Sport Fitness Culture

Sport|Fitness|Culture focuses on the influences of culture and society on human movement, such as sport, physical activity, and fitness. The text introduces and analyzes current issues of importance for those concerned with human movement and culture, whether it is in the context of teaching physical education, coordinating/ marketing sport and recreational programs, coaching or serving the general population – young and old – with any form of physical activity. Sport|Fitness|Culture incorporates interdisciplinary, cutting-edge work reflecting various research paradigms from these theoretical perspectives: sociology, psychology, history, philosophy, anthropology, gender and race studies and cultural studies. The fact that more and more people of all ages are participating in sport and physical activity means that serious attention must be paid to increasing awareness of the positive as well as the negative effects of such involvement. Indeed, sport has become a major socio-cultural factor in people’s lives. In the USA, there is hardly anyone who is not touched by this movement; however, people have very different experiences based on their cultural and socio-economic background, including gender, race/ethnicity, age, ability, as well as their sexual and religious orientations. This book will educate people about the importance of socio-cultural as well as psychological factors influencing people’s choices, opportunities, experiences and limitations in the domain of human movement.

Dealing with different aspects of movement, sports and physical activity, this text examines the effects such activities has on our culture and the benefits of participation.

Drawing on empirical research, this fascinating new book explores the embodied experiences of ‘gym goers’ and the fitness cultures that are constructed within gyms and fitness spaces. Gym Bodies offers a personal, interactive, ethnographic account of the multiplicity of contemporary gym practices, spaces and cultures, including bodybuilding, CrossFit and Spinning. It argues that gym bodies are historically constructed, social, sensual, emotional and political; that experience intersects with multiple embodied identities; and that fitness cultures are profoundly important in shaping the body in wider contemporary culture. This is important reading for students, tutors and researchers working in sport and exercise studies, sociology of the body, health studies, leisure, cultural studies, gender and education. It is also a valuable resource for policy makers and practitioners within the fields of sport, leisure, health and education.

This book provides a sociological perspective on fitness culture as developed in commercial gyms, investigating the cultural relevance of gyms in terms of the history of the commercialization of body discipline, the negotiation of gender identities and distinction dynamics within contemporary cultures of consumption.

From Charles Atlas to Jane Fonda, the fitness movement has been a driving force in American culture for more than half a century. What started as a means of Cold War preparedness now sees 45 million Americans spend more than $20 billion a year on gym memberships, running shoes, and other fitness-related products. In this first book on the modern history of exercise in America, Shelly McKenzie chronicles the governmental, scientific, commercial, and cultural forces that united-sometimes unintentionally--to make exercise an all-American habit. She tracks the development of a new industry that gentrified exercise and made the pursuit of fitness the hallmark of a middle-class lifestyle. Along the way she scrutinizes a number of widely held beliefs about Americans and their exercise routines, such as the link between diet and exercise and the importance of workplace fitness programs. While Americans have always been keen on cultivating health and fitness, before the 1950s people who were preoccupied with their health or physique were often suspected of being homosexual or simply odd. As McKenzie reveals, it took a national panic about children's health to galvanize the populace and launch President Eisenhower's Council on Youth Fitness. She traces this newborn era through TV trailblazer Jack La Lanne's popularization of fitness in the '60s, the jogging craze of the '70s, and the transformation of the fitness movement in the '80s, when the emphasis shifted from the individual act of running to the shared health-club experience. She also considers the new popularity of yoga and Pilates, reflecting today's emphasis on leanness and flexibility in body image. In providing the first real cultural history of the fitness movement, McKenzie goes beyond simply recounting exercise trends to reveal what these choices say about the people who embrace them. Her examination also encompasses battles over food politics, nutrition problems like our current obesity epidemic, and people left behind by the fitness movement because they are too poor to afford gym memberships or basic equipment. In a country where most of us claim to be regular exercisers, McKenzie's study challenges us to look at why we exercise-or at least why we think we should-and shows how fitness has become a vitally important part of our American identity.

