PIEN HUANG, HOST:
The fitness industry in the U.S. is big business. According to the latest numbers from the Health and Fitness Association, people in the U.S. are spending some $22 billion a year to sweat, dance and pump iron at the gym and in group fitness classes. But it wasn't that long ago that people thought exercise was kind of weird, and that shift can be tracked through a series of trends that took shape back in the 1970s. That's according to journalist Danielle Friedman. She recently wrote a piece in The New York Times about what she calls the decade that changed fitness forever. When we spoke, she explained why.
DANIELLE FRIEDMAN: Before 1972, for women - their access to sports and even to fitness spaces like gyms was really limited, but that started to change. There was the birth of exercise science. Just a few years earlier, a former Air Force physician had introduced the concept of aerobic exercise - what we would now call cardio - and suggested in a bestselling book that it was actually good for you to regularly and strategically stress your heart and lungs.
And there was also a shift toward self-improvement. The 1970s - the writer Tom Wolfe famously dubbed it the Me Decade. After the kind of activism of the '60s, Americans and baby boomers in particular were turning toward themselves, were sort of, in many cases, shifting away from trying to save the world to trying to improve themselves.
HUANG: Yeah. So for your piece in the Times, you do argue that there are five trends in particular that led to fitness becoming mainstream. And I want to talk about one of them to start with jazzercise (ph), which is, you know, kind of considered a punch line these days. And, like, remind us what jazzercise is and what made it so influential.
FRIEDMAN: Jazzercise is basically jazz dancing set to music. It was first created in 1969, and it really took off in the '70s. One of my favorite statistics is that by 1982, it was the country's second-fastest growing franchise behind Domino's Pizza.
(LAUGHTER)
FRIEDMAN: And one of the things that made it really special was that it attracted women who hadn't really ever exercised in their adult life. And so it was kind of like a gateway workout. A lot of women discovered that they actually loved how they felt when they sweat. It was safe because, at the time, there were still beliefs that vigorous exercise could make a woman's uterus fall out.
HUANG: (Laughter).
FRIEDMAN: And it really changed them. And then just on a practical level, jazzercise was responsible for a lot of firsts in the fitness industry that kind of created the blueprint for the modern group fitness class. It was one of the first workouts to offer babysitting so that moms with young children could take time to work out. Its instructors were the first to wear headset microphones. It was also one of the first fitness companies to go the franchise route, to allow instructors to open up their own jazzercise businesses and make a living. So it really was game-changing.
HUANG: Yeah. I mean, you know, thinking about these - this groundwork that you're talking about laying in the '70s and where fitness is today, I mean, it's so ubiquitous. You know, I think, you know, a report showed that 1 in 5 - more than 1 in 5 people in the U.S. now, like, are a member of a gym or a fitness center or a studio or something like that. I mean, like, do you just sort of see, like, a straight line between the '70s and now? Like, how do this trends shape how we participate in exercise today?
FRIEDMAN: America's relationship with fitness and the kinds of workouts that are most popular have sort of waxed and waned and evolved over the decades as we've learned more about what's good for us, what benefits health. And also, you know, the pendulum has just swung in terms of - there are these periods of kind of intensity and burnout. So the '80s was really the decade of no pain, no gain. Jane Fonda, who became a phenomenon in the early '80s with her home workout videos - one of her favorite sayings was, discipline is liberation. And so people were just working really hard at fitness.
And then by the end of the '80s, heading into the '90s, a lot of people were burnt out or had gotten injuries. And we saw the rise of yoga, which had taken root really in the '70s in this country, but it just exploded as a sort of response, almost, to that intensity. So the groundwork in terms of understanding that movement is really key to well-being and that it could bring all sorts of health benefits and it could be - could and should be a regular part of your daily life took root in the '70s. And then we've just - it has just evolved and grown and sort of met the times that we're in in the years since.
HUANG: That's journalist Danielle Friedman, author of "Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise And Reshaped The World." Danielle, thanks for joining us.
FRIEDMAN: Thank you so much.
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