May 25, 2023 • 55 mins
Humans exercising for better health has not been around that long. Today we dive into this fun history as we cover why and when we started this now commonplace pastime.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and Chuck's
here too, and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff
you should know about the history of exercising.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Yes, I found this super fascinating.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Yeah, it is pretty fascinating.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
I don't know. I it just grabbed me.
Speaker 4 (00:28):
And I guess it grabbed me earlier because it was
my idea because I think, I don't know, maybe i'd
seen Anchorman and they made the yogging joke, and then
I remembered hearing that, you know, exercises sort of new, right,
if you look at not only the history of humans,
but the history of America, it's only been around for
(00:49):
you know, you know, fifty ish years, sixty maybe.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yeah, I mean in ancient times they were pretty into fitness,
but then it kind of dropped off for a couple
thousand years, and we picked it up again in nineteen
sixty roughly at very least the decade of the sixties.
And like you said, specifically in America in the United States,
I should.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Say, yeah, so should we do it?
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeah. The whole thing is that the first half of
the twentieth century It's not like there weren't people exercising, right,
they were out there, they were just considered weirdos or possibly.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
Gay, exactly. They didn't even really use the word exercise much.
It was called physical culture, and like you said, it
was a real niche thing. The obviously there were you know,
sports and athletes and people like that were doing physical training,
and the military did stuff like that, and there was bodybuilding,
but that was super niche too, But as far as
(01:44):
like your regular average American walking around, they were just
walking around or sitting in chairs.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
They were walking around, eating a steak while they walked around.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
That's what they were doing with the martini, and you
did mention, you know, possibly gay, and that was a
characteristic early on. Is like, if you are a man
and it's nineteen forty something or fifty something and you
want to have like a nice body and you want muscles,
people might say, well, you're probably gay or you're probably
(02:17):
a narcissist, because gems are for gay men to meet
each other.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
And that was just sort of the perception at the time, exactly.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
And then women didn't have it much better. They were
almost culturally forbidden from exercising it in the first place,
it was unlady like to engage in exercise, or typically
considered that. On top of that, exercises, you're exercising for yourself.
It's kind of the basis of exercise, and that also
(02:44):
seemed unseemly for women to engage in such a self
indulgent pursuit, right. And then on top of that, there
was a general idea that your uterus might fall out
if you exercise too vigorously.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Yeah, or just you know, you may not be able
to get pregnant if you exercise, So just don't do that.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
Just stay on your feet all day and do the housework.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Right exactly, which, as we'll see, is actually an example
of moderate physical activity.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
That's right. It's better than sitting down.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
So in about nineteen sixty, if you asked Americans, hey,
do you exercise regularly? I'm surprised with this, about a
quarter of Americans would have.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
Said, yes, that seemed high.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
It does. It seems high to me too. In nineteen
eighty seven, less than thirty years later, that answer to
that question was yes from almost seventy percent of people.
So in those three decades from nineteen sixty till the
eighties through the eighties, exercise came on the scene and
just jelled with the world. In the United States in particular.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
Yeah, I would be curious to see that poll and
see exactly how it was worded and defined, right, because
that twenty four percent seems high. I could see people
just being like, well, sure I cut the lawn, right,
you know that kind of.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Thing, and regularly was once within the last three years.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Yeah, you cut the lawn once every three years.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Right. So again, it wasn't just women who were considered
at risk health wise from exercise. Everybody was considered at risk.
If you exercise too much, you were probably over taxing
your heart and you're probably gonna die young. They actually
thought athletes were at risk of dying young from over
exerting themselves. And then it was finally, I think about
(04:34):
in the late forties when a British epidemiologist named Jeremy N.
Morris and that and and the Morris makes me want
to say Norris so bad. I mean, it's a real
it's a weird combination. But he said, you know what,
I like to jog, and I liked exercise, and I
think that this is wrong. So I'm going to go
about studying it in the most clever way possible.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
Yeah, it's a pretty interesting study. And by the way,
Livia put this together for us, and as usual.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
I think she crushed it, knocked it out of the park.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
I had no notes. Not that we're usually noddy, No,
you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
No, we're not very nody.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
I like to just a gold star, right, But yeah,
he had a really ingenious and sort of contained way
to study this. He did lots of other studies, but
one of the ways he did it was he said,
you know, we got these big double decker buses in England.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Everybody's seen those.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
Everyone's seen those, and there's there's two people who work
on those. There's the guy who drives them, and then
there's the guy who is the bus conductor. And he's
always huffing it up and down those stairs. And you know,
granted it's not like forty stairs or anything, but they're
steep and you're climbing those things all day long, back
and forth. So he was like, I got a nice
little captive audience of of people who are pretty similar
(05:48):
probably in lifestyle and in age and stuff like that,
and one of them exercises one of them doesn't. And
he found that drivers had twice more than twice as
many heart attacks as conductors. And he was like, wait
a minute, did some more studying and said, hey, everybody,
I think exercising is good for your heart.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Yeah, and other people were like, wait a minute, let
us check it out. Well, wha, it's true. Study after
studies started coming in saying like, not only does exercise
not put you in an early grave, it actually probably
prevents you from an early grave. So maybe we should
all start exercising. So this was so in the fifties.
This was the era of proving that exercise was good
(06:28):
for you, and then by the time the sixties rolled around,
people were ready to start getting into it. And at
first it seems like they were. They were more hardcore,
surprisingly enough at first than we are today because you
look around and like so many people exercise today, especially
in comparison to like the sixties and seventies at the
(06:48):
beginning of the boom. But people have just kind of
mellowed out a little bit. Before it was just like
as intense as you could you could possibly get in
every single way.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Well, I mean, these are the people that drank three
martinis at lunch.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yeah, yeah, they did not want hardcore.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Right, Yeah, you're just going to do something, You're going
to do it hard.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
So in fact, we were talking about those people because
the culture of work really changed since about the mid
nineteenth century when people moved away, not entirely, obviously we
still had farmers and stuff, but you know, mainstream America
moved away from hard labor jobs into desk jobs, and
they started to worry that the sedentary lifestyle wasn't good
(07:28):
for them. In the mid seventies is when corporate America
started tuning in because Fortune magazine wrote an article that
basically said, Hey, all these CEOs and board members that
we have are just a bunch of and this is
of course in the mid seventies. There are a bunch
of old, sort of overweight, white fat cats, and they're
all having heart attacks and it's costing our firms and
(07:51):
corporations about seven hundred million bucks a year. And this
is mid seventies numbers. And so it was them who
started the health boom. It was sort of like corporate CEOs,
I think in the sixties and seventies, Livia found some
research that found that generally, like the people that started
this whole thing were college educated, they had some money,
(08:12):
and they were generally white people.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Yeah, that's who kicked off the boom. Today, the differential
in race is pretty much erased, but there's still a
gap in education where if you have college or some
college or a bachelor's degree, you're about twice as likely
to exercise on an average day as somebody who just
(08:36):
has a degree from high school. Really interesting, it is interesting.
Another thing that happened too, not just the health aspect,
but in the twentieth century, because of that increasing sedentariness,
Americans became a lot more fixated on how you looked physically,
especially weight, whether you were overweight or not, and there
(08:58):
became a much greater emphasis on not being overweight, and
that really dovetailed with the idea of taking care of
your insides while also taking care of your outsides, and
that really kind of provided the foundation for kind of
funneling people into the exercise boom of the sixties and seventies.
(09:19):
You could live longer, you could look better, so just
go exercise. Let's all give it a try.
Speaker 4 (09:24):
Yeah, for sure. And into the eighties is when you
really saw a boom and women exercising more and more.
The whole fitness movement was almost geared toward women at
that point for a number of reasons. One was, you know,
women trying to become more empowered, women gaining power and empowerment.
The feminist movement that said, all right, if you're you're
(09:47):
gonna do that in the workplace, why not be strong
in your personal life, physically strong, strong like bull Yeah, exactly,
and so be strong and your work life, be strong
in your physical life. Title nine, of course, really helped
things out because all of a sudden, girls sports were
getting more funding and more attention. And then, like you said,
the standards for physical attractiveness changing was for men and
(10:10):
women and everyone across the gender spectrum exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
So the first thing that really caught everybody's attention was jogging.
That was the one that really laid the groundwork, and
jogging grew out of legitimate running like it came most
people peg. A New Zealand Olympic track coach named Arthur
Lydiard as the guy who if he wasn't interested or
(10:35):
involved in bringing jogging to the masses, he still was
kind of like the inadvertent father of the whole thing,
because in the sixties, he came up with training techniques
for marathon runners that people still use today. It's really simple,
really basic, but it's really effective. It's things like on
a Monday, you run ten miles a half effort over
(10:59):
hills and roads, and then Tuesday you do you know,
flat fifteen mile run or something like that. I don't
think that's exactly it, but people use it today. And
the fact that there was now a framework that anybody
could just buy this book or buy this pamphlet and
approach jogging that really kind of helped usher people in.
