fit for purpose
Back in the day, you got fit in order to do something. Getting fit enabled you to run a marathon, swim the Channel, cycle to John O’Groats or whatever flicked your adventure switch. With many New Year resolutions probably focusing upon this particular condition, it begs the question, when did ‘fitness’ become a pastime in and of itself, an activity separated from any particular physical escapade, athletic endeavour or social aspiration? And when someone engages a fitness coach, personal trainer or gym instructor what exactly are they being trained for, instructed in and coached towards?
The word ‘fit’ first muscled its way into the vernacular as ‘fyt’ in the early 15th century, and referred to an individual being ‘appropriate’ and ‘well-suited’ to a particular task or position. When Shakespeare comments on Henry VIII’s new secretary, Gardiner, as a ‘fit fellow’ he is not admiring the man’s VO2 capacity or size of his guns. It took a further three hundred years for the word to acquire an athletic cache and, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the definition was applied solely to our four-legged horsey friends. Thereafter, Charles Darwin coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ in 1869, determining that organisms best adjusted to their environment were the most likely to survive and prosper. The term ‘fit’ finally became fashionable with bipeds on the turn of the 20th century when an expansive list of English idioms noted that if asked how one is, one may quite rightly reply “Very fit, thank you; never better”. It obviously helped if one were very posh.
Fitness as we now understand it became increasingly palatable during the next generation and by the time of World War One, the expression ‘keeping fit’ was in widespread use. However, the timing of this should be neither underestimated nor ignored. Author Jurgen Martschukat, in his ‘Age of Fitness’, explored the intentionally malevolent promotion of self-care and development of specifically, the white male body, as the response to the perceived threat to white supremacy within the US. The combination of peak ‘nature & nurture’ reached its truly shocking nadir in Nazi Germany’s Aryan race during World War Two.
Thankfully, moving away from any racial, nationalist context, fitness now sought a new suit of clothes and hit an increasing judgemental moral tone, ironically turning its ire to the now supposedly enfeebled body of the desk-bound white-collar male worker! Subsequently, the vast majority of fitness crazes, from jogging to spinning, martial arts to parkour were all largely targeted at middle-aged men and our sedentary lives. In the meantime, women had to make do with Jane Fonda and dieting before Pilates, yoga and Zumba brought them back into the game.
The current proliferation of activities, regimes, gadgets and devices means that almost everything we do impinges upon our fitness. Everyone appears to be knocking-back protein shakes, overdosing on vitamins, avoiding meat, counting their steps, obsessively monitoring their heart-rate, donning Lycra and competing on arduous Alpine climbs with the Peloton crowd. Not content with merely ‘beach-bod-ready’, the combative tone of boxercise, tough mudder, CrossFit and boot camps encourage their participants to think of themselves as modern-day heroes, veritable twenty-first century Olympians. Fitness is portrayed as a greater good, it becomes its own success and indicates a higher level of social principle.
In these exhausting times, slumping back on the sofa, hitting the Deliveroo speed-dial button and binging Breaking Bad, is perhaps a delicious act of individual counter-neoliberal resistance and I think I’ll ‘go-large’ on that!
