In particular, I have been interested to see how the ideologies and assumptions of the real-life, modern-day gym contrast with the 80s fantasy world to which, until now, my side-bends and sit-ups have been largely confined.

Ain’t got a motor in the back of her Honda

I wanted to start with a class. My local facility was offering a number of options for my preferred time of day: Spinning, Yoga, Body Attack and Body Pump. Spinning, of course, has long been a Cosmo-favourite, but it sounded a bit too terrifying for my tentative post-Christmas explorations, so I went for Body Pump because it’s on a Tuesday, and Tuesdays are good for me.

Like Body Attack, Body Pump originates with the New Zealand-based Les Mills workout group. I suppose I’d always known, objectively, that someone must make up these workouts, but I’d always vaguely assumed it was the class instructor, or the gym, or something. I certainly hadn’t realised there are whole organisations dedicated to churning them out – of which Les Mills is one. Body Pump was the first of their workouts to make it out of New Zealand and into Europe, which it did in the early-to-mid-90s. It’s now pretty much a young professional gym standard, along with the emerging new trend, PowerPlate (which claims to deal with cellulite, although what doesn’t [and what does?], frankly).

Never stray too far from the sidewalk

In addition to a kind of Cartesian ‘body/soul’ dualism in their choice of workout titles, Les Mills also has about them something of the cultish air that also characterises Jane Fonda’s seminal 1980s oeuvre. Seriously. They refer to ‘the Tribe’. They’ve declared ‘war on sedentary lifestyles’. And more:

We pride ourselves on being brave – the ones who turn up their sleeves when it comes to hard work. The ones that scream ‘hell yeah’ when the instructor barks ‘ten more’. Those who view sweat on their brows like a crown of achievement. The ones who don’t just step up, they turn it up, because they want results.

– Les Mills website

This is not what it is like.

Scary stuff. The almost-militarism of the Les Mills style plays out into the actual Body Pump workout, which is a weight training class accompanied by ‘chart-topping hits’ (well… ‘Because of You’). Its use of zeitgeisty-kinda music to drive you along aligns it with aerobics more generally, but with the 80s fitness craze in particular, which was similarly interwoven with pop culture, including the emergent disco culture (the seminal Saturday Night Fever, with its all-dancing star John Travolta, came out in 1977).

But Body Pump is no leotard-wearing 80s-style ‘jazzercise’ with instructors whose hair flows wild and impractically free (my school gym teacher used to make us use elastic bands as a punishment for forgetting proper hair ties) – and, unlike the films Jane Fonda made for housewives everywhere, Body Pump’s not, primarily, about women. Indeed, it was originally designed to ‘bring men into the aerobics room’, after the female-focused group exercise trends that preceded it. Whether former female dominance in said room was because women are known to prefer exercising in nice social groups (cos, you know, that’s how we go to the toilet and choose our clothes, isn’t it?), or because instructors were targeting women as particularly vulnerable to body fascism, is too big a question to address in whole here.

Godlike Odysseus

But certainly, the class I attend has a lot of Homeric-level male muscle in it (with added grunts). And indeed, the ‘tracks’ we listen to (officially chosen by the Les Mills group themselves, who rule over ALL THINGS, and presumably have some kind of Council of Trent-style semi-regular meeting to discuss such questions) – are generally of the ‘man-rock’ ilk (well, Kelly Clarkson aside). So sometimes we do staggered bicep curls in time to that bit in Eye of the Tiger. There’s even this bit where you lie on your back on the ‘bench’ (see, I’m down with the lingo) and do some ‘chest-reps’ with ‘barbells’ while listening to Smells Like Teen Spirit. [This is a bit I’m quite fond of because I like to pretend I’m in prison or something].

This is Sparta.

What I think is interesting here is that, while dear Jane made me feel like I was sharing in an essential female, slightly body-fascist sort of camaraderie (‘this is for the wibble-wobbles on the inner thighs… gonna burn them right off!’) – with a sense of shared understanding much akin to what you might experience in the disco toilets at 2am with mascara running down your face, only with more brutalist physical pain – Body Pump is more like that bit in Mulan where that guy who never wears a shirt trains the Chinese army (including the cross-dressing Mulan) in three minutes flat.

Indeed, whereas the 80s fitness dream was one of self-improvement and the drive for the Body Beautiful, Body Pump and the Les Mills ideology is actually more like a War on Fat, with concomitantly refigured notions of gender – men and women exercise side by side, with parallel physical goals.

The Eighties’ ‘woman’s world’ of VCR, suburban living room and dance-fitness (sexualised to an often ludicrous degree for the benefit of men) has changed to a kind of militant A-team dream. This probably has a lot to do with rising obesity levels in the population at large, making pursuit of exercise rather more of a general health priority than it once was, but since the original 80s fitness craze rose at much the same time as the rise of the disco one, I wonder if our exercise trends are still tangentially following our terpsichorean ones.

