![]() | Feature: Healthy Living Move for Health | No.49 January 2007 |
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Abstract
The article explores the ambivalent relationship between the commercial
fitness industry and questions of health. While commercial fitness has
drawn support and legitimacy from the health field, it is poorly equipped
to address population health issues. The article draws from research on
the United States, where the commercialisation and individualisation of
physical culture and leisure are most marked; however, these are global
issues, just as obesity and inactivity are global problems. Using the
example of commercial exercise manuals, the article outlines the problematic
construction of fitness as an individualised consumer leisure activity,
which obscures the social roots of health problems and further entrenches
class-based stratification of health and health risks. Introduction
Over recent decades, many Western countries have experienced a strange
paradox, with sport, exercise and leisure industries expanding alongside
problems with inactivity and obesity. It thus bears asking how commercial
fitness relates to questions, definitions and problems of health. This
discussion draws from a larger body of research (Maguire, 2001, 2002,
2006, 2007) on the commercial fitness field in the United States (US),
where the pace and scope of the individualisation and commercialisation
of fitness have been most dramatic. However, the commercial provision
of fitness services is a global phenomenon. Bearing in mind that the
commercialisation of fitness (and associated declines in compulsory
physical education and public provision of recreation programs and facilities)
is mediated by local conditions—including sporting traditions,
patterns of state provision of leisure services, socio-economic stratification,
climate and patterns of urbanisation and commuting—it can be particularly
illuminating to study the US as an extreme example of the commercialisation
and individualisation of physical culture and leisure in consumer societies
around the world. It is important to set aside the commonplace assumption
that fitness is ‘good for us,’ in order to ask how commercial
fitness makes health more or less available for participants and non-participants.
As such, the article proceeds with an overview of the health context
of the commercial fitness field before using the example of exercise
manuals to illustrate how the construction of fitness poses challenges
for health outcomes. Commercial Fitness and the Context of Health
In the US, commercial exercise facilities and equipment have a history
that reaches back into the 19th century (Green, 1986), however, we can
locate the take-off of this most recent boom in the commercialisation
of fitness in the late 1970s. A complex matrix of historical and contemporary
social, economic and political factors contributed to this ‘fitness
boom,’ including a long-standing physical culture tradition that
wed physical fitness to notions of social and self-improvement and individual
responsibility; a well-developed consumer culture that emphasised the
display and improvement of the body; a service economy and occupational
market that required and rewarded particular forms of physical capital;
and, most broadly, an increasingly sedentary mode of life that meant
that physical activity was no longer an inadvertent part of everyday
activity for most people. Alongside these factors, the health field
has played a fundamental role in the development of contemporary commercial
fitness.
Since the 1970s, health promoters, insurers and policy
makers have focused on individual responsibility for taking up healthy,
active lifestyles, prompted in part by rising costs of chronic diseases
such as heart disease and cancer, and medical research on the health benefits
of exercise. Corporations also took a fiscal management view of exercise,
installing company fitness centres as a way to reduce health claims and
absenteeism (Crawford, 1979). At the same time, proponents of demedicalisation
emphasised how taking care of one’s own health through a balanced
diet, regular exercise, nutritional supplements and self-education were
ways to increase ‘medical self-competence’ (Crawford, 1980,
p. 374), thus reclaiming some control over health from medical experts.
The commercial fitness field thus benefited from calls for healthy living
from both ends of the political spectrum—top-down
attempts to manage population health and grass-roots attempts to reclaim
control over health care.
The development of commercial fitness is linked as much to health as
it is to disease. Advances in medical science, water provision and sanitation
have meant that communicable diseases, the major causes of death in
the 19th century, have been replaced by non-communicable diseases, which
accounted for 60 per cent of global deaths in 2001 (WHO, 2004). According
to the World Health Organization (2004), five of the major risk factors
for non-communicable diseases are closely linked to diet and exercise
— poor patterns of which give us global patterns of rising obesity
and inactivity. These are intertwined problems, giving rise to interconnected
agendas, including the WHO Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity
and Health (2004), the Move for Health program (WHO, 2002) and the UN’s
2005: Year of Sport and Physical Education campaign.
