Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is an historian by trade — and a gym rat by choice.
In her new book, she combines those loves. "Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession" traces the history of fitness in the Unites State, from a time when it was considered part of a circus act to today, where it’s a national obsession.
Petrzela talked about how her love of fitness later in life.
Full conversation
NATALIA MEHLMAN PETRZELA: I grew up basically horrified slash traumatized by anything physical, whether it was PE or it was organized sports, like, I either didn't want to do it or was humiliated when I had to. But what happened to me is in junior year of high school, so this is like about 1994, 1995, I saw that you could do an independent study in phys ed. And I was like, anything to get me out of the humiliation of that class. What that meant was either personal training or group fitness.
My parents were like, personal training is for rich people, but we belong to a community center that had step classes. So I walked in there like age 15,16, and for the first time in my life, I loved doing something physical. And that kind of set me on this journey of being really into the gym, like fitness, but not sports. And so long story short, like my lives were very separate. I pursued this very scholarly academic path, but I was always like working in gyms, working out.
And eventually I kind of like started asking the question I always ask as a historian of like, how did we get here? I started asking that of like gym culture. Why is there a gym on the corner of every affluent neighborhood? Like, why is it the pressure to exercise something so many people feel?
GILGER: That's really interesting. OK, so take us back in the history here because at one point in American history, no one exercised, right? This would have been odd, right?
PETRZELA: Yeah, definitely. So there was like in the 1890s, early 20th century, there was this whole culture of like strong men and strong women, and they were literally circus and freak show performers.
Like what was going on at that time is like for men, the idea that you would spend time working on your body, lifting weights, doing something that was not organized sports was really suspicious because it meant you were narcissistic. You like cared what your body looked like. You wanted to hang out in these like weird underground gymnasiums with other sweaty, scantily clad men. So there were all these suspicions that exercise made you like effeminate.
And then on the flip side, for women, there was this sense almost the opposite, that women that wanting to work out made you kind of masculine. Because what kind of woman would want to build muscles? There were these ideas that lasted a long time that doing any kind of rigorous weightlifting or certainly running would make your uterus fall out and compromise your fertility. And that, you know, sweating was seen as very unfeminine. And so you had both of those kind of like ideas operating across gender.
And then of course, at this time too, like, working with your body by choice was considered strange because that's what laborers did, right? If you could be leisured, that was more attractive. And at that time, fat bodies were considered more attractive. Rich people were fat because they could afford to sit around and eat caloric food.
GILGER: OK, so when did this shift? When was the first time in American history we saw people be encouraged to exercise?
PETRZELA: Yeah, so it's not like a sudden change, but a few big trends happen. So one is as America becomes more of a service economy, and you have a big boom in that in the 1920s and then in the 1950s, and then it kind of continues, people in the kind of middle and upper classes are sedentary. And so they actually have to start like creating time in their day to be physically active. And there's a lot of sort of like hand wringing about what that should look like and shouldn't, but that's kind of one big trend.
Another really big moment, and this is a moment that happens, is during the Cold War, first under President Eisenhower and then President Kennedy, there's this real anxiety that, like, the best of what America has to offer, which is leisure, its suburbs and cars and TV sets and frozen dinners. That's American capitalism at its best, but it's making Americans deconditioned, lazy and fat.
And so you have this first government kind of encouragement that if you want to be a good American, if you want to be fit enough to defend the United States, if the Cold War gets hot, you have got to, you know, get up and go exercise. And so you have both of those presidents like really putting the White House's muscle behind promoting physical fitness.
GILGER: OK, so you have to tell us about the chicken fat song.
PETRZELA: Yeah, OK. So when Eisenhower gets on board with doing this in the 1950s, you know, he was a general and the PE programs that he imagined were like very not fun. They were militaristic. They were for boys.
When Kennedy comes in, he's like a real poster boy for making fitness fun. Like he doesn't sort of quiet the Cold War rhetoric. It's still like pretty much, there's still a lot of fear-based talk, but what he does is he kind of tries to say like, this is not just for kids, this is for girls and boys and their parents and families, we should all get in on fitness. This is fun. This is part of a kind of aspirational lifestyle.
And one of the things he does is that he hires this famous songwriter to create this jingle, which is, it's brilliant because it's both super catchy, but it also has the instructions of a workout in it, so PE teachers could just put it on the phonograph, play, and kids could do it. And so it's about a 10-minute song. It's called Go You Chicken Fat Go. And it walks you through this kind of calisthenic workout with this very kind of like upbeat military style music.
[AUDIO CLIP]: “Touchdown every morning, 10 times, not just now and then. Give that chicken fat back to the chicken and don't be chicken again.”
PETRZELA: And interestingly, of course, Go You Chicken Fat Go is both about losing the flab that Kennedy said was part of, you know, soft Americans who were not exercising, but it's also about not being cowardly, right? Don't be a chicken. Go do your push-ups, like you can be a strong American. So yeah, OK.
GILGER: So then there seems to be another shift in the fitness world, kind of in the 1980s, because it just kind of explodes, right? Like I think of Jane Fonda, but I'm sure it was much bigger than that.
PETRZELA: Yeah, it was definitely much bigger than that. So yeah, even like between the kind of 1950s and 1960s and the 1980s, there was this really key period. And basically, what happens is that with that boost from the federal government of saying like, fitness is a good civic activity, fitness goes from being understood as this like narrowly physical activity, and therefore, kind of narcissistic, maybe detracting from more cerebral pursuits, but like very kind of constrained. It goes from that to being considered an integral part of like holistic health.
So by the time you get to the 1980s, the idea that mind and body are connected, you got to work on your body to be a fully actualized person, and it's your individual responsibility to do so. That’s really taken hold in the '60s and '70s kind of across the political spectrum.
By the time you get to the 1980s, a private industry has absolutely sprung up that is running with these ideas. And when I say running, I mean running, because the other big thing that happens in this period is that cardio becomes mainstreamed as exercise.
GILGER: So where do you think we are today, like in the, in the grand scope of exercise history?
PETRZELA: So we are an unfit nation by almost every measure. Only about 20% plus of Americans work out the recommended daily amount, and to me that is so tragic, especially because I think we all are pressured to exercise, right? And a lot of people, most people are not doing that. I think that we're in a moment where as divided as we are on so many issues, almost everybody agrees that exercise is good for you. And so what I would love to see is us as a nation getting behind that idea and actually funding the public infrastructure to make exercise more accessible.