Indeed, one of the things I find particularly interesting is how this class – and actually the gym itself come to that – constructs itself around the idea of maenadic levels of adrenaline, but in a kind of nightclub context. I have to NB here that I go to a rather Executive gym chain, which to be honest is probably actually constructed in the 80s power-professional mould – there’s coloured strip-lighting and everyone’s wearing matchy-matchy black lycra …and thongs. (I mean, seriously, think about the physics of that. There will be squats.). In Spinning it goes literal, as the room is darkened and there’s pounding rave music (at 7am on a Monday morning).

So where does this leave us? Much of this may seem largely irrelevant, since the numbers of women who attend the gym (indeed, the numbers who can even afford it) are relatively small compared to the population at large. And yet! What happens in those harrowing halls may reflect some curious external trends.

And so into the Eighties…

During the Eighties, there was a Fitness Craze among the baby-boomers, who ‘from trying to improve society, [in the 60s and 70s…] turned to improving themselves‘. There can be no more evocative symbol of this than Jane Fonda and her striped leotard, although hers was a comparatively straight-edge style compared to some.  Let’s pause to take a look at the opening to Jane Fonda’s Workout (released in 1982). It looks a little bit like a dark and threatening Exercise Cult. Even the music is vaguely sinister:

It feels a bit like that to do the workout. Jane ain’t taking no crap, and the video is punctuated with whoops of enthusiasm and the occasional yelp of pain from her exercise minions – one of whom, Leslie, is even invited down front to sing Jane’s very own personal song, ‘Do It’. Leslie appeared in a few more of Fonda’s workout videos, unlike the the guy in the crop top who looks uncannily like Steve Carrell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. (Alas, there is no YouTube evidence that this guy ever existed, bar a fuzzy image in the video above, so the latter link – with its excellent headgear – will have to suffice.)

Go for the burn: Bess Motta's 'Aerobicise'

Speaking of that dude, I’ve never understood if the men in the back row are there as misguided eye candy while you sweat it out, or if they’re intended to demonstrate that the workout is suitable for all genders. Have a think about that one.

Do It Yourself

The ‘New Workout’ was the first of 23 workout videos Fonda released and, apparently, the best-selling home video ever made (17 million copies sold). It’s hardly surprising: the DIY formula was a seductive one for (in particular) many American baby-boomer housewives, who were just beginning to own the new and exciting VCR-machine. Indeed, this exercise-at-home option contrasts curiously with these housewives’ stereotypical Victorian counterparts, all inactivity, crinolines and restrictive corsets. Fashion follows money, so the trophy wives of the 1980s would be as likely to flaunt their husbands’ wealth with lycra, fitness gadgets and gyms as elegant laziness; keeping trim between cleaning the house and nuking something for dinner.

Another explanation is the quality of the workout itself: there’s a pleasing sense of female camaraderie on Jane’s workouts – she’s occasionally ironic, and consistently determined that you should smile while you do your umpteenth set of sit ups (I never knew it was possible for your abs to hurt post-workout, but I was ignorant). At peak moments she shouts ‘Come on! If I can do it, you can do it!’, apparently forgetting that she trained as a professional ballet dancer, whereas we, her viewers, are more likely to be professional slobs. She believes in you!

Running Wild

That said, she’s also MAD – look at the ‘cool down’ section of the ‘Advanced’ workout for evidence. Rumours that she was filming the video on a diet of espresso, ice cream and cocaine remain unconfirmed, but she’s certainly on some kind of drug, even if just adrenaline. She drives her mob onwards, onwards, always onwards, and I always think there’s something vaguely Maenadic about the hoots and howls of pain she elicits from her class.

However, looking at similar videos of the time it seems that such a frenzied approach to exercise was completely normal: in the Canadian TV series 20-Minute Workout (1983-4), the instructions are shouted out by Bess ‘Aerobics Queen’ Motta almost as parts of a ritualistic cowboy song. The overall effect is unsettling, if not completely hypnotic:

Here’s Bess again, in a slightly more extended Aerobicise opus (the original 1981 show, whence 20-Minute Workout was a spin-off). For some reason, at this point she seems to require two versions of herself to work out with simultaneously. It gets very weird from about 2:40 onwards, at which point the line between ‘exercise-at-home cardio workout’ and ‘strangely synchronised proto-American Apparel soft porn’ becomes blurred to say the very least:

Both these are filmed with a pizazz lacking in Jane Fonda’s no-nonsense camerawork and they perhaps explain why, though Bess may have been Aerobics Queen, Jane was the housewives’ favourite. These are so lacking in practicality that they’re almost music videos; and indeed there’s a ‘genuine’ Sexy Workout prototype to compare them with, in the shape of Olivia Newton-John’s 80s cult classic ‘(Let’s Get) Physical‘ (1981).