Thus, to understand the growth, success and limitations of commercial
fitness, it is important to understand the problems of obesity and inactivity.
Obesity and inactivity are global problems. Though linked in the media
and popular imagination with the developed world, obesity and inactivity
rates are rising across the globe, resulting in the co-existence of
problems of obesity and under-nutrition in some countries (WHO, 2000).
Global statistics on obesity are difficult to compare because of irregular
definitions of the surveyed population, the definition of obesity and
the survey periods. The most comprehensive study is the WHO MONICA (MONItoring
of trends and determinants in Cardiovascular diseases) Study that compares
specific cities from 48 different, but mostly European countries, and
shows that in all but one case, between 50 and 75 per cent of adults
were overweight or obese between 1983-1986 (WHO, 2003b), and that these
rates are increasing over time. In the past 10 years, European countries
have seen an increase of between 10 and 40 per cent (WHO, 2000); more
markedly, obesity rates in the US increased by two-thirds between 1960
and 1990, and increased another two-thirds over the 1990s alone (Farley
& Cohen, 2001). Despite similar problems with global measures of
inactivity, statistics are largely consistent, around the world, 60
to 85 per cent of adults are not physically active enough to achieve
any health benefits (WHO, 2002).
Significantly, obesity and inactivity are stratified by gender and
class (National Center for Health Statistics, 2005; WHO, 2000, 2002;
YWCA, 2001). Women have higher rates of obesity than men, men have higher
rates of overweight, and in both instances, rates of obesity increase
as socioeconomic class decreases. Similarly for inactivity: physical
inactivity is higher for women and girls, and worse in poor urban areas
(WHO, 2003a). Among other things, poverty means a lack of access to
safe recreation areas and high-quality, low-cost foods, which are contributing
factors in inactivity and obesity (Crister, 2000; WHO, 2000, 2002).
Socioeconomic class is not only about economic capital. Food and activity
choices reflect cultural and social capital as well (Bourdieu, 1984):
for example, having the knowledge of and preferences for certain activities
and foods such that the ‘healthy’ option takes on the appearance
of being the ‘natural’ preference rather than the difficult
choice. Rising socioeconomic levels on a population scale create the
conditions for obesity and inactivity—eating too much becomes
a possibility, rather than under-nourishment, while technology and urban
development make physical inactivity a likelihood for increasing portions
of the population. However, obesity and inactivity are then stratified
individually by class—choosing to be fit then becomes a sign of
status. Exercise Manuals and the Construction of Fitness
Despite the support drawn from the broader health field, commercial
fitness has an ambivalent relationship with health. Using the example
of commercial exercise manuals (see Maguire, 2002), let us consider
four ways in which the construction of fitness is problematic in terms
of health.
First, and most directly relevant to the issue of health, exercise
manuals use the health benefits of regular exercise as a tool for motivating
people to take up fitness. In an attempt to motivate readers to discipline
their leisure time appropriately and make time for fitness, manuals
construct fitness as a panacea for the ills, individual and collective,
of contemporary life: exercise is the means to reduce health risks,
improve energy levels, cope with stress, lose weight, improve appearance,
feel younger, and so forth. Fitness is constructed as a way to gain
control over one’s body and one’s impression on others,
and in service economies in which appearances count and physique is
a form of capital, fitness offers (potential) rewards with real economic
consequences. What is problematic about the construction of fitness
as a cure-all is that collective sources of risk (geopolitical instability,
pollution) and other risks beyond individual control (inherited predisposition
for diseases, accidents) are obscured by the focus on individual responsibility.
Although a sense of control over one’s life contributes to health
(Epstein, 1998), the form of control on offer in the fitness discourse
is inherently unstable and tenuous. Control over one’s life is
reduced to a command of the body, which is often disrupted by impositions
from a disorderly social world, highlighting the limits of the individual’s
control.
