“Lift: Fitness Culture, From Naked Greeks and Acrobats to Jazzercise and Ninja Warriors” by Daniel Kunitz
Paperback, 336 pages
Published 2017 by Harper Wave
ISBN-10 : 0062336193 | ISBN-13 : 978-0062336194
Date Finished: November 5, 2020
How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
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I started reading books for a New Yorker story I was working on and found this one pretty fascinating from a historic perspective. From naked Greeks to modern day CrossFitters, I think fitness culture is endlessly fascinating.
My Notes:
And while the majority of girls at my school may have hoped to get as skinny as Jane Fonda in one of her workout videos, they were far more likely to do it with cigarettes, Diet Coke, and fasting than with aerobics.
It was at The Paris Review that I became alienated from my physical existence, and where we became reacquainted. At our worst, my cohorts and I at the magazine emulated the wasted waif aesthetic of the time, the nineties, and gave no thought to improving or maintaining ourselves physically. We thought of ourselves as living the life of the mind.
George, [Plimpton], however, was not just some empty bon vivant. In fact, he had an ingrained Protestant work ethic: no matter how deep into the night he dove, he alway surfaced on cue, waking each morning to put in a full day of writing and editing. I was less resilient.
By then a flight of stairs would leave me bent over with a tubercular wheeze; I felt incapable of carrying around much more than a gin and tonic. The reason for my physical degeneration was that for the previous decade I'd lived almost entirely in my head: writing, reading, editing, looking at art, and consuming way too many powdered drugs.
We thought physical culture was an oxymoron (with the emphasis on moron—we preferred our oxy with contin.) That's not to say we were inactive: we had endlessly rechargeable batteries when it came to carousing. George had an extraordinary constitution—up to a point. When his lifestyle finally exacted a toll on his health, it was steep: he died at the comparatively young age of seventy-six.
This argument over intensity could still be heard when, in 1984, Jim Fixx, author of the extraordinarily popular and influential 1977 book The Complete Book of Running, suffered a massive heart attack—while running.
To put it briefly: by swapping cigarettes for running, I had taken a few stutter steps in the direction of what I will call, after the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, the practicing life. Addiction is just the repetition of a habit; it's the sameness of the repeated act that mollifies us. The practicing life demands one continually reform and reevaluate one's habits as part of a process of deliberately shaping one's existence.
One day you can't understand why anyone would choose to sweat and pant at a way-too-early hour wearing barely any clothing; the next you can't understand how anyone cannot do it.
One benefit of weight training is that it inures you to failure: few personal bests are achieved without numerous botched attempts, often in public.
The upheaval revealed an unexplored region where numerous aspects of physical culture converge: it is, as I named it above, a New Frontier.
When your gaze slips off the mirror and onto how well you function in the world instead, you inevitably shift emphasis away from working out to change how you look and toward physical performance.
None of that precludes the desire to have an attractive body—it's just that a particular look no longer motivates the workout.
Similarly, there has been an explosion of interest in strength training among women, where previously there had been very little—and this in turn is reorienting standards of beauty, changing society-wide perceptions of what types of bodies are attractive.
Mark Greif's assertion that "[d]espite the new emphasis on female athleticism, the task of the woman exerciser remains one of emaciation." Greif made this claim in a provocative and widely noted 2004 essay, "Against Exercise,"
The latter is pertinent because people at the cutting edge of fitness had just begun turning away from exercise machines, viewing them as nonfunctional, limiting to one's range of motion, and, by eliminating the use of stabilizing muscles, liable to make one weaker rather than stronger.
Yet New Frontier Fitness (NFF) also addresses nutrition, community, neuromuscular integration, brain healthy, meditation, visualization, ethics, and emotional well-being. Its manifestations tend, in short, to be holistic.
Of course people have always trained, but only recently—in the last fifteen years—have large numbers of ordinary people all over the world, with jobs and lives and potbellies, begun training with something approaching the fervor of professional athletes.
... but with distinctly different goals: whereas the pro trains for a specific sport, the New Frontier athlete trains for life—to improve how she meets it and to deal productively with its pathos.
That is the crux question. If it were as simple as wanting to lose weight or pack meat onto my pectoral muscles or just look good naked, I'd have an easy answer. My reasons, however, are not easily stated: I could say I want to be stronger, faster, more agile, more flexible; that I want to move better and to think more keenly; that I want to counteract aging, to be more at ease in my skin, to have better sex, to function optimally as an organism. I could say that I want to surpass in every way possible the man that I am today and the one I'll be tomorrow, and that my athletic practice is at once a means to these ends and a model for achieving them. But voicing such thoughts is, frankly, kind of obnoxious.
A muscled warrior-athlete in midstride, the Doryphoros, a sculpture by the Ancient Greet artist Polykleitos, exemplifies an abiding Western physical ideal of masculinity—which is to say, pecs and abs worthy of an armored breastplate and a deep inguinal crease.
Athletes were represented in the nude in ancient Greece because male citizens trained completely naked in a gymnasium (gymnos in Greek means nude, and from it our word gymnasium is derived).
That the finest body might have been hewn according to mathematics marks the first known instance in the long history of fitness of the fixation on measure, or data.
We also have a much broader—looser, we might say—conception of physical splendor than the Greeks, for whom the body, and the trained body in particular, was central. As Aristotle makes clear, beauty for the Greeks always "implies a well-developed body: i.e. small people can be neat and well-proportioned, but not beautiful."
For the last five hundred years or so, at least since the Renaissance, the West has set its standard of male beauty in the mold of such Greek statuary as the Doryphoros and the Diadumenos. Still, during the entirety of those five centuries, that standard remained largely an unattainable ideal.
This was a place both similar and significantly different to our gyms: the Greek version functioned as a place to train the mind in the techniques of reason as well as the body. In Athens, the three great gymnasia—Plato's Akademy, Aristotle's Lykeion, and the Cynosarges—were also the sites of the era's three major philosophical traditions, directed by philosopher-athletes. These institutions produced important thinkers, politicians, poets, and playwrights, as well as great athletes. The intellectual work took place in the exedra.
It had a dirt or sand floor, which was surrounded by changing rooms where an athlete stripped down and, depending on the day's activity, often tied off the foreskin of his penis before anointing his entire body with olive oil. We don't know exactly why either was done. Tying the foreskin might have prevented erections in the decidedly homoerotic atmosphere of the palaistra, prevented injury, or possibly improved performance (although I have no idea how, and I myself am unable to conduct such experiments). The oil would have burnished one's physique and may have protected the nude athlete from the elements, such as the cold or the sun; it may also have had religious significance, as anointing with oil is a common rite in many religious traditions.