Culture, Sport, and Physical Activity focuses on the influences of culture and society on human movement, such as sport, physical activity, and fitness. The text introduces and analyzes current issues of importance for those concerned with human movement and culture, whether it is in the context of teaching physical education, coordinating/ marketing sport and recreational programs, coaching or serving the general population - young and old - with any form of physical activity. Culture, Sport, and Physical Activity incorporates interdisciplinary, cutting-edge work reflecting various research p.

This book is about gym culture, the pursuit of fit, muscular bodies and the use of drugs as a means to get there. Building on the international research literature and in-depth interviews with men who have experience of image and performance enhancing drugs (IPEDs), the book explores the fascination with muscles, motivations for using drugs to enhance them, assessments of risks, and experience of side effects. The book examines what the altered body does to the men’s identity, self-image and relationships with peers and partners. Taking an evolutionary psychological approach, it also investigates the biological and psychological foundations of the fascination with the muscular body and discusses the notion of precarious manhood. Building on these analyses the book considers the political and regulatory initiatives in place to prevent the use of IPEDs and assesses those strategies’ potential to reach their aims. This is essential reading for anybody with an interest in the issue of drugs in sport, the ethics of sport, sociology of sport, sociology of the body, masculinity or public health.

2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title The moving body—pervasively occupied by fitness activities, intense training and dieting regimes, recreational practices, and high-profile sporting mega-events—holds a vital function in contemporary society. As the body moves—as it performs, sweats, runs, and jumps—it sets in motion an intricate web of scientific rationalities, spatial arrangements, corporate imperatives, and identity politics (i.e. politics of gender, race, social class, etc.). It represents vitality in its productive and physiological capacities, it drives a complex economy of experiences and products, and it is a meaningful site of cultural identities and politics. Contributors to Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body work from a simple premise: as it moves, the material body matters. Adding to the burgeoning fields of sport studies and body studies, the works featured here draw upon the traditions of feminist theory, posthumanism, actor network theory, and new materialism to reposition the physical, moving body as crucial to the cultural, political, environmental, and economic systems that it constitutes and within which is constituted. Once assembled, the book presents a study of bodies in motion—made to move in contexts where technique, performance, speed, strength, and vitality not only define the conduct therein, but provide the very reason for the body’s being within those economies and environments. In so doing, the contributors look to how the body moving for and about rational systems of science, medicine, markets, and geopolity shapes the social and material world in important and unexpected ways. In Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body, contributors explore the extent to which the body, when moving about both ostensibly active body spaces (i.e., the gymnasium, the ball field, exercise laboratory, the track or running trail, the beach, or the sport stadium) and those places less often connected to physical activity (i.e. the home, the street, the classroom, the automobile), is bounded to technologies of life and living; and to the political arrangements that seek to capitalize upon such frames of biological vitality. To do so, the authors problematize the rise of active body science (i.e. kinesiology, sport and exercise sciences, performance biotechnology) and the effects these scientific interventions have on embodied, lived experience. Contributors to Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body will be engaging a range of new and emerging theoretical perspectives, including new materialist, political ecology, developmental systems theory, and new material feminist approaches, to examine the actors and assemblages of movement-based material, political, and economic production. In so doing, contributors will vividly and powerfully illustrate the extent to which a focus on the fleshed body and its material conditions can bring forth new insights or ontological and epistemological innovation to the sociology of sport and physical activity. They will also explore the agency of the body as and amongst things. Such a performative materialist approach explicates how complex assemblages of sport and physical activity—bringing into association everything from muscle fibers and dietary proteins to stadium concrete or regional aquifers—are not only meaningful, but ecological. By focusing on the confluence of agentive materialities, disciplinary technologies, vibrant assemblages, speculative realities, and vital performativities, Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body promises to offer a groundbreaking departure from representationalist tendencies and orthodoxies brought about by the cultural turn in sport and physical cultural studies. It brings the moving body and its physics back into focus: recentering moving flesh and bones as locus of social order, environmental change, and the global political economy.