Here, with a crazed energy akin to Fonda’s – but a sexual energy that’s more Bess Motta – Olivia Newton-John stalks a gym in something suspiciously akin to a thong-leotard. She pushes fat blokes around until they become ripped blokes shining with sweat (who then walk off into the changing rooms hand-in-hand…) – yet, ironically, the video was set in a gym in order to pacify hand-wringers who found the title too sexual.

Thematically and choreographically, this is almost an inverted reworking of the song 1950s icon Jane Russell sings to the US Olympic team in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes:

I’m not in condition to wrestle
I’ve never trained in a gym
Show me a man who can nestle
And I’ll pin a medal on him

– Jane Russell, Ain’t there Anyone Here for Love? (1953)

Here, again, the woman is a kind of Exercise Divinity (note the Greek reference in the murals!), but not yet the Olivia NJ-style fitness dominatrix, just a sexy slavering (and physically passive) male muscle-fan.

The Maenads Today

Many modern exercise videos start from celebrity and work back (Kerry Katona, Davina McCall), but they seem to set out to strip their celebrity fitness instructors of all trace of the divine: Davina (whilst being instructed by a mysterious woman sitting cross-legged in full gym kit just behind her) howls at the exercises (‘They’re really hard!!’), while Katie Price/Jordan’s 2005 effort The Jordan Workout is full of ‘I’m shattered!’, although I somehow doubt working out was the main intention of this particular video, given what Jordan is wearing:

It’s interesting that the camaraderie is still there, but the star is no longer the instructor: instead, you’re ‘sharing’ the star’s expensive personal trainer for the price of a DVD. Perhaps as a result, whereas Jane and Bess are driving you on to ‘better yourself’ (we’ll leave the body fascism issue at the door for brevity’s sake), Jordan and Davina are much more prosaic about the whole thing. They even feel the need to give you a context for their workout: we learn that Jordan made her video because she wanted to be ‘back in her g-string and on the beach as Mrs Andre in just twelve weeks’. And look at how the sex appeal has changed: it’s gone from a kind of primordial Dionysian cult to a bit of a cheeky snigger at Jordan’s knickers.

Conclusions – well, there are strange intersections here between sexuality, female camaraderie and the drive towards fitness. Personally, I reckon Jane’s still the best – and let’s not forget she also has an excellent political record – but I will leave you with this video, made in 1983 by Debbie Reynolds (of Singin’ in the Rain fame): Do It Debbie’s Way.

Do It Debbie’s Way (1983).

The next time I’m fed up down the gym, I am going to fling the dumbbells down in disgust and flounce off, offering as explanation merely: ‘I spent years at MGM making musicals! This is the lousiest exercise I eveeeer haaaad!!!!’

For starters: I am overweight and I am not fucked up about it. Here are some of my thoughts on a lifetime of body-based bullshit – a lot of which I only started to realise and address when I joined a gym for the first time this year.

I’m going to focus on the body shape and exercise side of things here because food and loathing is in itself a subject which would take more word count to tackle than our lovely editor has time to read through. Suffice to say that due to being raised right I have always known how to eat healthily, and that ‘diet’ is a four letter word. I’ve sometimes felt a bit left out of the whole dumbass ‘detox fat flush carb starve blah blah fad’ being discussed around the water cooler, but I’m also profoundly grateful that self-hatred regarding food has never been my mother tongue. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not particularly confident about my body, but crucially it’s never been the main thing I measure my self-worth by. I can’t begin to express how grateful I am that I dodged that bullet.

I have always been overweight (to varying degrees), but I’ve also always been pretty active (my post-viral fatigue syndrome years notwithstanding). For the last few years I’ve been swimming around a mile a week (sometimes more), I do some yoga, and every couple of years I start working out for a bit. Often people do a double-take when they find out that I swim a lot. ‘But you’re a size 16. Does not compute!’ As Health at Every Size can tell you, fat and fit are not always a dichotomy, but nonetheless the cultural assumption is that a big person must be stationary.

However, since the beginning of November last year, I started exercising a lot (I’m unemployed and needed something to keep me busy) and as I started to ‘tune up’ physically I found myself – despite wanting to move up a gear to the next bit – really dragging my heels about ever moving the exercising out of the privacy of my room. I found myself looking up exercise tutorials on YouTube and then trying to figure out how to supplement the equipment they used with something I had lying around. (Water bottles filled with sand instead of weights because owning weights is for, y’know, them… and I’m not one of them.) However, at a certain point I realised that there weren’t many workarounds left for the machines I was genuinely craving a go on – I needed an actual real-life gym.

Swimming (like I say, my physical activity of choice) does involve wearing a swimsuit, but this is one activity I was raised with, and something about being submerged once you’re in, about not ever getting sweaty, about not having to make eye contact with anyone else, made me think of it as the exception to the ‘exercise is scary’ rule. Gyms remained terrifying to me.

