In his new book Sweat, best-selling author Bill Hayes turns his attention to our long-standing obsession with exercise.
Part history book, part memoir, Sweat sees Hayes dive into the ancient Greek's devotion to the gymnasium, examine how exercise has evolved over time, and look at the well-being fads that have surfaced over the centuries.
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Hayes' previous books include Sleep Demons, Five Quarts, and Insomniac City, the latter of which recounts his life in New York City and his romantic relationship with the late neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks.
Hayes is the Creative Director of the Oliver Sacks Foundation, and co-edited Sacks' posthumous works Gratitude and The River of Consciousness.
The Global Wellness Institute estimates that the global fitness industry will be worth a trillion dollars in two years time. But for most of modern history physical exercise was the preserve of athletes and eccentrics.
The earliest evidence of exercise for its own sake came in the 5th century BC when Hippocrates articulated the tenants of exercise, Hayes said.
"In fact, he wrote up two treatises on healthful living including diet and exercise and it was Hippocrates who said 'eating alone will not keep a man well, he must also take exercise for food and exercise while possessing opposite qualities yet work together to produce health'."
But Hayes said you could argue the origins of exercise go even further back to the Olympic Games founded in the 8th century BC since fitness training was part of the regimen for competing.
Exercise and athletic competition was limited to men and boys in ancient Greece.
"In antiquity, men exercised and athletes competed in the nude, in fact the word gymnastics means to exercise in the nude."
Exercise and nationalism
Hayes said wrestling was one of the key events.
"I think its origins come out of training for the military which we can trace back beyond the 10th century BC to military states like Sparta where exercise and training were part of everyday life and wrestling and boxing were considered forms of exercise or training to get ready for hand-to-hand combat."
Nationalism and militarism have been part of the history of exercise over time, Hayes said.
For example, in the 19th century, Pehr Henrik Ling pioneered the teaching of physical education in Stockholm in Sweden.
Ling was the innovator of the idea of big group fitness classes from which aerobics classes today are descended, Hayes said.
"He designed his own technique really a kind of tightly choreographed callisthenics for both men and women although they were kept separate, all with a drill master telling people what to do," he said.
"It was part of a kind of nationalistic training getting the country ready for the possibility of invasion or war."
Called somatic nationalism, there was a nationalist spirit to it which was then used by authoritarian regimes such as the Nazi regime, Hayes said.
However, Ling's legacy also had a positive influence given he was the first to encourage women and girls to exercise, developing classes for them.
Ling also established the first-ever university to be devoted to what we would today call exercise science and it is still open today, Hayes said.
"It was his hope to train teachers who would spread the Ling method around the world and indeed they did, sending instructors, both male and female, to the UK and to the US and India and spreading the Ling method."
The importance of Girolamo Mercuriale
One of the most important historical figures to trace the history of exercise was a 16th-century physician named Girolamo Mercuriale.
"Mercuriale is credited with writing the first comprehensive book on exercise published in 1569."
Hayes said in his book he retraces Mercuriale's life and how he came to write De Arte Gymnastica or The Art of Gymnastics.
"I weave together his story with the history of exercise with kind of a chronicle of my own history of exercise as I try out everything from running and swimming to boxing and yoga."
Hayes said the culture of exercise and athletics that developed in ancient Greece and Rome shifted with the rise of Christianity in the West in about the 3rd and 4th centuries AD.
The rise of christianity led to a shift from worshipping the body with the athlete as the ideal to worshipping the soul and the spirit, Hayes said.
"Cathedrals replaced gymnasiums and it was considered indecent or vain to exercise and the ideal was no longer the Olympic athlete but instead the suffering Christian saint."
That was until Mercuriale came on the scene during the Renaissance period when there was a renewed interest in the individual, humanism and the philosophers of iniquities.
Mercuriale became the physician to a prominent cardinal in Rome, Alessandro Farnese, which gave him access to the Farnese family library and the Vatican library.
"It was there that he began digging through the books and manuscripts and deciphered and translated the works of Hippocrates and Galen and others and with that, with those teachings and writings began to try to revive the ancient Greek arts of exercise."
Mercuriale then became a personal physician to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian and was then chair of medicine at the University of Padua. Ultimately he ended up writing some 15 books.
Hayes said Mercuriale wanted to revive the ancient Greek art of exercise, but he is not sure Mercuriale achieved that aim since he became "lost to history because all of his books were written in medieval Latin".
Mercuriale approached exercise from a physician's perspective and believed it should be a part of daily life, moderate, that it should be safe and that some people such as those who were sick or elderly could forgo exercise.
