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!!!!’