(11:21):
But again, bear in mind, this is an Olympic level
track coach who's establishing this stuff, and this was people's
first entree into jogging. So the earliest joggers were hard core,
like scary. I'm a little nervous about them. And we're
talking about people who are running around in the sixties
and seventies.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Yeah, I think they.
Speaker 4 (11:42):
I think they like to be called runners, those types. Sure,
they're like, you're a jogger, Chuck, Actually not even.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
That speed walker like Chris Paul, I should do speed
walking to me, Jim, I'm sorry, speedwalking is way harder
than jogging.
Speaker 4 (11:57):
Oh do you mean like on your cardio or just
your body. Yeah, well cardio, yes, intent to look cool?
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Okay. Well, but.
Speaker 4 (12:06):
So in the mid nineteen sixties, a guy you may
have heard of named Bill Bowerman. He was a running
coach from the University of Oregon, Go Ducks and co
founder of a little company called Nike. He published a
pamphlet kind of based on stuff Arthur Lydiard had been
talking about, and then eventually wrote this book that I
remember seeing on in houses of like friends of mine.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Really for sure it was. It was a very big book.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
It was called Jogging Colon even back then, a physical
fitness program for all ages. He co wrote it with
a cardiologist named W. E. Harris, talked about all the
health benefits of running, and it really caught on. It's
really funny though, like people still like it caught on,
but it was still.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
Sort of a new thing.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
So The New York Times wrote an article that demonstrated
and this was in April of nineteen sixty eight that
like when people were running like co occasionally they had
real stories, like a cop would stop and say like
why are you running?
Speaker 3 (13:05):
What are you running from? Or what did you do?
Or people that were.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
Runners and joggers said, you know, I like to run
at night because people don't stare at me.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
It don't feel as weird. So it's just so funny
to look back at, you know. And this was in
the late sixties, that people jogging on the streets where
you were like, what's up on that person? Why are
they running?
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Right? And at night they like to run in all
black with a black watch cap and black mask covering
their eyes.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Yes, very safe.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
There was another guy who really brought jogging to the masses.
His name was Jim Fix. He wrote the Complete Book
of Running, released in nineteen seventy seven, and he I
remember there was a proselytizer for running, if there ever
was one, it was him Fix. Yeah, And he ironically
died while jogging. He ran himself to death. He had
a massive heart attack while jogging. But he's still I mean,
(13:54):
it doesn't really undo what he did, which was, Hey, everybody,
let's let's go jog. And that's what Anchorman was referring to.
Was that, right, the jogging trend that Jim Fix helped
usher in in the late seventies.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
But there was another gym in the seventies. A man
by the name of president Jim Carter, it'd be weird.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
So weird does sound weird? He's such a Jimmy, He
totally is Jim. It seems like you'd have an overly
strong handshake.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Right, Jim Carter.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Jim Carter, good to meet you. Yeah, what have you
done for me lately?
Speaker 3 (14:27):
He high five.
Speaker 4 (14:29):
But this was at a time in the seventies when
the president of the United States had influence on popular culture.
Like I don't feel like presidents really have that much anymore. No, No,
it's dying fast at least. And he was a jogger
from the White House. This is the late seventies. He
would jog sometimes ten twelve miles at a time, really
(14:51):
got into it.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
And The New York Times wrote about this, of course.
Speaker 4 (14:55):
And you know, if if someone's in the White House
jogging and running, then that normalizes it for a lot
of America.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
Yeah, I read an article about that. I don't know
if it was the New York Times one or not,
but he yeah, it wasn't New York Times. It chronicled
him going on this run like he held like a
fun run basically at Camp David, and he almost collapsed
on one of the hills and had to be ushered
off and taken to the hospital. Oh really, yeah, And
(15:23):
he was like running with you know, dozens, scores, if
not hundreds of other people on this fun run, and
they were running with the president, and he had Secret
Service guys running with them keeping pace. But he he
had to leave the race that he helped organize because
he just went too hard. That was how they used
to do it.
Speaker 4 (15:42):
Did they say over a bullhorn now dropping out a
runner of thirty two jim Carter?
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Shame, shame. That's how they used to.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
Do would you. Oh was that Sean Connery?
Speaker 2 (15:56):
No, I didn't mean it, but sure, I'll take that. Yeah,
that was Sean Henri shaming Jimmy Carter on that run
in the late seventies.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
It sounded like Sean you doing Sean Connery saying same.
That's how it heard in my.
Speaker 4 (16:11):
Yes, shame traback so speaking of the New York Times,
and I guess we'll take a break after this. But
in the late nineties ninety seven they wrote an article
kind of looking back on running and jogging, and they
were keen to point out that, like even into the seventies, zho,
it was still a bit of a subculture. Like you said,
(16:32):
they were like running and jogging enthusiasts, But it wasn't
like tons of mainstream Americans were running. It was still
like what are those people doing? Like should I do that?
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Right?
Speaker 3 (16:41):
All right? Okay, break time?
Speaker 2 (16:43):
I think it is break time.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
All right, we'll be right back with aerobics.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Okay. So you've got jogging that's on the scene, then
you have aerobics too. This was the one that was
like probably the most popular thing of the eighties. If
you ask me, I think I think aerobics dominated the eighties.
Jogging the seventies, and aerobics was around a lot longer
than just the eighties. It was one of those things where,
(17:28):
you know, some people who were kind of into exercising
kind of developed it on their own separately, and then
it just took a little while to get more and
more popular as word of mouth spread. But there's a
guy named Kenneth Cooper who started it all again in
the sixties. He was a US Air Force surgeon and
he was like, you know those that weightlifting, the calisthetics
(17:49):
that the military uses for training. It's all well and good,
but these guys are like like dying on these these
runs and jogs and hikes.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
They've got no aerobic stamina.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Stamina exactly. So he started looking into it and he
was like, I think we need to start using what
we call now cardio. But Jack then it was aerobic exercise.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
Yeah, he was a jogger. He said, I think aerobics
is being sold short. So he wrote a book in
nineteen sixty eight called Aerobics, and he said, you know,
running and walking and biking is what people should be doing.
And that was his idea of aerobics at the time,
was just getting that heart rate up sustaining it for
an extended period of time. He had a pretty clever
(18:35):
test where he could basically tell you in about twelve
minutes what kind of like how good of shape you
were in. But then what happened was really really awesome.
Like I really love this section because my mom figures
into this, which I'll get to as we as we go.
But women in the United States said, you know, what
they're talking about running and biking and walking, but what
(18:58):
they're really talking about is getting your heart rate up
for an extended period of time. So I'm going to
make that my own. And there was one woman in particular,
very early on, there were some real trailblazers here. She
was a dance teacher, also an Air Force wife, no coincidence,
by the name of Jackie Sorenson. She read that book,
she took that fitness test and found out she was
(19:18):
in really good shape. And she was like, but wait
a minute, I don't run. How can I be in
this good of shape. She was like, I'm a dancer.
I'm getting my heart rate up. And so she in
nineteen sixty nine came up with a danced base exercise
class on the Air Force base in Puerto Rico where
they were stationed, and the Air Force said, we should
produce this as a TV show, which is really weird,
(19:41):
and they did. It was called Aerobic Dancing, and eventually
she published a book as well in the late seventies,
but she I think was.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
One of the first ones. It really was like, you
don't have to run.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
You can be in a room and do this as
long as you get that heart rate up exactly.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
And also it just is much more engaging and fun.
No too, you know, biking and jogging those are very
frequently solitary pursuits. Aerobics was a bunch of people getting
together in a room and having fun together to like
popular music.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Right yeah, clapping in, yelling and doing all that.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Exactly and encouraging one another. So this was really attractive
to women at the time because this was you know,
they were still coming out of this social expectation that
they shouldn't really be exercising, and now they were saying,
you know, to heck with you guys, We're gonna do
this anyway. And this was it was almost like there
was strength in numbers, but there was also there was
(20:33):
a social component to it as well. There was another
woman named Judy Shepherd. She started out in the sixties
as well, but she became the founder of jazzer Size.
That's my mom used to jazzer size. I remember. She
even had a poster of Judy Shepherd doing different moves
that came with her record, like record, vinyl record. I
(20:55):
should say, oh yeah, so my mom would do jazzer
size at home. She went to jesuitize class, so she
was into it for sure.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
It was originally called jazz and Dance for fun and fitness.
Jazzer Size is way more marketable, and this to me,
maybe the fact of the podcast it was a Jazzer Size,
you know, was a copywritten or whatever, an owned title
I hope by Judy Shepherd. I didn't look that up,
but it ended up being a franchise, and in nineteen
(21:24):
eighty four, Jazzer Size was the second biggest franchise company
in the United States behind Domino's Pizza.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
That's really something because that was at the time when
Dominoes is like, we're going to get your pizza in
thirty minutes or lesser. It's free. So everybody was into
Dominoes at the time.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
Is right before the NOID, I think right like two.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Years before the NOID. I looked it up. So Judy
Shepherd created what's known as the boutique fitness franchise model,
where it was a specific kind of exercise, usually some
sort of branded exercise like Jazzer Size, that you could
go set up in a strip mall for a minimal
initial output and people would come flock to your Jazzer
(22:03):
Size studio. And you still see that today in certain
places like Bar has a lot of like franchises, different
kinds of franchises, curves, which we'll talk about later. That's
a franchise. But Judy Shepherd started that with jazzer science.