Second, exercise manuals naturalise the association of fitness with
one’s discretionary leisure time, and thus expenditure on fitness
with discretionary income. This is important in terms of the status
rewards possible through field participation, as leisure and lifestyle
choices are the primary stakes in competition for distinction and prestige
in consumer culture (Bourdieu, 1984). However, the cultural imaginary
of leisure poses two problems; one for the field, the other for health.
On the one hand, leisure is imagined as a time of relaxation, making
working out (a sweaty, strenuous activity even for those who intrinsically
enjoy it) a difficult ‘sell’ as a leisure pursuit, especially
in competition against other activities more in keeping with the consumer
culture ethos of instantaneous gratification. Thus, exercise manuals
attempt to educate readers to discipline their leisure time, applying
a work ethic of time schedules, appointments and efficiency to their
discretionary time in order to ‘fit in’ fitness. On the
other hand, leisure is imagined as a time of freedom, creativity and
control: a time to do with as one sees fit. The exercise manuals treat
as unquestioned common sense that time for exercise is to be found individually
during one’s leisure time, rather than through collective strategies
that challenge the nature of the working day or patterns of urban development
that discourage working in proximity to one’s residence (giving
rise to patterns of sedentary commuting).
Third, exercise manuals construct fitness as a leisure activity in
keeping with the broader cultural imaginary of fitness as a time of
fun and pleasure. However, there is a particularly narrow vision of
pleasure on offer in exercise manuals: exercise itself is not pleasurable;
the pleasure comes from the effect one’s fitter body has upon
others, or the satisfaction in having made ‘good’ use of
one’s leisure time. Fitness activities are rarely constructed
as enjoyable and as ends in themselves, but are instrumentally rationalised
as means to other ends: reduced health risks, improved social status
and so forth. Non-instrumental pleasure, however, is often present in
the narratives of fitness field participants, who may refer to feelings
of freedom, competence and strength in doing the activity itself (see
Maguire, 2007). With increasingly sedentary patterns of work and everyday
life, it is little wonder that fitness activities can offer intense
experiences of embodiment; what is striking is the relative absence
of emphasis on such benefits in the exercise manuals’ discourse.
In conjunction with the preceding themes, the fitness discourse tends
to prioritise control over the body over pleasure in the body, and instrumental
pleasure over spontaneous, non-directed play (Huizinga, 1955).
Fourth, exercise manuals construct fitness as a consuming activity.
Commercial exercise manuals, including those published from a public
health perspective, reproduce the message that participation in fitness
requires consumption: a pair of shoes; a membership in a health club;
the services of a personal trainer; a new piece of equipment. Furthermore,
exercise manuals often prescribe consumption-oriented goals as motivational
techniques, suggesting for example that the reader buy him/herself something
new (for their fitter body) once a certain benchmark is reached. This
highlights how the commercial fitness field functions as a web of consumption,
linking consumers to ever more consumption opportunities and requirements,
thereby aiding in the broader reproduction of consumer culture. The
fitness field’s discourse resolves the tension between the hedonism
of consumer culture and the inherent asceticism of exercise by linking
them as cause and effect: be disciplined and work out now, in order
to then engage in guilt-free shopping. This message, in addition to
serving as an engine for consumption, perpetuates the double bind of
indulgence and restraint characteristic of the contemporary era (Featherstone,
1982).
Commercial fitness has benefited from the health field: media attention
on the dire predictions and exercise prescriptions from health leaders,
direct referrals through physician-prescribed exercise, and scientific
findings on the benefits of exercise have all helped to reinforce the
fitness discourse’s construction of exercise as a panacea and
a morally good use of leisure time. However, commercial fitness is poorly
equipped to address the health problems that furnish it with legitimacy
and, indeed, a market. In constructing fitness as a cure-all to be located
strictly within leisure time and thus considered as a matter of individual
choice, control and consumption, exercise manuals present a vision of
fitness that obscures the deeply social roots of population health issues
such as inactivity and obesity. Is Fitness Good for Us?
