By Jürgen Martschukat

We live in the age of fitness.

Tens of thousands of people run marathons and compete in all-comers cycle races. Millions go for an evening jog in the park or work out in gyms, where they lift weights and use machines of various kinds or practice yoga; active vacations of all kinds are more popular than ever.

In 1970, this was barely conceivable.

Hiking vacations were for retirees only, and windsurfing had just been invented. The Berlin Marathon still lay in the future. Few adults had a bicycle, while gyms were few and far between.

Since then, however, fitness has boomed, and retirees go surfing. Every year, active people of all ages (and those who want to appear active, or at least aspire to be active) spend billions on fitness-related items: running shoes and sportswear, weights and carbon fiber bicycles, energy drinks, and diet foods.

Equally popular are fitness classes and activity vacations, fitness magazines and books, apps, and gadgets. Fitness stars have millions of followers on Instagram; images of toned bodies are hugely popular on social media.

What those engaged in “getting and staying fit” generally have in common is that they are active but rarely organize themselves in clubs or associations.

They do not participate in a specific league, and they are almost never out to win a competition. Yet they all want to improve themselves somehow by living a healthy life.

Those who undertake fitness training are not looking to win a medal. Instead, what this practice aims to achieve is health through training and a fit body.

Fitness operates via the body, but it is by no means limited to it. A fit body stands for an array of partially overlapping forces, abilities, and ideals, which point far beyond the doing of sport and the body. These encompass one’s performance in everyday life and at work, productivity and the ability to cope with challenging situations, potency, a slim figure, and a pleasing appearance according to the prevalent standards of beauty.

Also important in this context is the notion of “doing the right thing,” “doing something good” for oneself, and getting the “best” out of oneself, as well as gaining recognition for it, no matter what age we are. At times, the sheer joy of movement and activity also comes into play.

The pursuit of fitness is part of a culture and society that concurrently laments increasingly fat bodies.

In the twenty-first century, fatness is even referred to as an epidemic, and health problems such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease are a perennial topic of concern.

In our western societies, the consistent message is that the lack of physical activity has assumed frightening proportions. A so-called sedentary lifestyle and an unhealthy, high-calorie diet are viewed as the main causes of increasing fatness. On the one hand, then, there is a culture of fitness, while on the other, there is anxiety over the lack of exercise and burgeoning fatness.

What may seem contradictory at first sight turns out to be part of a single social formation, centered on the self-responsible, committed and productive individual. Both sides of this coin (the culture of fitness and the fear of fat) revolve around the successful self, which proves its success by mastering its own body. In (post-)modern societies, lack of fitness amounts to a flashing red light.

The last half-century may be considered the age of fitness. We live in an epoch that has modeled itself on the market, interprets every situation as a competitive struggle, and enjoins people to make productive use of their freedom. The individual is supposed to work on themself, have life under control, get fit, ensure their own productive capacity and embody these things in the truest sense of the word.

This requirement has achieved unprecedented importance in recent decades.

But the traces of the age of fitness reach further back into history, at times to the eighteenth century, when the idea and practices of liberty and self-determination began to gain ground among the citizens of the new republic.

The middle of the nineteenth century also demands our attention, when Darwinism, the “survival of the fittest,” and the conception of inevitable, natural competition took the stage.

And it was in the decades around 1900 that modern societies first experienced a fitness hype, which responded to a feeling of crisis of the body in modern societies.

Modern and liberal societies are governed through fitness. Freedom is bound up with the demand, made of all of us, to use our freedom productively and in the best possible way, and fitness perfectly embodies this facet of freedom.

People’s success or failure in this endeavor establishes differences, engenders exclusion, and legitimizes privileges. The coexistence of, and simultaneous antagonism between fitness and fatness (often perceived as non-fitness), their meanings and associations, reveal the manifold tensions inherent in governing through freedom and fitness.

Fitness and fatness have a significant impact on whether a person is recognized as a productive member of society, on who may be considered a subject and who may not.

Fitness has become critical to success or failure, recognition or exclusion, in a society that sets such great store by self-responsibility, performance, market, and competition.

Jürgen Martschukat is a Professor of North American History at the University of Erfurt. He is the author of The Age of Fitness, published by Polity.