Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World
The big picture: this crisis is amplifying concerns brick-and-mortar operators have been wrestling with in recent years. Mainly, will on-demand and connected fitness offerings poach their members?
Anthony Vennare • Will The Fitness Industry Ever Be The Same?
Okay, so exercise is paradoxical: salubrious but abnormal, intrinsically free but highly commodified, a source of pleasure and health but a cause of discomfort, guilt, and opprobrium. Why did this realization motivate me to write this book? And why might you wish to read it?
Daniel Lieberman • Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding
Fitness is a particularly compelling form of self-improvement because it demonstrates classic American values like productivity, individualism, and a commitment to meeting normative beauty standards.
Amanda Montell • Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
Attempting to be great at all things physical, most participants fail. Only those with the greatest genetic potential and tolerance for such intensity prevail. The trickle-down effect from this attitude is a change in perspective. Instead of exercising to improve health and fitness, merely completing an impossibly difficult workout is the goal.
Bill Hartman • ALL GAIN, NO PAIN: The Over-40 Man's Comeback Guide to Rebuild Your Body After Pain, Injury, or Physical Therapy
I may not be able to do much about grievous injustice in the world, at least not by myself or in very short order, but I can decide to increase the weight on the leg press machine by twenty pounds and achieve that within a few weeks. The gym, which once looked so alien and forbidding to me, became one of the few sites where I could reliably exert c
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