understand i i too had a membership at golds 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 uh The last category I mentioned, the budget-friendly gym, is actually the fastest-growing sector in the fitness industry.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 5 Okay, so budget-friendly gyms are the fastest-growing sector of the fitness industry. But what sector is the biggest right now?

Speaker 11 So these numbers come to us from an industry report, again, released last year from the Health and Fitness Association.

Speaker 11 And they say 23.1 million americans had a membership at a fitness studio at some point during the year of 2024.

Speaker 5 okay that is a ton of americans um 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

Speaker 21 I've never been, no.

Speaker 3 How do you feel? Are you excited, nervous?

Speaker 14 I've done reformer Pilates.

Speaker 21 I've done Matt and Floor Pilates.

Speaker 21 They all challenge me in a way that like traditional weightlifting or yoga does not.

Speaker 10 But yes, I'm nervous because their catchphrase is fail with us.

Speaker 20 Oh yeah, you're gonna fail.

Speaker 5 But the point is the failure because it's muscle failure.

Speaker 22 We're gonna start with Core. Elector is a full body workout on Frank Core.

Speaker 11 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...

Speaker 15 I loved how hard it was.

Speaker 3 I loved that the coaches didn't apologize for the intensity.

Speaker 15 And I loved like feeling myself grow. Like you can feel yourself growing, getting stronger like class by class.

Speaker 11 So with that in mind, we began our class. And honestly, it was pretty tough.
This is still tonight.

Speaker 22 You're here for six more seconds. Return the full rate out for three, two, and one.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 15 Oh boy, do I.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 17 When I started,

Speaker 5 I was 60 pounds heavier.

Speaker 23 I had upper body issues, muscular issues. It's been transformational.
I

Speaker 23 come almost every other day and it's just a part of my livelihood routine now.

Speaker 5 Hotty, that's really awesome. I think when you think of what you want to get out of exercise, it's everything she just said.

Speaker 11 100%.

Speaker 11 I spoke to a fitness instructor back in Austin named Carla Mae O'Connor.

Speaker 22 Working with your strong tempo this year.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 3 I think that cardio was so huge then, right? Everybody was focused on how many calories can I burn? How much can I sweat?

Speaker 11 Carla Mae says people working out today want different physical results from their workouts too.

Speaker 3 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 lose weight.
I want to be thinner.

Speaker 3 Now, when I talk to my clients, they say, I'm coming here because it's made me feel stronger.

Speaker 11 Strength, functionality, community, even improved mental health. These are the sorts of things clients say they want from fitness studios.

Speaker 24 Bodybuilders want the peak.

Speaker 1 We want the height of the bicep.

Speaker 11 If I want. I visited another spot in Austin called Correct Fitness, and I talked with the owner and CEO, Alex Earle.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 11 This gym is serious business. There are cold plunges, saunas, free weights, but also like heavy items that look like medieval weaponry.

Speaker 26 You know, we use steel maces and kettlebells and steel clubs.

Speaker 11 Alex says these memberships are definitely more expensive than a traditional big box gym.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 26 We do a workout on Friday called Fuck You Friday that has become insanely popular, but there's so much camaraderie.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 And that includes small group training classes too. So, honestly, Alex might be right.
This might be a pretty good deal.

Speaker 5 Okay, Hadi, thank you so much for helping us get a handle on how folks are exercising nowadays.

Speaker 11 Absolutely, JQ.

Speaker 5 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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Speaker 13 We're back.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 When it comes to exercise in 2025, we're kind of in a fitness golden age. Danielle Friedman says that's a real progression.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 31 Thanks very, very much for letting me come into your home. My name is Jack Lelaine.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 17 In the late 1950s, there were a few really popular TV fitness personalities.

Speaker 27 Host Great Nuts presents Bonnie Prudence.

Speaker 1 Want to take some off of here and possibly a little there?

Speaker 17 Need a part.

Speaker 1 Hands up.

Speaker 5 Twist. Twist.

Speaker 17 Who had to work really hard to convince the country that exercise,

Speaker 17 first of all, would not kill you. There was a lot of fear.

Speaker 19 What?