Speaker 4 (22:17):
Yeah, very big deal. Then there was a woman named
Gilda Marx, married into the Marx brothers family had taken
when growing up. Apparently was a dancer and even worked
out with weights, which was very unusual at the time
because that would have been in I guess the thirties
and forties. And in nineteen sixty or thereabouts, she was
(22:38):
choreographing a show, a charity show in Los Angeles, created
an exercise routine so all the dancers could you know,
get in better shape, and everyone loved it. Everyone's like,
this is awesome. And she said, wait a minute, I'm
onto something here. So she in her backyard started aerobics classes,
then rented studios, and then eventually and it became a
(23:00):
very big and as you'll see, sort of when something
becomes like a big Hollywood thing and celebrities do it,
it becomes a popular thing everywhere, of course, and it
was gonna Yes, that's surprising.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
And it was called Body by Gilda.
Speaker 4 (23:12):
And it was not only a big deal because Body
by Gilda was a big deal, but it was a
big deal because she ended up having two clients by
the name of Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Yes, huge, like so so. Gilda Marx essentially created the
popularity of aeroba and it's like jazzer size was there.
It was very popular. The like aerobic dancing that was
very popular too, But it was like celebrities like Jane
Fonda and Richard Simmons who became a celebrity just for
(23:45):
getting into exercise that really really increased it in popularity.
And Jane Fonda just straight up ripped off Gilda Marx.
She took a couple of her classes at a Body
by Gilda in Century City and the next year she
set up her own I think a couple of years later,
she published Jane Fonda's Workout Book, which became an extremely
(24:06):
popular bestseller. It was number one on the nonfiction list
and stayed there for six months.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
By the way, two million books.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
That's amazing. We're almost there. We're getting there with our book, right,
we're gnawing away at her record. But she also released
a VHS tape that was wildly popular too. And that's why,
I mean, people of a certain age today still associate
Jane Fonda with exercise and aerobics, and then the people
(24:35):
of a certain age parents associate her with funneling money
to the Viet Cong, Right, still do for sure? Yeah,
they're still mad about it.
Speaker 4 (24:44):
Oh yeah, still mad. Here's another stat for you. The
Jane Fonda Workout Tape was the first non movie VHS
tape to top the sales chart, and it was number
one as far as VHS sales go for six years
and the whole run of them.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
She ended up making.
Speaker 4 (25:03):
Follow up tapes, but the whole collected Jane fond of
Workout Tape set has sold I'm sorry, between eighty two
and ninety five sold seventeen million days.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Wow, that's fun.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
I mean, numbers like that are amazing, she'd be. I
don't even what that translates to and record sales, but
it's what's the biggest platinum sellar?
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Double plat platinum's a million?
Speaker 3 (25:27):
Oh really, what's the best platinum or what's the high?
Speaker 2 (25:30):
I think they just keep going like triple platinum, quadruple platinum.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
That kind.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
So she was seventeen platinum.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
Yeah, that is extraordinarily impressive, and that really does put
it into perspective because not a lot of records go platinum,
especially not think of times over. Yeah exactly, Although I
will say she didn't have that much competition back then.
The only other two movies on VHS were Beverly Hills
Cop and The Empire Strikes Back.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
Very nice.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
So the other person that was a body by Gilda
graduate after just one class, it turned out, yeah, sort
of was one of the greatest people ever to run
around planet Earth. Richard Simmons. He if you're not familiar
with Richard Simmons, or if you just know him from
finding Richard Simmons podcast, even if you're just tangentially familiar
(26:18):
with him from you know, living through the era where
he was on TV everywhere all the time, go check
out Richard Simmons' testimony before Congress. He span has a
clip of it when he went and testified before Congress
I think of the nineties, maybe early nineties, I think,
And he gives it's Richard Simmons in a suit and tie,
(26:38):
so just that is worth going to see. It's bizarre
to see. But then he opens his mouth and it's
just the same old Richard Simmons, and he gives this
impassioned speech that like will kind of make you tear
up a little bit and give you chills. And then
he also had some laughs in there. He's just great,
just a great person. And this guy everyone at the
time thought he was just totally No one ever thought
(27:01):
Richard Simmons was like he was never normal, right, but
he was so himself that he just sucked people into
his orbit and he became like a really really popular star,
I would guess, one of the most famous people in
the world for a brief period in the early eighties.
Speaker 4 (27:17):
Absolutely like you said, he got kicked out of body
by Gilda and the one class that he went to
by being Richard Simmons basically, and then eventually founded a business.
At first it was an exercise studio slash salad bar.
I get what he's trying to do there. It was
(27:37):
called Roughage an anatomy asylum. And then eventually he was like,
you know, let's drop the salad bar. Let's just make
it a fitness center. Then obviously had the Richard Simmons
Show in nineteen eighty, started putting out those VHS tapes
in eighty three, and then in the late eighties. It's
all leading to this moment he puts out Sweating to
(27:59):
the Oldies, which I believe to date has grossed over
two hundred million dollars.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Amazing. It became the best selling home fitness video ever,
not Jane Fonda.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
Yeah, to the top of the heap, take that Pink Floyd.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Yeah, and don't forget deal a Meal. Remember that was
wildly successful too.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
Oh, that's right, that was it.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Yeah. It was like some color coded cards and you
could put different color coded cards together in your little
Dealer meal portfolio and that would be your meal for
the day. And if you followed these the instructions, you
would be able to lose weight. And he was really
into losing weight because he had been very overweight as
a child, and he was dedicated to making sure that
(28:39):
other people didn't suffer the way that he suffered. Yeah,
and he was very much dedicated, very sweet. He he
wasn't a phony, I guess. No.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
He was true to himself. He wanted to have fun
while he worked out. I love the guy. I know
you do too. He's just he's just one of the
great humans.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Yeah. He was also on a letterman a lot like
frequently great for sure, because he had a sense of
humor about himself. He wasn't like unaware of what people
how people looked at him.
Speaker 4 (29:09):
He just didn't care, and they both played their part.
I think Letterman he wasn't. I don't think, honestly, don't
think Letterman was as genuinely freaked out and turned off
by Richard Simmons in real life. I think it was
all just a bit and he's great. And you know,
I didn't follow the I didn't listen to h finding
Richard Simmons, but I did sort of follow the story
(29:31):
a little bit, and like my big takeaway was, and
I know they may have meant well because they thought
he was being held against his will, but I love
that the end result was like Richard Simmons is fine,
leave him alone, he doesn't want to be bothered anymore.
Just him, let him live his life, you know. So
(29:52):
winding down the talk of aerobics is when I want
to talk about my mom for a minute, because Lyvia
points out that, you know, it was marketed to women
as a way to like get in shape and lose weight,
but also to empower yourselves and to have some time
with other women. And my mom was like, and it
(30:12):
sounds like your mom to a certain degree, but my
mom specifically was sort of ideally in all the wrong ways,
situated to really get into this because she was. It
was in the eighties. She was in a very unhappy marriage.
Without getting into a lot of specifics, it was it
(30:33):
was not a good scene in my house, and my
parents didn't like each other much. My dad wasn't a
supportive good guy, and my mom dove into aerobics at
the American Fitness Center like I'd never seen anyone dive
into something.
Speaker 3 (30:50):
Before, become an instructor. She became an instructor.
Speaker 4 (30:53):
She later became a spinning instructor into her seventies I think,
or at least late sixties.
Speaker 3 (30:59):
And my dad was and I didn't.
Speaker 4 (31:02):
Really realize this at the time, but this is all
what was sort of just coming into my eyeballs and
my ear holes as a kid. He was not supportive
of it. He was threatened by it. He was a
I wish I could cuss. He was a real jerk
about it.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (31:15):
It's just interesting to look back at, like there were
a lot of women like my mom, I think in
the eighties.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Yeah, I could see him like talking her down about
it and her just being like, I can't hear you.
I'm empowering myself right now.
Speaker 4 (31:28):
Did your mom do this like would she just sit
around while the TV was on and do like leglists
and stuff.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Yeah, she was into all sorts of stuff like that,
like just had any like made for TV, not made
for TVs as seen on TV. Like exercise item we
probably had, remember the thigh master, Oh sure, and that
one thing It was like kind of a weird metal
cradle that helped you do sit ups and crunches better.
You just kind of rock back and forth on. We
(31:52):
had one of those. Had the mini trampolines. We had
all that.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
I remember it was called the something Rocker. I think,
actually I do remember.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Probably it had to have been not that was a
real miss.
Speaker 4 (32:02):
Yeah, But just to cherry on top of this with
my mom, I think not only was it empowering for her,
but I think it was also I think she was
totally sticking it to my dad At.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
The same time. I don't think my mom was trying
to stick it to my dad. But yeah, she sure
liked aerobics. Yeah, I'm sure it was empowering for her too,
definitely for sure.
