Fitness movement

The growing awareness and practice of exercise and healthy diets

Jogging and other forms of exercise became popular on a mass scale during the 1970s. New research in exercise physiology and preventive health helped to convince Americans of the need for daily maintenance of their bodies.

Americans learned that daily exercise was a major component of health during the 1970s, but as awareness of fitness grew, the role of exercise in American lives expanded beyond health concerns and encompassed recreational pastimes. As new forms of exercise were created, fitness became a full-fledged lifestyle as Americans gave new meaning to “working out.” With new forms of exercise available, the physical appearance of one’s body became more important: Visible musculature and thinness combined to create a new “fit” aesthetic.

Jogging

Jogging was arguably the most prominent fitness trend of the 1970s. Americans, inspired by exercise manuals published in the final two years of the 1960s, appeared on high school tracks and city sidewalks en masse during the decade. Most of those initially attracted to jogging in the first half of the decade took it up for reasons of health. Research by exercise physiologists and physicians, most notably Kenneth H. Cooper, had begun to point to the importance of cardiovascular training for disease prevention and weight maintenance. Jogging manuals also recognized that most Americans had little opportunity to engage in physical exercise in their adult years. Touted as a natural, inexpensive, go-anywhere form of exercise, jogging was popular almost instantly. By 1971, Cooper’s Aerobics (1968), which outlined a basic jogging plan, had sold two million copies.

Before research on the importance of cardiovascular training, most Americans had considered isometrics, calisthenics, tennis, golf, or team sports as appropriate forms of exercise. A number of factors differentiated jogging from other kinds of exercise that Americans had practiced prior to the 1970s. Taking up jogging did not mean simply beginning a new sport; because of its frequency (three times a week on average), starting a jogging program meant making a lifestyle change. Jogging was radically different from most sports because success was not defined in terms of wins and losses. Successful joggers were those who maintained a consistent routine, managing on a near-daily basis to choose movement over inertia. Length of time was the principal unit of measurement in jogging, with optimal health the ultimate goal; neither speed nor mileage was important in the pastime’s infancy.

By the mid-1970s, jogging—increasingly referred to as “running”—was part of the US fitness landscape. Road races, especially marathons, had increased in number of events and participants. The New York City Marathon, for example, expanded from almost three hundred participants in 1972 to more than eleven thousand competitors in 1979. Though the emphasis on racing would seem to belie the individual focus of running, most competitors took part to challenge themselves, rather than to be one of the top-ten competitors out of a field of thousands.

Included in these growing statistics were a large number of women, many of whom took up sports for the first time. The women’s movement coupled with Title IX—part of an act that focused on gender equality in sports opportunities within educational institutions—and jogging’s emphasis on health helped to change opinions that women were too modest to sweat. Popular beliefs that women’s bodies were not able to withstand long-distance running or that running was harmful for women’s anatomy were made obsolete as women ran in increasing numbers.

Americans found several reasons for running beyond the improvement of their health. While physical fitness was still part of the quest, many Americans engaged in running in the last half of the decade because they imbued it with political significance, class status, or spiritual healing or they made it a part of a project of self-improvement. In the midst of the gas crises and the environmental movement, some runners imagined their exercise as a way to get in touch with nature and prepare for a time when fossil fuels were depleted completely. Amid difficult economic times, running functioned as a way to exert some small measure of authority in one of the few areas where individuals still maintained a sense of control—their own bodies. Some mental health professionals even began to advocate running as a treatment for depression, alcoholism, or other mental health problems. Most runners, however, imagined running as a tool of self-improvement that allowed them to find small victories in mileage or speed increases.

Aerobic Dance

At the same time that the jogging movement was expanding, a number of individuals were working to combine principles of cardiovascular training with dance routines to create “aerobics.” Aerobic instructors, usually former dance teachers, choreographed to music dance routines designed to raise the heart rate significantly for an extended period of time.