When we take for granted that fitness is ‘good’ we fail
to question the vested interests and unintended consequences of the
particular way in which fitness is constructed and sold to us. Is fitness
good for us? For the majority, and in particular for those lower down
the socioeconomic ladder who are more likely to be inactive and overweight,
the answer is no, both because a lack of capital and suitable consumption
preferences make participation unlikely, and because the private provision
of fitness services facilitates the ongoing withdrawal of their public
provision. For a narrow band of people who have the means and taste
for participation, the answer is yes and no: commercial fitness provides
goods and services that may facilitate the accomplishment of regular
physical exercise, but in such a way that is deeply restrictive and
possibly self-defeating. The ‘lessons’ of the exercise manuals
include the promotion of an individualised notion of exercise, an instrumental
view of pleasure through exercise and the narrowing of the parameters
of participation to those provided by the consumer market.
Medical research continues to substantiate the role of regular exercise
in decreasing the risks of various diseases and ailments, including
arthritis pain, breast cancer, colon cancer, osteoporosis, stroke, Type
2 diabetes and congestive heart failure (Krupa, 2001; Hardman &
Stensel, 2003). To improve the health of the population, physical activity
has to be ingrained as part of everyday behaviour, it must become a
habit. Population inactivity and obesity stem in part from the decline,
in the US and the West more generally, of compulsory childhood physical
education (PE), a central element of institutional socialisation into
physical activity and the production of exercise as a habit. Into this
void has stepped the market, with a complex web of motivational goods
and services aimed at producing new, fit habits for adults. But such
motivation, flashy health club décor, inspiring stories in magazines,
an enthusiastic personal trainer, comes at a cost, and is marketed to
a middle-class market, reinforcing the economic and cultural capital
boundaries to participating in the fitness lifestyle. And although commercial
fitness has by and large addressed itself to adult consumers, this is
changing as declining PE and anxieties about childhood obesity create
a market for children-centred commercial fitness.
Childhood PE requires reinvestment and reinvention. PE’s focus
on competitive, performance-oriented sports has excluded many from participation
because of cultural backgrounds, body culture interests and physical
capacities. Hence, we not only see declining provision of PE, but also
declining participation of students, and especially young women (YWCA,
2001). At a more general level, schools need to be remade as healthy
environments, by, for example, removing the reliance on income from
vending machines and redesigning schools’ interiors, exteriors
and access routes to encourage physical exercise. At the most general,
and most fundamental, level, PE needs to counter the market’s
instrumental rationalisation of physical activity. The need for and
enjoyment of movement, of the body as a whole, is deeply embedded within
us, but this play element of culture is increasingly subsumed within
the rationalisation of movement (Huizinga, 1955). Government policy
makers, health workers and promoters, leisure and recreation professionals
and physical educationalists need to find ways to facilitate the play
ethos, on collective and individual bases.
The fat/fit paradox of the past three decades, in which fitness industries
have boomed alongside increasing rates of population inactivity and
obesity, can thus be understood as the rational outcome of addressing
a social problem with an individualised and commercialised solution.
The result is a further entrenchment of the existing class-based stratification
of health and health risks, and the rationalisation of health and exercise
as matters of appearance management and status consumption. Individual
sovereignty, so prized in consumer culture, is ‘healthy’
only insofar as it is accompanied by collective responsibility to tackle
social problems through collective solutions: for example, more funding
for public provision of recreation services accessible across class
divides; a commitment to the sort of urban planning that makes active
living the easy, not difficult choice; and compulsory childhood PE that
produces an appreciation of the joy of movement and the habit of physical
activity. References
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Contact
Dr. Jennifer Smith Maguire
Department of Media and Communication University of Leicester Leicester, United Kingdom jbs7@le.ac.uk ![]() http://www.icsspe.org/portal/index.php?w=1&z=5 |