Speaker 3 (32:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (32:23):
All right, so second break, second break starting now, all right,
(32:47):
so we need to talk about gems and gym culture.
The word gymnasium comes from the Greek gymns for naked
They in Germany. I think in the eighteen hundreds that's all.
They got real into gyms for a while and exercising,
but it was very spotty and obviously not a very
big thing at all culturally in the world for the
(33:09):
most part. But gyms were known, you know, like YMCA's
in the sixties and seventies were around.
Speaker 4 (33:15):
They were kind of not great. They kind of were stinky,
like any gym back then just wasn't like an awesome
place to go, Like, you didn't feel great walking into
one usually. But in nineteen thirty nine, a couple of
gyms opened that were that really changed the game. This
is nineteen thirty nine. Jack Lalane, health guru legend, opened
(33:38):
what's looked at as the very first health club in
the United States in Oakland, California, And that same year
a guy named Vic Tanny opened up a gym his
first gym in Santa Monica and Your Muscle Beach, both
in nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Yeah, Jack Lalane became kind of like that generation's well
I was gonna say Charles Atlas, but they kind of
overlapped its same time. I saw him on a nineteen
eighty something episode of The Richard Simmons Show as like
a special cast. But he was like a big proselytizer
and he told everybody to go work out because they're
getting pudgy, that kind of stuff. Vic Tanny he went
(34:15):
a different way. He, from what I can tell, established
the health club, which was huge in the seventies and eighties.
Health clubs where it was a place where you could
go not just work out with weights or whatever, but
they might have a pool, they probably had a racketball court.
A few of us for sure, they might have Apparently
(34:36):
some Vic Tanny clubs had ice skating rinks. I mean
like it was like you would go and you could
spend hours there and they were really nice. But vic
Tanny's whole model, I guess he overspent because they went
out of business I think in the sixties. But they
(34:56):
were so so beloved that other owners, local owners and
sometimes regional owners would just start buying them up and
just turn them into something else, which is still a
model that gets followed today.
Speaker 4 (35:09):
Yeah, like if you like to go to a gym
that has a whirlpool at a sauna and a steam
room and like you said, a racketball court. Like you
can thank Vic Tanny for that. He was the guy
that came up with this sort of all encompassing really
like something for everyone and also a place that you
(35:29):
want to go to that's not smelly and gross.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Right, I mean, they're always a little bit smelly, It depends.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
It depends. We used to go to one called Urban
Active and it did not smell, and Urban hold out
to La Fitness and it began to smell. Yeah, it
was very disappointing. Man, I'm telling you. The men's sauna
totally fine, and then within weeks it was like this
smells like button here. I can't even say in ten minutes.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Did the rules change or the cleaning methods?
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Like the cleaning methods, it's the explanation.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
Did everyone never mind?
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Yeah? I don't know, because I don't think the clientele
changed that quickly. You know, everybody's membership got transferred over.
It's just I think they stopped cleaning the butt smell
out of this aunus, which is what you want to
do if you have a public sawn.
Speaker 4 (36:15):
Okay, So now the health club is established in the
sort of mid early to mid nineteen sixties, like you said,
people jumped in there when Vic Tanny's chain went out
of business.
Speaker 3 (36:27):
Some were mom and pops.
Speaker 4 (36:29):
Sometimes companies would come in to start their own new
jam and buy up a bunch of them. Nautilus was
one of those that bought up a bunch of Victanny's
closed stores or what are we calling fitness centers stores,
And Nautilus was a big deal because it's like, hey,
like free weights can be intimidating for some people, and
like at Nautilus you can just change the setting and
(36:51):
it's a big machine and it's the same as freeweights.
I don't really know if it's the actual same or not,
but they marketed it as like you're still lifting weights.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
No, it's true, you definitely are. And it allowed people
a lot more entry into it. Like today, like you
go into a gym, there's so many machines there. That's
directly from Arthur Jones and his Nautilus machines that he
he started creating by hand. Basically he was like a
Kellogg brother.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
Oh wow, I like those things.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
Yeah, for sure. His whole thing was you you can
also exercise, get a full exercise or full workout and
much shorter amount of time than you could with weights,
and he basically emphasized working out until you just you
you had a temporary muscle failure and then you knew
you were done with your workout for the day. Right,
(37:40):
So seriously, that's what he encouraged.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
Muscle failure. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (37:44):
Uh So by the seventies when these clubs were opening up,
there were there were a couple of different models. One
was sort of the country club style that was probably
a country club and also had like racket sports and
all that other stuff, whirlpool and steam room. And then
there was the ones that my mom went to and
probably your mom went to that was probably in a
shopping center. Some of those could be really good and
(38:07):
some of them were pretty CREDI like anything else. If
it's just sort of not some huge chain, you know,
some are gonna be awesome, some aren't.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Yeah, my family went belonged to several different racket clubs
in Toledo, And the reason why so many is because
we had a long string of getting like your multi
year memberships at a racquet club and then within a
few months it would just go under. So we'd move
on to the next racket club and they'd take a
lot of our money too. So I think we did
this at least three times that I was aware of
(38:35):
when I was a kid. But we always had a
racket club membership somewhere.
Speaker 4 (38:40):
I fully thought you were gonna say, because you had
a run of getting expelled as a family went around.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Luckily not, No, we knew how to am in.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
Okay, I wish that would have been the case. That
would have been a good time.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
I can lie if you want to go back and
re record that part.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
No, that's right.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
So I think one of the gyms that people associate
with gyms in general is Gold Gym, And even still
to this day, that's like if you if you want
serious training and you're going to like you're not messing around,
You're not there to meet anybody except maybe a mentor
who's going to teach you how to get even more buff.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
That's where you would go as a Golds gym for sure.
Speaker 4 (39:16):
That was started by a bodybuilder named Joe Gold. And yeah,
you're totally right. I mean since the sixties it has
that rep. Is like a sort of serious weightlifters gym
Bally Total Bally Total Fitness, which if I'm not mistaken,
there may still be some independent American fitness centers, but
the ones that we belonged to, I believe Bally bought
(39:37):
them out and took them over.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
If I'm not mistaken, Well, Bally's gone now.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
I saw a twenty fifteen article there were five left
in the world.
Speaker 3 (39:44):
Really well this is a name.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Ok.
Speaker 4 (39:47):
Yeah, it was during the boom Sure and that was
founded by a former employee of Vic Tanny named Donna
Hugh Wildman, and like you said, was huge and then
sort of gave way to a their places like La
Fitness and twenty four hour Fittes.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
Yeah, and that whole reputation of gyms and health clubs
being impossible to cancel your membership and taking advantage of you,
that model was paided by Ballytotal Fitness. They were the ones. Yeah,
like they would you signed up for a three year contract,
but they didn't tell you that when you were signing up,
like business tactics like that. I wrote a story about
a woman who signed up for a lifetime contract in
(40:24):
nineteen eighty seven, paid fifty three dollars I think a
year and was still getting billed after Ballytotal Fitness went
like bankrupt, Like that's how much of it like shady
they were. They could still bill you even though they
weren't around any longer.
Speaker 3 (40:39):
Yeah, it was. It was the cell phone contract of.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
The exactly exactly, but that came from Ballytotal Fitness and
then twenty four hour Fitness actually won a different way.
A guy named Mark Mastrov was the first one to
institute monthly memberships rather than the standard annual ones.
Speaker 3 (40:54):
Great ideeah for sure.
Speaker 4 (40:56):
Yeah, people loved it and they got that name after
Mastroff realized it was originally six am to eleven, but
he was like, people are out here waiting for this
place to open. They don't want to leave at the
end of the night, So screw it, I'm taking the
locks off the door exactly.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Let yourselves in have a great time.
Speaker 4 (41:13):
What else, So you mentioned Curves, That is a huge thing.
There were women centric or women only fitness clubs like
as early as the nineteen sixties, but Curves is the
first one that was really like, you know what, if
you're over forty five and you're a woman and you
don't want to go to the gym to get hit
(41:34):
on by these gross guys and get galcked at or
laughed at or whatever, come to curves, we got a
program for you. It was started by a husband and
wife team, Gary and Diane Heaven with an Eye, and
I believe at one point or maybe still, it's the
largest fitness franchise in the world.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
They had like one hundred thousand different one hundred thousand locations,
ten thousand Oh was it okay? Still?
Speaker 3 (42:00):
Yeah, but that's still a lot.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
Yeah, sure, And again it was all over the world,
so it was pretty cool. Also, by the way, I
to myself pronounced their last name he even, but I
like your interpretation much more really, Yeah, okay, so Chuck.
There's still plenty of fitness clubs around. I think LA
Fitness is the leader, with more than two billion in
(42:22):
revenue a year. But one of the things that really
kind of happened starting in the nineties was that the
kind of fitness crazy just spread out. There was jogging, aerobics,
and maybe going to the gym, and then health clubs
(42:42):
kind of started. And then finally people are like, we've
done all this for a decade or so, now we
need some other stuff. So in a few cases they
actually went back to the future and grabbed some established
means of working out or exercising and revamped it for
the for the new millennium.
