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Susan Best  There are no amount of health trends, from torturous candida diets to pre-packaged detox kits, and under this banner comes the ubiquitous fitness fad.
Once upon a time there was no such thing as fitness. A person either took a pleasant turn around the garden, known as a “constitutional”, or they got a sweat up as a working class stiff. At most, a noble man might have engaged in a little civilised sport such as cricket or fencing or a man of less means might go in for a spot of brawling or boxing. Francine Pavkovic has written a thesis, Puritanism and Punishment in Competitive Body Building, as part of a Sociology degree at the University of New South Wales. Francine says the shift over the last 200 years, from physical labour to sedentary labour, makes the need to supplement our physical activity almost vital. Hence the explosion of gym culture and other exercise fads.  The modern-day fitness fad did not come into its full glory until the 1980s when aerobics burst onto the scene, with Jane Fonda workout videos and Olivia Newtown-John singing about getting physical in leg warmers and sweat bands.
The early 90s brought the advent of the “boot camp” for those who enjoy a particularly punishing exercise routine. Boot camp work outs still thrive on the beaches of Australia and a site billing itself as the "Original Boot Camp" offers a variety of courses including corps training; platoon dynamics; special operations; seal pups; boot camp express; and the very tempting “hell week”. What exactly is the attraction of an exercise program called “hell week”, and what informs the obsessiveness with which many labour at the gym? Francine says that while disparate theories abound stemming from sociology, sports psychology and sports philosophy, her own opinion is informed by Marxism. “Gym culture is a construction of late capitalism so it is about the rationalisation of body and removing fat,” she says. “Fat is associated with idleness and that Calvinistic idea that idleness is the devil’s playground. While we are past that mind-set, there is now a religion that’s formed where we just train and remove all the idleness from our lives and the fat from our bodies in order to create a perfect state, not to be noticed by God above, but to be noticed by people around us. It’s about standing out from a mass.” Granted, not all fads are found in the gym. The 90s also heralded the yoga boom. Yoga, developed in India thousands of years ago, is a set of psycho-physical exercises with accompanying lifestyle rules that is both a spiritual practice and a means to holistic health. It gained popularity in the west during the 1960s and 70s but in the 90s yoga became the place to be seen, as countless Hollywood celebrities appeared in the pages of magazines carrying their yoga mat to and from class. Then came the rise of specialty yoga classes such as Ashtanga (power) yoga, a particularly rigorous form of yoga, and Bikram yoga, in which yoga postures are practiced in a heated room to increase cardiovascular action and calorie burning, and to encourage the elimination of toxins. Pilates, a non-aerobic form of exercise that improves flexibility, core strength, balance and body awareness, also grew in the hipness stakes throughout the '90s and '00s. A series of roughly 500 highly specific exercises inspired by callisthenics, yoga and ballet, Pilates was devised in the 1920s as a way to help athletes and dancers recover from injury and maintain peak fitness. It can be practiced on a mat or with equipment. Body building was for decades a kind of subculture, particularly popular with the gay community, but over the last couple of decades the gym has gone mainstream and it’s Grand Central Station for countless fads. We’ve seen step, spinning, kickboxing and fusion classes, such as yoga/dance fusion. Francine says trends come and go based on the human need for variety. “You do reach a boredom threshold,” she says. “It’s documented extensively. People do get bored with the same routine again and again so the trends remove people from that boredom threshold. It’s something different and you’re also working different muscles.” Fads may come and go and while some might find their ideal life-long workout, the bottom line is that the best gains are made when a person commits to an exercise routine that works for them over the long term. It is also a fact that lifestyle or health changes or the ageing process itself can require a re-think of even the most effective routines. But there can be no doubt about it. Regular exercise drastically improves quality of life, making a critical contribution to holistic health.
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