Speaker 17 Yeah, there was a lot more fear about overexertion than underexertion at the time.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 19 Okay, oh, yeah.

Speaker 17 And for women, exercise was seen as especially dangerous. There was a widespread belief strenuous exercise would make your uterus fall out.

Speaker 17 Muscles were seen as unseemly and unladylike beyond just the you know the life of leisure because heading into the 60s people like Jacqueline, Bonnie Pruden were saying,

Speaker 17 no, no, no, no, no, it's safe.

Speaker 6 You need to do it.

Speaker 17 And as people started following their lead and discovering that

Speaker 17 a regular exercise habit made them feel good, in some cases improved measures of health,

Speaker 17 slowly the cultural messaging began to take off.

Speaker 27 A push-up is a little little thing, but little things add up the way little words mount up to make important sentences.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 10 There is nothing, I think, more unfortunate than to have soft.

Speaker 21 Chubby, fat-looking children.

Speaker 17 So all of these cultural forces were sort of helping to shape what happened in the early 60s. And

Speaker 17 we started to see

Speaker 17 some of the first really early group fitness classes.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 What happened in the 70s?

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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

Speaker 17 were active and wanted to continue to be active. And there was also the birth of exercise science, which is huge.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 And in the 70s, we saw what we would now look at as like almost like the virality

Speaker 17 of

Speaker 17 so many workouts and and modes of exercise that laid the groundwork for how we move today.

Speaker 5 What are some of those exercises that laid the groundwork?

Speaker 17 Running or jogging.

Speaker 17 Before the early 70s,

Speaker 17 People who ran for fun and ran in public were really seen as kind of kooky.

Speaker 17 And they would sometimes like have cans thrown at them.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 It was in 1972 that for the first time women were officially allowed to enter the Boston Marathon.

Speaker 17 The 70s was in many ways the decade of dance.

Speaker 17 A chorus line was this huge Broadway hit. You know, there was disco, there was Saturday Night Fever.

Speaker 23 We just watched the hair.

Speaker 17 Dance was cool. Like everyday Americans wanted to have good dance skills.
And

Speaker 17 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,

Speaker 17 going to a jazzercise aerobics dance class was the first time that they had ever worked out as adults.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 11 Is this sort of thing though a sport or is it just sort of self-love?

Speaker 17 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,

Speaker 17 and

Speaker 17 he really

Speaker 17 not completely single-handedly, but almost helped to make bodybuilding and strength training aspirational in this country.

Speaker 17 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

Speaker 17 become kind of notorious for her anti-Vietnam War protests. So she was the first Hollywood celebrity also to become a fitness influencer.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 13 She,

Speaker 17 more than anyone who came before her, made exercise aspirational, especially for women.

Speaker 5 Next, what happens to wellness when we put mind over matter?

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Speaker 19 We're back.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 But now, we're going to explore a practice that's less about burning calories and more about the mind.

Speaker 2 Inhale

Speaker 4 So by taking a deep breath, undeniably, when you're moving energy, you're gonna feel that more aliveness.

Speaker 4 You're just gonna activate that part of your nervous system that's gonna allow you to feel more of you and more energy.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Right before we started class, Hadi asked us how we were feeling.

Speaker 24 I am feeling pretty tense right now.

Speaker 30 I'm coming down down from it.

Speaker 3 I've been running a little anxious lately, I will say.

Speaker 5 I've been a little high-strung lately.

Speaker 3 A lot of running around, a lot of just like, okay, what's next?

Speaker 5 Not great odds for relaxing, but we did our best.

Speaker 2 Just take a deep breath into the nose.

Speaker 2 Exhaling it out.

Speaker 2 Taking more, deep breath in through the nose.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 How much of that is true?

Speaker 35 You know, the hard thing about wellness is that a lot of the practices, there's a kernel of truth there.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 29 You know, I remember writing a story about lemon water at one point. And it's like, is is having a glass of lemon water in the morning good for you?

Speaker 34 It's probably fine.

Speaker 24 But people were making claims like this can, you know, reduce your cancer risk.

Speaker 6 And like, that's a really big claim.