Speaker 4 (43:01):
Yeah, and yoga was certainly one of those. I just
started yoga two weeks ago, by the way, Yeah, for
the first time.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
In the last month or so. It's kind of gotten
under my skin. It's really awesome, isn't it.
Speaker 4 (43:12):
Yeah, And it's kicking my butt too. And I didn't underestimate.
I wasn't like, oh, you're just stretching and you're on
the floor and doing stuff like posing and stuff. It
wasn't like I thought it was going to be easy.
But it's kicking my butt and I'm like more sore
than I've been doing almost anything else.
Speaker 2 (43:29):
It's awesome. You also gained strength very quickly, though, like surprisingly.
Speaker 4 (43:32):
Quickly, and balance, and yoga is a great thing to
pick up at any time, but especially like you know,
in your fifties, because balance and core strength and all
that stuff as you age is really super important.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
For sure, It's always important. Yeah, well, yeah, flexibility.
Speaker 4 (43:49):
But yoga started, you know, in the nineteenth century and
in the sixties and then seventies or a couple of
really big PBS shows that grabbed the attention of a
lot of people and it's just always been pretty popular
and has never been more popular than it is now.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
Yeah, the nineteenth century is when it first was introduced
to the United States.
Speaker 3 (44:09):
I think, oh, is it like an ancient practice? Probably?
Speaker 2 (44:12):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it goes way back, way back.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
I think that's what I meant.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
And there's where my one hundred thousand came from that
I was confused about curves. There's at least one hundred
thousand yoga studios in the United States alone, and one
thing that's cool about yoga in particular is there are
some franchises, which is fine, but most yoga studios are
independently owned. They're just somebody who loves yoga so much
they opened up their own studio and you can come
(44:39):
to yoga there.
Speaker 3 (44:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (44:41):
And that's kind of the same with our next not
fad because it's been around for a while, but pilates.
It's kind of similar in that people will a lot
of mom and pop pilates places like for instance, the
person I dated in New Jersey, she ended up after
I left and we broke up and stuff. She moved
(45:03):
to Savannah, Georgia from New Jersey and started up her
own plate studio and This wasn't something that she did
at all when I was there, So it's definitely something
I think that, like yoga, people can get into it
and really get into it such that either I want
to be an instructor or I want to open up
my own business around it.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
Sure, and plates was named after Joseph Platts. I think
you said.
Speaker 3 (45:26):
I didn't say that, Oh, okay, So it is.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
Named after Joseph Platts. He was a German circus performer
and his circus happened to be in the UK when
World War One broke out and they said, oh you're German,
We're going to lock you up for four years while
the war goes on. So he and his whole troop
spent World War One locked up in the UK. And
while he was there, he started developing an exercise regimen
(45:50):
based on stretching that apparently saw cats chasing mice and
birds around the prison, and so he came up with
these exercises that imitated that. He claimed that when the
nineteen eighteen flu epidemic came to the island that he
was imprisoned on, not one person who followed his exercise
regimen got sick from it. Whether that's true or not,
(46:13):
it's a pretty great story. And then one other great
story about him is that he smoked fifteen cigars and
drank a leader of booze every day.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
What a guy.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
And he was like one of the gurus of fitness
from I mean we're talking back in the teens in
nineteen twenties.
Speaker 4 (46:30):
Yeah, that's amazing. I should probably plug Carol's studio. Oh yeah,
it's a Momentum Pilate studio and Samannah and I haven't
been in touch with her since then, So go to
Momentum and tell him.
Speaker 3 (46:44):
Tell her Chuck sent't you and she'll I'm.
Speaker 4 (46:45):
Sure she'll say like, oh, yeah, whatever happened to that guy?
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Nice? Very nice. And the people who come will say, oh,
let us tell you.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
Yeah, she'd be like a pod what.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
So Bars another one. They were definitely worth mentioning because
it incorporates elements of ballet, yoga, pilates and it's named
after the bar that well basically the handrail that runs
across the length of a wall that ballerinas frequently used.
But it was created by a German ballerina in the
(47:17):
forties or fifties now the fifties who fled to England.
She was her name was Lottie Burke, and she was
a free love advocate and so when she established bar
in the Bar exercises, she also coupled it with not
only is this going to make you feel great, it's
going to help your sex life. And that was an
overt message of taking bar from this through the sixties
(47:40):
and the seventies.
Speaker 3 (47:42):
I would have pronounced that, by the way, Lota.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Well, unlucky for you, I said it.
Speaker 4 (47:49):
First, you gather a very like Wisconsin e lotty ring
to it, Lotti, give me a lotty lotty. Burke boot
camp workouts became very popular in the nineties. Obviously took
on that sort of military style training where you didn't
need a lot of stuff, You just needed to meet
a bunch of strangers in a city park and have
(48:09):
someone yell at you for an hour for sure.
Speaker 3 (48:12):
What about Tybo?
Speaker 2 (48:13):
Tybo was created by Billy Blanks, who was legit. He
was the US Karate team captain for US Karate and
the US Olympic Karate team, so he was I mean,
he knew what he was doing, and he created Tybo,
which kind of incorporated kickboxing aerobics. If you've ever seen
(48:34):
if you were alive. I guess in probably the nineties
you saw the Billy Blanks Tybo infomercial and he managed
to sell a ton of tapes from that infomercial. It
was a very successful infomercial. I'm not sure how much
tibo is done still today, but I looked it up
to see if it was, you know, is it legit?
And it definitely is a legit workout.
Speaker 4 (48:55):
Oh sure, it's a butt kicker. I tried it once
and I was like, I can't do this. Yeah, but
it was another example of one of those that really
caught on in Hollywood in LA and so it had
a short, short ish life. I'm sure people still do it,
but the big Tybo craze.
Speaker 3 (49:11):
Was a few years for sure.
Speaker 4 (49:14):
What about high intensity interval training hitt hit. I know
this as Toabada because I was seeing a trainer for
a while and we did. She put me through Toabada
basically every time. And that was named after a sports
scientist's named Izumi Tabata who in the mid nineties was
(49:36):
working with Olympic speed skating coaches to create what was
a form of high intensity interval training.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
Right where you do something like pushups or burpies or
mountain climbers or something like that for maybe twenty seconds,
rest for ten seconds, and then you're immediately off into
the next exercise for twenty seconds, and sometimes after four
minutes you might get a minute of rest. It depends
on how long the Tobata workout is. Like a twelve
(50:04):
minute one, you would not get any rest in between.
Certainly not a minute, I should say. But the point
is you're getting a high intensity workout in a very
short amount of time. So you're doing like a twelve
to twenty minute workout and you're getting the same impact
that you would have gotten from say like a thirty
(50:25):
to forty minute workout of lower intensity, but still not
low intensity, I mean moderate intensity training. This is just
super duper intensity, high intensity training, and Tabata definitely established that.
Speaker 4 (50:37):
Yeah, it's great if you're short on time. Obviously, I
think our workouts were thirty minutes, and you know, they
were great.
Speaker 3 (50:44):
I enjoyed it. There were butt kickers, but I liked.
Speaker 2 (50:46):
It, yeah, I should say. Speaking of Toabada Japanese guy,
you reminded me that like exercise is really really big
in Japan, so much so that people have or definitely
had loud speakers in their house and like in their
local community or maybe even their region. Every morning they
(51:07):
would be like, good morning, it's time to do exercises,
and everybody would do the same exercises in their house
to the voice over the loud speakers called radio taiso.
Speaker 3 (51:17):
Oh interesting. And they also did like corporate calisthenics and stuff.
Speaker 2 (51:20):
Right, Yeah, they were just into like collective exercise for
a long time.
Speaker 3 (51:25):
That's great.
Speaker 4 (51:27):
And then the last couple we'll talk about are zumba
and CrossFit. Zumba very popular, still popular. Apparently was created
by accident in the mid nineties by Alberto Beto Perez
and he was a sixteen year old aerobics teacher in Colombia. Apparently,
as the story goes, at least forgot the usual music
(51:49):
and said, I'll just play the music that I have
and it turned into sort of a fun Latin dance
exercise class.
Speaker 2 (51:56):
Yeah, and just took off like a rocket. I think
he was on the cover of Ink magazine once. I
mean like he just like it was just crazy how
how much it took off. And it's still huge. Soom
was still very much popular a couple of decades later.
And then CrossFit is wildly popular too, not among everybody,
(52:16):
but the people that it's popular with. It's wildly popular,
so much so that it's commonly referred to as like
a cult or something like that, because people love talking
about CrossFit and proselytizing for it. But the point of
CrossFit is kind of like what Arthur Jones, the Nautilus creator,
was talking about, where you work out until you are
(52:37):
you like just short of injuring yourself, essentially, where you
feel like you want to throw up and like you
can't do anymore. And it combines weightlifting, gymnastics, a bunch
of different stuff, but it's a really really intense workout
that you really have to work your way up to.
