A few years ago I spent a lot of time studying the history of exercise. I was looking for documentation to support my mantra that exercise is a natural, daily instinct equal to eating and sleeping.
It’s my assumption that primitive people ate, slept and exercised every day because survival offered no choice. And eventually, there was circle dancing and ritual for expression. But I wanted to find the point of separation from instinct of necessity to organized exercise and how it developed into the sport conditioning of exercise science that it is today.
It looked like ancient Greece was the place to start. Hippocrates equated good health and fitness with sport. Socrates was quoted as saying that the best dancer was also the best warrior. They were both right, but they should have included the Hellenic Choral Dances in their health and fitness statements because singing, and especially group singing with its muscular bonding is wonderful fitness activity.
Fast forward to the discovery and development of our country. In its beginnings the daily needs of the first inhabitants necessitated daily exercise for men and women alike – hunting and gathering food and providing shelter for themselves.
Keep following the time line to the machine age, which gave people more leisure, resulting in diagnoses of malaise and nervous disorders. And then there was the birth of “Physical Culture” at the turn of the l9th century, with a figurehead named Bernarr Macfadden, who saw the problems associated with inactivity.
On the surface, I think Macfadden could be identified as the one who started the activity of fitness in this country, and even though much of his work looks like sport conditioning today, it was inclusive of both sexes and strived to integrate it naturally into each day. I
especially call attention to his laughing exercise. He knew that laughter was part of general good health.
Then we got the radio exercise personalities, the specializations, the fads, the exercise scientists with their cadre of exercise addicts, and the whole bureaucracy of it (of which I have always been on the fringe).
I’d like to be able to repeat the truism that, “The more things change the more they stay the same,” and take comfort in the fact that people will eventually realize that exercise really is a natural, daily instinct, and satisfy that instinct with the variety of ways that are available to them.