Speaker 29 That's pretty dangerous.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's refreshing. It's delicious.
It's a great way to hydrate. But yeah, that's probably a bit much.

Speaker 35 Right.

Speaker 24 And I think the truth is that a lot of these things might make your life one or two percent better.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 29 So, I mean, for me, the best part of covering wellness is I love trying things.

Speaker 18 I love trying different classes, different trends.

Speaker 29 So, I'm always on the lookout for sort of what people are doing.

Speaker 24 And breath work was something I was a little familiar with.

Speaker 34 I've meditated and done yoga for years.

Speaker 29 And so I've done sort of little bits of breath work in those.

Speaker 29 And also at the time, there was some reporting going around of people having sort of psychedelic experiences from doing breath work.

Speaker 6 And so I was really curious about that.

Speaker 5 I want to take a step back. What is breath work? Describe to us what it actually means.

Speaker 35 So breath work is any,

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 One, two, three, four.

Speaker 29 You go.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Where did the idea come from that breathing exercises can be a little bit of a cure-all?

Speaker 34 Breathing exercises date very, very far back.

Speaker 20 They're very ancient.

Speaker 30 And I don't know that they were always considered sort of a cure-all, but

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 6 In China, there are Qigong breathing exercises, which date back thousands and thousands of years.

Speaker 30 So around the world, people very early on realized, oh, our breath can be a tool.

Speaker 29 This is something we can use to our advantage.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 6 Yeah, there's actually a lot of science behind it.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 35 And some of how this works is our brain associates different breathing patterns with different mental and emotional states.

Speaker 24 So, you know, when you're really stressed out, you tend to breathe pretty quickly and shallowly.

Speaker 35 And when you're more relaxed, you breathe more deeply and slowly.

Speaker 36 And so what breath work can do is sort of reverse engineer that.

Speaker 35 And so say you're feeling really stressed.

Speaker 18 If you start breathing very deeply, that activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your body's fight-or-flight response.

Speaker 36 It lowers cortisol.

Speaker 35 You're telling your body, I'm actually okay.

Speaker 24 We don't need to be stressed. See how I'm breathing slowly.

Speaker 37 We're good.

Speaker 5 So you started talking about the class and you know, we did those energetic breaths.

Speaker 22 We're going to move to the two inhales through the nose,

Speaker 22 exhale out through the mouth.

Speaker 17 It sounds like this.

Speaker 24 I didn't love that at first. It really sort of like stressed me out.

Speaker 5 Yeah, my chest was kind of like constricting. I'm like, am I doing this wrong?

Speaker 34 Why am I not?

Speaker 29 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?

Speaker 30 Like, what's going on here? I think that was part of it.

Speaker 19 I felt like, I don't know about you, my nostrils got cold after a while.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 35 I wouldn't say for me, that was the most enjoyable, but I definitely felt my energy level rise.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Like, how did you feel doing those?

Speaker 15 I love that.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 18 So I'll try to do sort of like four,

Speaker 38 inhale for four, exhale for six.

Speaker 34 And I try to do that in my day-to-day life.

Speaker 37 So I love that. That's great.

Speaker 5 Well, I guess the question of all questions, would you do a breath work class again?

Speaker 12 I've been thinking about this.

Speaker 20 I might.

Speaker 35 I also think, though, that breathwork is one of those things where doing a class once in a while is great.

Speaker 24 But if you can find a way

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 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,

Speaker 24 there's limited value.

Speaker 11 I ask you what your anxiety level is now.

Speaker 24 Like non-existent.

Speaker 22 Amazing.

Speaker 14 JQ?

Speaker 3 Okay, before I was at a 3.75,

Speaker 5 I think now I would put myself at a 1.25.

Speaker 20 Yeah, I like the percentage of that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah, yeah. This episode was produced by Hadi Mwagdi, edited by our executive producer Miranda Kennedy with help from Nareen Khan.

Speaker 5 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 ExplainItToMe, we love to answer your questions.

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Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 13 Bye.

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Speaker 39 Teams all across your business will be psyched to collaborate and create amazing presentations, videos, social posts, flyers, and more.

Speaker 39 Meet Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content. Learn more at adobe.com/slash express/slash business.