You shouldn't just jump into a CrossFit class. And if
you go to a good CrossFit boxes what the studio
(53:00):
are called, they're not going to just let you jump
into it, right, because you can really hurt yourself.
Speaker 3 (53:06):
Yeah, I'm CrossFit. Doesn't interesting you know me either.
Speaker 2 (53:09):
We've done it before and it's not fun.
Speaker 3 (53:11):
Yeah, I'm making yoga though Emily and are doing it together.
It's fun. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (53:15):
And if you like CrossFit, hey man, we're not yucking
your young well, of course our own personal experience, so
settle down.
Speaker 3 (53:21):
No, I don't want to work out until I throw up.
That's me. Yeah, for sure, this is a good one.
Speaker 2 (53:26):
It was a good one. I hope we inspired you
to do some exercise because it's good for you. I
don't care what anybody says. It's good for you. And
even if it's not good for weight loss, which we
found over the years, definitely not, it's good for mental health.
I think we've said plenty of times. So just that alone.
Speaker 3 (53:43):
Makes it worthwhile, very worthwhile.
Speaker 2 (53:46):
If you want to know more about exercising, then just start.
It's really easy these days. And since I said that,
it's time for listener.
Speaker 3 (53:53):
Mail, I'm going to call this coliseum follow up.
Speaker 4 (53:58):
Hey, guys, quick note about the how do we pronounce
it hippogium or hypogem?
Speaker 3 (54:04):
I don't remember.
Speaker 2 (54:05):
I think I called it a hypogium.
Speaker 3 (54:07):
Hypogum, all right.
Speaker 4 (54:08):
Quick note about the Hypogeum and the mock naval battles
that were reportedly held inside the Colosseum. As you noted,
the Hypogeum was created after the Amphitheater was built. The
flooding of the floor of the Colosseum only happened in
the first decade of the structure and before the hypogm
Hypogeum sorry was dug and created. Once the Hypogeum was constructed,
(54:29):
it was no longer possible to flood and drain the Colosseum.
Speaker 3 (54:33):
That makes sense, and that is from Dave Stemble.
Speaker 2 (54:38):
Dave those great, to the point authoritative, like a shake
from Jim Carter.
Speaker 3 (54:44):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (54:45):
If you want to get in touch with this like
Dave Dave did, Dave's got a great handshake too, I'm
sure you can send us an email. Send it off
to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should
Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts myheart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(55:08):
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and Chuck's
here too, and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff
you should know about the history of exercising.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Yes, I found this super fascinating.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Yeah, it is pretty fascinating.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
I don't know. I it just grabbed me.
Speaker 4 (00:28):
And I guess it grabbed me earlier because it was
my idea because I think, I don't know, maybe i'd
seen Anchorman and they made the yogging joke, and then
I remembered hearing that, you know, exercises sort of new, right,
if you look at not only the history of humans,
but the history of America, it's only been around for
(00:49):
you know, you know, fifty ish years, sixty maybe.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yeah, I mean in ancient times they were pretty into fitness,
but then it kind of dropped off for a couple
thousand years, and we picked it up again in nineteen
sixty roughly at very least the decade of the sixties.
And like you said, specifically in America in the United States,
I should.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Say, yeah, so should we do it?
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeah. The whole thing is that the first half of
the twentieth century It's not like there weren't people exercising, right,
they were out there, they were just considered weirdos or possibly.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
Gay, exactly. They didn't even really use the word exercise much.
It was called physical culture, and like you said, it
was a real niche thing. The obviously there were you know,
sports and athletes and people like that were doing physical training,
and the military did stuff like that, and there was bodybuilding,
but that was super niche too, But as far as
(01:44):
like your regular average American walking around, they were just
walking around or sitting in chairs.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
They were walking around, eating a steak while they walked around.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
That's what they were doing with the martini, and you
did mention, you know, possibly gay, and that was a
characteristic early on. Is like, if you are a man
and it's nineteen forty something or fifty something and you
want to have like a nice body and you want muscles,
people might say, well, you're probably gay or you're probably
(02:17):
a narcissist, because gems are for gay men to meet
each other.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
And that was just sort of the perception at the time, exactly.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
And then women didn't have it much better. They were
almost culturally forbidden from exercising it in the first place,
it was unlady like to engage in exercise, or typically
considered that. On top of that, exercises, you're exercising for yourself.
It's kind of the basis of exercise, and that also
(02:44):
seemed unseemly for women to engage in such a self
indulgent pursuit, right. And then on top of that, there
was a general idea that your uterus might fall out
if you exercise too vigorously.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Yeah, or just you know, you may not be able
to get pregnant if you exercise, So just don't do that.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
Just stay on your feet all day and do the housework.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Right exactly, which, as we'll see, is actually an example
of moderate physical activity.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
That's right. It's better than sitting down.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
So in about nineteen sixty, if you asked Americans, hey,
do you exercise regularly? I'm surprised with this, about a
quarter of Americans would have.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
Said, yes, that seemed high.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
It does. It seems high to me too. In nineteen
eighty seven, less than thirty years later, that answer to
that question was yes from almost seventy percent of people.
So in those three decades from nineteen sixty till the
eighties through the eighties, exercise came on the scene and
just jelled with the world. In the United States in particular.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
Yeah, I would be curious to see that poll and
see exactly how it was worded and defined, right, because
that twenty four percent seems high. I could see people
just being like, well, sure I cut the lawn, right,
you know that kind of.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Thing, and regularly was once within the last three years.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Yeah, you cut the lawn once every three years.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Right. So again, it wasn't just women who were considered
at risk health wise from exercise. Everybody was considered at risk.
If you exercise too much, you were probably over taxing
your heart and you're probably gonna die young. They actually
thought athletes were at risk of dying young from over
exerting themselves. And then it was finally, I think about
(04:34):
in the late forties when a British epidemiologist named Jeremy N.
Morris and that and and the Morris makes me want
to say Norris so bad. I mean, it's a real
it's a weird combination. But he said, you know what,
I like to jog, and I liked exercise, and I
think that this is wrong. So I'm going to go
about studying it in the most clever way possible.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
Yeah, it's a pretty interesting study. And by the way,
Livia put this together for us, and as usual.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
I think she crushed it, knocked it out of the park.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
I had no notes. Not that we're usually noddy, No,
you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
No, we're not very nody.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
I like to just a gold star, right, But yeah,
he had a really ingenious and sort of contained way
to study this. He did lots of other studies, but
one of the ways he did it was he said,
you know, we got these big double decker buses in England.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Everybody's seen those.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
Everyone's seen those, and there's there's two people who work
on those. There's the guy who drives them, and then
there's the guy who is the bus conductor. And he's
always huffing it up and down those stairs. And you know,
granted it's not like forty stairs or anything, but they're
steep and you're climbing those things all day long, back
and forth. So he was like, I got a nice
little captive audience of of people who are pretty similar
(05:48):
probably in lifestyle and in age and stuff like that,
and one of them exercises one of them doesn't. And
he found that drivers had twice more than twice as
many heart attacks as conductors. And he was like, wait
a minute, did some more studying and said, hey, everybody,
I think exercising is good for your heart.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Yeah, and other people were like, wait a minute, let
us check it out. Well, wha, it's true. Study after
studies started coming in saying like, not only does exercise
not put you in an early grave, it actually probably
prevents you from an early grave. So maybe we should
all start exercising. So this was so in the fifties.
This was the era of proving that exercise was good
(06:28):
for you, and then by the time the sixties rolled around,
people were ready to start getting into it. And at
first it seems like they were. They were more hardcore,
surprisingly enough at first than we are today because you
look around and like so many people exercise today, especially
in comparison to like the sixties and seventies at the
(06:48):
beginning of the boom. But people have just kind of
mellowed out a little bit. Before it was just like
as intense as you could you could possibly get in
every single way.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Well, I mean, these are the people that drank three
martinis at lunch.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yeah, yeah, they did not want hardcore.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Right, Yeah, you're just going to do something, You're going
to do it hard.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
So in fact, we were talking about those people because
the culture of work really changed since about the mid
nineteenth century when people moved away, not entirely, obviously we
still had farmers and stuff, but you know, mainstream America
moved away from hard labor jobs into desk jobs, and
they started to worry that the sedentary lifestyle wasn't good
(07:28):
for them. In the mid seventies is when corporate America
started tuning in because Fortune magazine wrote an article that
basically said, Hey, all these CEOs and board members that
we have are just a bunch of and this is
of course in the mid seventies. There are a bunch
of old, sort of overweight, white fat cats, and they're
all having heart attacks and it's costing our firms and
(07:51):
corporations about seven hundred million bucks a year. And this
is mid seventies numbers. And so it was them who
started the health boom. It was sort of like corporate CEOs,
I think in the sixties and seventies, Livia found some
research that found that generally, like the people that started
this whole thing were college educated, they had some money,
(08:12):
and they were generally white people.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Yeah, that's who kicked off the boom. Today, the differential
in race is pretty much erased, but there's still a
gap in education where if you have college or some
college or a bachelor's degree, you're about twice as likely
to exercise on an average day as somebody who just
(08:36):
has a degree from high school. Really interesting, it is interesting.
