The Age of Fitness. Jürgen Martschukat

it is not part of the realm of fitness. The bodies of bodybuilders are about transgressing limits; they are dysfunctional pieces of art, serving only to embody a certain aesthetic, which does not equate with fitness in the sense of everyday performance. On the contrary, in everyday life the bodybuilder’s bulky frame tends to get in their way. Bodybuilders, according to art theorist Jörg Scheller, are artists. As early as 1977, Arnold Schwarzenegger claimed this very status, as he revealed in an interview in the documentary Pumping Iron. He is doing the work of a sculptor, Schwarzenegger rhapsodizes, though one who must chisel thousands of tons of iron to create his masterpiece.⁷⁸

“Fit or fat?”

      Many of the threads of this chapter on fitness in recent history are woven together in a slim volume from 1977 by Covert Bailey, a soldier, nutritionist, author, television presenter, and apostle of fitness. Fit or Fat? is its both simple and suggestive title, a leading question that captures the ethos of neoliberal subjectivity. Bailey’s guide to bodies and exercise is full of observations on the body-as-machine, weight measurements and body fat percentages, exercise intervals and recovery periods, exercise intensity and pulse rates, “good” nutrition, protein, sugar, and fat. At the end of the book there is a log for a 12-month exercise program. Here the reader finds pre-printed forms designed to help keep them on track and, as the Quantified Self community would put it today, to make “more informed decisions” about their fitness and life, and even to become “a better human.” “Join those of us who are proud,” Bailey’s book concludes by exhorting readers, “to be getting the most out of the bodies we are given. Start now!”⁷⁹

Bailey’s book articulates the performance and body fetish that took hold of the Western world in the 1970s and 1980s and continues to this day – in an accelerated form, in fact. Fitness enthusiasts were not only keen to produce a toned and powerful body, but also wanted to present it in the best possible way. They now wore figure-hugging, sleeveless T-shirts or skin-tight leotards that left little to the imagination, not only while working out but also outside the gym. The mania for fitness and the body was focused entirely on oneself, one’s success, on having control over one’s life and happiness. Contemporary critics such as historian Benjamin Rader were already referring to a “new strenuosity” and the “strenuous life,” that is, an industrious and relentless lifestyle, one that Americans were once again being exhorted to embrace and that was subject to a new round of evangelization.⁸⁰ Here Rader was alluding to one of the most famous speeches in US history, one that dates back more than a century. In 1899, New York governor and future president Theodore Roosevelt had called on Americans to embrace such a “strenuous life”: an indefatigable, industrious, physically active way of life that would equip them to survive in a globally competitive environment and the Darwinian struggle for existence. In Europe as well, achievement through physical training and healthy eating are not inventions of the 1970s, even if it was then that they entered a boom phase and ushered in the age of fitness. The history of fitness dates to the nineteenth century, and in fact we can trace it still further back.⁸¹

Notes

      1 1. Gamper, “Radrennfahrer,” 197–202.

      2 2. However, this also includes those who, for example, step onto the scales regularly. Around 20 percent of Americans are said to practice self-tracking in the narrower sense, with this figure referring to 2013. Not least due to the many different forms tracking may take, the numbers vary greatly; Fox and Duggan, “Tracking for Health.”

      3 3. QS: Quantified Self: Self Knowledge Through Numbers – Deutsche Community, http://qsdeutschland.de/info/ (accessed May 9, 2016).

      4 4. Rippberger, “Fitness-Apps”; Schmedt, “Fitness-Tracker”; Swan, “Quantified Self”; Crawford et al., “Our Metrics, Ourselves,” 490–4. For a summary, see also Duttweiler et al., Leben nach Zahlen.

      5 5. Lupton, Quantified Self, 3; Lupton, “Self-Tracking Citizenship”; for a concept of citizenship that has been expanded in a particularly productive way, see Rose and Novas, “Biological Citizenship”; Honneth, Anerkennung; see also Cooper, Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference.

      6 6. Volkwein, “Introduction”; Volkwein quotes from, among other things, 1996 guidelines issued by the US Department of Health and Human Services. Bauman, Liquid Modernity; Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life.

      7 7. Volkwein, “Introduction,” xi, xv.

      8 8. Bröckling, “Prävention,” 214. See also Bröckling, Gute Hirten führen sanft, 73–112, on prevention and “the power of prophylaxis.” On prevention as a “cultural technology of modernity,” see Lengwiler and Madarász, “Präventionsgeschichte.”

      9 9. See Judith Butler’s performance concept, as explained in Butler, “Performative Acts.”

      10 10. Biltekoff, Eating Right, 5–6.

      11 11. Crawford et al., “Our Metrics, Ourselves,” 487. On the Microsoft ad from 2014, see Rubino, “Microsoft Band”; Mackert and Martschukat, “Introduction: Critical Ability History.”

      12 12. Butler, Bodies that Matter. See also Bauman, “Postmodern Uses of Sex.”

      13 13. See Metzl and Kirkland (eds.), Against Health; Guthman, Weighing In, which also addresses the debate on “healthism” and the normative elements in the pursuit of health; on this topic, see also Crawford, “Healthism.”

      14 14. On participation under dictatorships and state socialism, see, for example, Lüdtke, “Deutsche Qualitätsarbeit,” or Offermann, “Socialist Responsibilization.”

      15 15. McRuer, “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness”; McRuer, Crip Theory; Mackert, “Writing the History.”

      16 16. Anon., “Deutschland verfettet”; Froböse et al., Der DKV-Report 2018. On performance or efficiency as a modern paradigm, see Verheyen, Die Erfindung der Leistung.

      17 17. There is a wealth of references to choose from, such as Saguy, What’s Wrong With Fat?, 107ff.; Gilman, Obesity; Biltekoff, Eating Right. See also, for example, Pollack, “A.M.A. Recognizes Obesity”; Bakalar, “Obesity Rates”; Anon, “Übergewicht in Deutschland”; CDC Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, “Obesity and Overweight,” http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesity-overweight.htm (May 11, 2016); “The State of Obesity – Better Policies for a Healthier America, Obesity Rates and Trends,” http://stateofobesity.org/rates/ (May 11, 2016); Hales et al., “Differences in Obesity.”

      18 18. Kim et al., “Causation or Selection.”

      19 19. See, for example, Gard, End of the Obesity Epidemic; Saguy, What’s Wrong?; Frommeld, “Fit statt fett”; and on “excess weight” and life expectancy, see Afzal et al., “Change in Body Mass Index.”

      20 20. Wirtz, “Fit statt fett”; Geyer, “Fit statt fett”; for an early campaign, see Essen und Trimmen – beides muß stimmen, Frankfurt am Main: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ernährung (c. 1976), and Bundeszentrale für Gesundheitliche Aufklärung, Essen und trimmen, beides muß stimmen. On nudging, see Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge; Hildebrandt, “Stups zum Glück.” Just how paradigmatic “nudging” is to the governance of liberal societies becomes clear if one reads the book by Thaler and Sunstein together with Michel Foucault’s studies of governmentality: Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, and Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. See also Foucault’s remarks on power as decentral and as action that acts upon the action of others; Foucault, “Subject and Power.”

      21 21. Sutton, “First Lady”; see also the website of “Let’s Move” at https://letsmove.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ (May 12, 2016); for a summary, see Martschukat, “On Choice.”

      22 22. The UK, for example,