Because most instructors were working independently, usually renting space in community rooms, school gymnasiums, or on military bases, little has been written on the early history of aerobics. The best known of this group of aerobics pioneers includes Judi Sheppard Missett, founder of Jazzercise, and Jacki Sorensen, founder of Aerobic Dancing and one of the first fitness instructors to publish a book of aerobics routines. Their work, and that of other early practitioners over the course of the 1970s, created a new form of exercise, increased awareness of physical fitness, and paved the way for aerobics to become one of the primary fitness activities of the following decade.

Bodybuilding and Workplace Programs

Pumping Iron, a 1974 book and 1977 film documentary about a group of bodybuilders preparing for the Mr. Olympia and Mr. Universe competitions, brought widespread attention to the sport of bodybuilding and weightlifting in gyms in general. Featuring a young Arnold Schwarzenegger, the film made it clear that bodies were malleable entities to be sculpted at will. The film created awareness of what had previously been a little-known subculture and made visible musculature a desired goal of many men and, later, women. Over the course of the 1970s growing awareness about weightlifting—a sport in which athletes compete to lift the most weight—and bodybuilding—a sport in which athletes compete for best-developed bodies and symmetrical musculature—helped to increase the popularity of gyms for average Americans.

Fitness programs in the workplace also came into existence in the 1970s. Originally targeted at male executives who were considered at risk for heart attacks, the programs were started after companies began to assess the financial costs of decreased productivity because of employee illness or death. Corporations such as Xerox and Pepsi installed workout and locker room facilities for employees, and more ambitious companies hired staff to teach nutrition and exercise and sponsored exercise incentive programs. Business publications such as Forbes and Business Week began to run articles on the fitness programs of top executives and politicians. These kinds of articles reinforced the perceived link between productivity and physical fitness. By the end of the decade, the media were reporting on overweight individuals who had difficulty finding employment because prospective employers imagined them to be lazy and not properly representative of the company’s image.

Diets

Concerns about diet and obesity had increased throughout the previous decade. Though a slender body had long been established as ideal for women, the 1970s saw the appearance of men’s bodies become equally important in their quest to find mates. The lean, lithe bodies created by physical regimens became the new ideal, as did the newly muscular bodies of gym aficionados. “Love handles,” “thunder thighs,” and paunches, once considered the natural result of a lifestyle of abundance, were now increasingly viewed as a mark of moral lassitude. Diets, particularly those created by physicians, were popular. The controversial low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, developed by Dr. Robert Atkins, was launched in 1972. Touted as an antidote to heart disease, the Pritikin program, which advocated whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and low fats, was launched in 1977 when it was featured on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) network’s 60 Minutes. The Scarsdale diet, another popular low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet, was introduced in 1978.

Impact

Part of the reason Americans paid so much attention to fitness in the 1970s was because they began hearing from medical professionals that their health was their own responsibility. Preventive medicine became important as studies increasingly revealed that obesity, high cholesterol, and stress were risk factors for many diseases. In addition, Americans were aware of changes in the medical profession and had come to doubt that doctors were the best caretakers of their health. Over the course of the decade, physician prestige fell as Americans began to sense that medicine was a business rather than a healing art. As a result, interest in alternative medicine, such as chiropody and acupuncture, rose dramatically. Exercise, perceived as a kind of self-care, was part of this shift.

Moreover, the federal government promoted the self-care message. With the nation’s economy in a tailspin and the health care system particularly in turmoil, preventive health programs, which included exercise, appeared to federal lawmakers to promise an easy solution to reduce costs. In 1976, Congress enacted the National Consumer Health Information and Health Promotion Act, which, among other things, allowed for funds to implement health maintenance programs. The surgeon general’s 1979 report Healthy People, which encouraged Americans to exercise as a way to cut federal health expenditures, was the culmination of a decade of exercise promotion that placed the burden of good health on the individual. The fitness movement had continued effects in the United States into the twenty-first century, with the number of private fitness clubs increasing from 3,000 in 1978 to nearly 20,000 in 2002, and gym memberships growing from less than 2 million in the early 1970s to more than 40 million in the early 2000s.

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