Previously known only as the Valley of Horrors

I’d never been inside a gym before this year, and I was convinced that it would be stuffed with supermodel-beautiful people. I was sure the moment I walked in the music would stop playing and everyone would turn and stare like I’d walked into the wrong saloon in a bad western.

When I finally just bit the bullet and went, I was relieved to find out it was full of a range of shapes, sizes and ages, and I did fine on the machines. The guy who did the induction just talked me through how to use each machine, set a goal and left me to it. No hectoring, shouting, or close-ups on unflattering areas like they do on the TV.

I realised later it wasn’t my own performance I was worried about (I know I’m pretty fit these days – I barely got out of breath), but an internalised shame about being a larger person being seen doing exercise at all. I realised I saw exercise as a ‘thin person’ activity.

I get that if you’re aiming to get fitter, thinner or both, then a gym sure as hell helps, but still I was reluctant. It didn’t seem to make any sense – but then I realised: all the shame and embarrassment I was feeling wasn’t about me, it was a response to a lifetime of others’ assumptions. Experiences like being laughed at if I got pink-faced after running somewhere, or always being picked last for the teams in PE (despite being pretty good at football back then – fuck you, my Year 5 class), or a school bully cackling loudly when she overheard me say to a friend “yeah, sure, I’ll meet you after dance club”. My own abilities didn’t put me off exercise – other people’s (conscious and unconscious) group shaming did.

In fact, avoidance of embarrassment has been seen to be one of the largest factors inhibiting girls in the UK from doing PE. The WHO’s own study has noted that:

It is important to recognise the significance of girls’ early experiences of physical activity and it is often within the context of physical education lessons where understanding of individual sporting identity is developed … what were initially regarded as lesser concerns for school governing bodies, such as specific uniforms for physical education lessons and the standards of showering facilities were shown to be significant aspects in girls’ actual enjoyment of school sports.

[…] in sports there are many occasions where the body is literally displayed and this has the potential for the individual to be exposed to negative emotional experiences of shame and embarrassment.

Can I get an amen, sister? I’m writing this a few weeks away from my 26^th birthday, but I only very recently realised that I am still haunted by the memories of the Nelson Muntzs of my school years pointing, laughing or making bitchy comments.

Anyone who does any sports or goes to the gym will tell you: you will get sweaty – that’s how it works – but in my teens (and even before) how well you did at PE wasn’t half as important as avoiding the indignity of getting sweaty, red-faced or out of breath. As a chubbier kid, I was an even easier target for the standard crap.

In a world dominated by the RED CIRCLES OF SHAME from Heat magazine and the like – drawing attention to any perceived imperfections, sweat stains, funny creases and so on in even the most highly-regarded beautiful people – is it any wonder that the perceived embarrassment of getting hot, sweaty or out of breath is prohibitive to many people? The Surgeon General in the ‘States has drawn flak for suggesting that the extra haircare required might be a small contributing factor in putting many women off exercise, and in a world where a bad hair day for some celebrities can make it to the press, is it any wonder that the trickle-down effect has been to make ordinary women self-conscious about these things too?

Fat-shaming is not just a shitty way to treat people (duh) – it’s also utterly counter-productive. To be honest I only ever felt moderate embarrassment about my figure, but I felt acutely ashamed of my body in relation to exercise. I felt that because of my body shape, certain doors were closed to me. Ironically, most of those doors were ones that led to better fitness and possibly even changing my shape.

In an inverse-snobbery retaliation I’d decided that explicit, gym-type exercise was for horrible/vain/stupid people. When I started exercising, I started working through all the years of rubbish I’d accumulated in relation to physical activity – and my self-image has done far more of a reshape than my body has over the past three months (though the body’s coming along nicely, thanks for asking). While I’ve been really enjoying exercising under my own steam, I’ve also been exorcising the ghosts of schoolyards past.

Some of the things that kicked me into upping my exercise ante were finding friends of mine were into certain sports and realising that exercising was actually a pretty normal thing that pretty normal people do. Not everyone who goes to the gym is either a supermodel or a wanker. And some exercise can be pretty badass (I’m still looking for boxing lessons locally – I really want to hit things).

So, uh, morals. Well, the moral of the story is don’t be scared of new stuff, and if you are trying to get healthier then for God’s sake don’t worry about other people. You’re not at school anymore and no one gives a crap. That haw-haw Nelson Muntz kid from the playground isn’t here. They’re grown up, somewhere else, and would probably be embarrassed to remember they were that mean. That toned person sweating on the exercise bike next to you? They’re much more worried about their own abs than yours, and are probably mentally compiling shopping lists as they go. No one cares, and no one should be judging you anymore. This is about you and your body. You’re the one that gets to live in it.