Another thing that happened too, not just the health aspect,
but in the twentieth century, because of that increasing sedentariness,
Americans became a lot more fixated on how you looked physically,
especially weight, whether you were overweight or not, and there
(08:58):
became a much greater emphasis on not being overweight, and
that really dovetailed with the idea of taking care of
your insides while also taking care of your outsides, and
that really kind of provided the foundation for kind of
funneling people into the exercise boom of the sixties and seventies.
(09:19):
You could live longer, you could look better, so just
go exercise. Let's all give it a try.
Speaker 4 (09:24):
Yeah, for sure. And into the eighties is when you
really saw a boom and women exercising more and more.
The whole fitness movement was almost geared toward women at
that point for a number of reasons. One was, you know,
women trying to become more empowered, women gaining power and empowerment.
The feminist movement that said, all right, if you're you're
(09:47):
gonna do that in the workplace, why not be strong
in your personal life, physically strong, strong like bull Yeah, exactly,
and so be strong and your work life, be strong
in your physical life. Title nine, of course, really helped
things out because all of a sudden, girls sports were
getting more funding and more attention. And then, like you said,
the standards for physical attractiveness changing was for men and
(10:10):
women and everyone across the gender spectrum exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
So the first thing that really caught everybody's attention was jogging.
That was the one that really laid the groundwork, and
jogging grew out of legitimate running like it came most
people peg. A New Zealand Olympic track coach named Arthur
Lydiard as the guy who if he wasn't interested or
(10:35):
involved in bringing jogging to the masses, he still was
kind of like the inadvertent father of the whole thing,
because in the sixties, he came up with training techniques
for marathon runners that people still use today. It's really simple,
really basic, but it's really effective. It's things like on
a Monday, you run ten miles a half effort over
(10:59):
hills and roads, and then Tuesday you do you know,
flat fifteen mile run or something like that. I don't
think that's exactly it, but people use it today. And
the fact that there was now a framework that anybody
could just buy this book or buy this pamphlet and
approach jogging that really kind of helped usher people in.
(11:21):
But again, bear in mind, this is an Olympic level
track coach who's establishing this stuff, and this was people's
first entree into jogging. So the earliest joggers were hard core,
like scary. I'm a little nervous about them. And we're
talking about people who are running around in the sixties
and seventies.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Yeah, I think they.
Speaker 4 (11:42):
I think they like to be called runners, those types. Sure,
they're like, you're a jogger, Chuck, Actually not even.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
That speed walker like Chris Paul, I should do speed
walking to me, Jim, I'm sorry, speedwalking is way harder
than jogging.
Speaker 4 (11:57):
Oh do you mean like on your cardio or just
your body. Yeah, well cardio, yes, intent to look cool?
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Okay. Well, but.
Speaker 4 (12:06):
So in the mid nineteen sixties, a guy you may
have heard of named Bill Bowerman. He was a running
coach from the University of Oregon, Go Ducks and co
founder of a little company called Nike. He published a
pamphlet kind of based on stuff Arthur Lydiard had been
talking about, and then eventually wrote this book that I
remember seeing on in houses of like friends of mine.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Really for sure it was. It was a very big book.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
It was called Jogging Colon even back then, a physical
fitness program for all ages. He co wrote it with
a cardiologist named W. E. Harris, talked about all the
health benefits of running, and it really caught on. It's
really funny though, like people still like it caught on,
but it was still.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
Sort of a new thing.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
So The New York Times wrote an article that demonstrated
and this was in April of nineteen sixty eight that
like when people were running like co occasionally they had
real stories, like a cop would stop and say like
why are you running?
Speaker 3 (13:05):
What are you running from? Or what did you do?
Or people that were.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
Runners and joggers said, you know, I like to run
at night because people don't stare at me.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
It don't feel as weird. So it's just so funny
to look back at, you know. And this was in
the late sixties, that people jogging on the streets where
you were like, what's up on that person? Why are
they running?
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Right? And at night they like to run in all
black with a black watch cap and black mask covering
their eyes.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Yes, very safe.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
There was another guy who really brought jogging to the masses.
His name was Jim Fix. He wrote the Complete Book
of Running, released in nineteen seventy seven, and he I
remember there was a proselytizer for running, if there ever
was one, it was him Fix. Yeah, And he ironically
died while jogging. He ran himself to death. He had
a massive heart attack while jogging. But he's still I mean,
(13:54):
it doesn't really undo what he did, which was, Hey, everybody,
let's let's go jog. And that's what Anchorman was referring to.
Was that, right, the jogging trend that Jim Fix helped
usher in in the late seventies.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
But there was another gym in the seventies. A man
by the name of president Jim Carter, it'd be weird.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
So weird does sound weird? He's such a Jimmy, He
totally is Jim. It seems like you'd have an overly
strong handshake.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Right, Jim Carter.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Jim Carter, good to meet you. Yeah, what have you
done for me lately?
Speaker 3 (14:27):
He high five.
Speaker 4 (14:29):
But this was at a time in the seventies when
the president of the United States had influence on popular culture.
Like I don't feel like presidents really have that much anymore. No, No,
it's dying fast at least. And he was a jogger
from the White House. This is the late seventies. He
would jog sometimes ten twelve miles at a time, really
(14:51):
got into it.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
And The New York Times wrote about this, of course.
Speaker 4 (14:55):
And you know, if if someone's in the White House
jogging and running, then that normalizes it for a lot
of America.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
Yeah, I read an article about that. I don't know
if it was the New York Times one or not,
but he yeah, it wasn't New York Times. It chronicled
him going on this run like he held like a
fun run basically at Camp David, and he almost collapsed
on one of the hills and had to be ushered
off and taken to the hospital. Oh really, yeah, And
(15:23):
he was like running with you know, dozens, scores, if
not hundreds of other people on this fun run, and
they were running with the president, and he had Secret
Service guys running with them keeping pace. But he he
had to leave the race that he helped organize because
he just went too hard. That was how they used
to do it.
Speaker 4 (15:42):
Did they say over a bullhorn now dropping out a
runner of thirty two jim Carter?
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Shame, shame. That's how they used to.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
Do would you. Oh was that Sean Connery?
Speaker 2 (15:56):
No, I didn't mean it, but sure, I'll take that. Yeah,
that was Sean Henri shaming Jimmy Carter on that run
in the late seventies.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
It sounded like Sean you doing Sean Connery saying same.
That's how it heard in my.
Speaker 4 (16:11):
Yes, shame traback so speaking of the New York Times,
and I guess we'll take a break after this. But
in the late nineties ninety seven they wrote an article
kind of looking back on running and jogging, and they
were keen to point out that, like even into the seventies, zho,
it was still a bit of a subculture. Like you said,
(16:32):
they were like running and jogging enthusiasts, But it wasn't
like tons of mainstream Americans were running. It was still
like what are those people doing? Like should I do that?
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Right?
Speaker 3 (16:41):
All right? Okay, break time?
Speaker 2 (16:43):
I think it is break time.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
All right, we'll be right back with aerobics.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Okay. So you've got jogging that's on the scene, then
you have aerobics too. This was the one that was
like probably the most popular thing of the eighties. If
you ask me, I think I think aerobics dominated the eighties.
Jogging the seventies, and aerobics was around a lot longer
than just the eighties. It was one of those things where,
(17:28):
you know, some people who were kind of into exercising
kind of developed it on their own separately, and then
it just took a little while to get more and
more popular as word of mouth spread. But there's a
guy named Kenneth Cooper who started it all again in
the sixties. He was a US Air Force surgeon and
he was like, you know those that weightlifting, the calisthetics
(17:49):
that the military uses for training. It's all well and good,
but these guys are like like dying on these these
runs and jogs and hikes.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
They've got no aerobic stamina.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Stamina exactly. So he started looking into it and he
was like, I think we need to start using what
we call now cardio. But Jack then it was aerobic exercise.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
Yeah, he was a jogger. He said, I think aerobics
is being sold short. So he wrote a book in
nineteen sixty eight called Aerobics, and he said, you know,
running and walking and biking is what people should be doing.
And that was his idea of aerobics at the time,
was just getting that heart rate up sustaining it for
an extended period of time. He had a pretty clever
(18:35):
test where he could basically tell you in about twelve
minutes what kind of like how good of shape you
were in. But then what happened was really really awesome.
Like I really love this section because my mom figures
into this, which I'll get to as we as we go.
But women in the United States said, you know, what
they're talking about running and biking and walking, but what
(18:58):
they're really talking about is getting your heart rate up
for an extended period of time. So I'm going to
make that my own. And there was one woman in particular,
very early on, there were some real trailblazers here. She
was a dance teacher, also an Air Force wife, no coincidence,
by the name of Jackie Sorenson. She read that book,
she took that fitness test and found out she was
(19:18):
in really good shape. And she was like, but wait
a minute, I don't run. How can I be in
this good of shape. She was like, I'm a dancer.
I'm getting my heart rate up. And so she in
nineteen sixty nine came up with a danced base exercise
class on the Air Force base in Puerto Rico where
they were stationed, and the Air Force said, we should
produce this as a TV show, which is really weird,
(19:41):
and they did. It was called Aerobic Dancing, and eventually
she published a book as well in the late seventies,
but she I think was.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
One of the first ones. It really was like, you
don't have to run.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
You can be in a room and do this as
long as you get that heart rate up exactly.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
And also it just is much more engaging and fun.
No too, you know, biking and jogging those are very
frequently solitary pursuits. Aerobics was a bunch of people getting
together in a room and having fun together to like
popular music.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Right yeah, clapping in, yelling and doing all that.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Exactly and encouraging one another. So this was really attractive
to women at the time because this was you know,
they were still coming out of this social expectation that
they shouldn't really be exercising, and now they were saying,
you know, to heck with you guys, We're gonna do
this anyway. And this was it was almost like there
was strength in numbers, but there was also there was
(20:33):
a social component to it as well. There was another
woman named Judy Shepherd. She started out in the sixties
as well, but she became the founder of jazzer Size.
That's my mom used to jazzer size. I remember. She
even had a poster of Judy Shepherd doing different moves
that came with her record, like record, vinyl record. I
(20:55):
should say, oh yeah, so my mom would do jazzer
size at home. She went to jesuitize class, so she
was into it for sure.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
It was originally called jazz and Dance for fun and fitness.
Jazzer Size is way more marketable, and this to me,
maybe the fact of the podcast it was a Jazzer Size,
you know, was a copywritten or whatever, an owned title
I hope by Judy Shepherd. I didn't look that up,
but it ended up being a franchise, and in nineteen
(21:24):
eighty four, Jazzer Size was the second biggest franchise company
in the United States behind Domino's Pizza.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
That's really something because that was at the time when
Dominoes is like, we're going to get your pizza in
thirty minutes or lesser. It's free. So everybody was into
Dominoes at the time.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
Is right before the NOID, I think right like two.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Years before the NOID. I looked it up. So Judy
Shepherd created what's known as the boutique fitness franchise model,
where it was a specific kind of exercise, usually some
sort of branded exercise like Jazzer Size, that you could
go set up in a strip mall for a minimal
initial output and people would come flock to your Jazzer
(22:03):
Size studio. And you still see that today in certain
places like Bar has a lot of like franchises, different
kinds of franchises, curves, which we'll talk about later. That's
a franchise. But Judy Shepherd started that with jazzer science.
Speaker 4 (22:17):
Yeah, very big deal. Then there was a woman named
Gilda Marx, married into the Marx brothers family had taken
when growing up. Apparently was a dancer and even worked
out with weights, which was very unusual at the time
because that would have been in I guess the thirties
and forties. And in nineteen sixty or thereabouts, she was
(22:38):
choreographing a show, a charity show in Los Angeles, created
an exercise routine so all the dancers could you know,
get in better shape, and everyone loved it. Everyone's like,
this is awesome. And she said, wait a minute, I'm
onto something here. So she in her backyard started aerobics classes,
then rented studios, and then eventually and it became a
(23:00):
very big and as you'll see, sort of when something
becomes like a big Hollywood thing and celebrities do it,
it becomes a popular thing everywhere, of course, and it
was gonna Yes, that's surprising.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
And it was called Body by Gilda.
Speaker 4 (23:12):
And it was not only a big deal because Body
by Gilda was a big deal, but it was a
big deal because she ended up having two clients by
the name of Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Yes, huge, like so so. Gilda Marx essentially created the
popularity of aeroba and it's like jazzer size was there.
It was very popular. The like aerobic dancing that was
very popular too, But it was like celebrities like Jane
Fonda and Richard Simmons who became a celebrity just for
(23:45):
getting into exercise that really really increased it in popularity.
And Jane Fonda just straight up ripped off Gilda Marx.
She took a couple of her classes at a Body
by Gilda in Century City and the next year she
set up her own I think a couple of years later,
she published Jane Fonda's Workout Book, which became an extremely
(24:06):
popular bestseller. It was number one on the nonfiction list
and stayed there for six months.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
By the way, two million books.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
That's amazing. We're almost there. We're getting there with our book, right,
we're gnawing away at her record. But she also released
a VHS tape that was wildly popular too. And that's why,
I mean, people of a certain age today still associate
Jane Fonda with exercise and aerobics, and then the people
(24:35):
of a certain age parents associate her with funneling money
to the Viet Cong, Right, still do for sure? Yeah,
they're still mad about it.
Speaker 4 (24:44):
Oh yeah, still mad. Here's another stat for you. The
Jane Fonda Workout Tape was the first non movie VHS
tape to top the sales chart, and it was number
one as far as VHS sales go for six years
and the whole run of them.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
She ended up making.
Speaker 4 (25:03):
Follow up tapes, but the whole collected Jane fond of
Workout Tape set has sold I'm sorry, between eighty two
and ninety five sold seventeen million days.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Wow, that's fun.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
I mean, numbers like that are amazing, she'd be. I
don't even what that translates to and record sales, but
it's what's the biggest platinum sellar?
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Double plat platinum's a million?
Speaker 3 (25:27):
Oh really, what's the best platinum or what's the high?
Speaker 2 (25:30):
I think they just keep going like triple platinum, quadruple platinum.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
That kind.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
So she was seventeen platinum.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
Yeah, that is extraordinarily impressive, and that really does put
it into perspective because not a lot of records go platinum,
especially not think of times over. Yeah exactly, Although I
will say she didn't have that much competition back then.
The only other two movies on VHS were Beverly Hills
Cop and The Empire Strikes Back.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
Very nice.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
So the other person that was a body by Gilda
graduate after just one class, it turned out, yeah, sort
of was one of the greatest people ever to run
around planet Earth. Richard Simmons. He if you're not familiar
with Richard Simmons, or if you just know him from
finding Richard Simmons podcast, even if you're just tangentially familiar
(26:18):
with him from you know, living through the era where
he was on TV everywhere all the time, go check
out Richard Simmons' testimony before Congress. He span has a
clip of it when he went and testified before Congress
I think of the nineties, maybe early nineties, I think,
And he gives it's Richard Simmons in a suit and tie,
(26:38):
so just that is worth going to see. It's bizarre
to see. But then he opens his mouth and it's
just the same old Richard Simmons, and he gives this
impassioned speech that like will kind of make you tear
up a little bit and give you chills. And then
he also had some laughs in there. He's just great,
just a great person. And this guy everyone at the
time thought he was just totally No one ever thought
(27:01):
Richard Simmons was like he was never normal, right, but
he was so himself that he just sucked people into
his orbit and he became like a really really popular star,
I would guess, one of the most famous people in
the world for a brief period in the early eighties.
Speaker 4 (27:17):
Absolutely like you said, he got kicked out of body
by Gilda and the one class that he went to
by being Richard Simmons basically, and then eventually founded a business.
At first it was an exercise studio slash salad bar.
I get what he's trying to do there. It was
(27:37):
called Roughage an anatomy asylum. And then eventually he was like,
you know, let's drop the salad bar. Let's just make
it a fitness center. Then obviously had the Richard Simmons
Show in nineteen eighty, started putting out those VHS tapes
in eighty three, and then in the late eighties. It's
all leading to this moment he puts out Sweating to
(27:59):
the Oldies, which I believe to date has grossed over
two hundred million dollars.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Amazing. It became the best selling home fitness video ever,
not Jane Fonda.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
Yeah, to the top of the heap, take that Pink Floyd.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Yeah, and don't forget deal a Meal. Remember that was
wildly successful too.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
Oh, that's right, that was it.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Yeah. It was like some color coded cards and you
could put different color coded cards together in your little
Dealer meal portfolio and that would be your meal for
the day. And if you followed these the instructions, you
would be able to lose weight. And he was really
into losing weight because he had been very overweight as
a child, and he was dedicated to making sure that
(28:39):
other people didn't suffer the way that he suffered. Yeah,
and he was very much dedicated, very sweet. He he
wasn't a phony, I guess. No.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
He was true to himself. He wanted to have fun
while he worked out. I love the guy. I know
you do too. He's just he's just one of the
great humans.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Yeah. He was also on a letterman a lot like
frequently great for sure, because he had a sense of
humor about himself. He wasn't like unaware of what people
how people looked at him.
Speaker 4 (29:09):
He just didn't care, and they both played their part.
I think Letterman he wasn't. I don't think, honestly, don't
think Letterman was as genuinely freaked out and turned off
by Richard Simmons in real life. I think it was
all just a bit and he's great. And you know,
I didn't follow the I didn't listen to h finding
Richard Simmons, but I did sort of follow the story
(29:31):
a little bit, and like my big takeaway was, and
I know they may have meant well because they thought
he was being held against his will, but I love
that the end result was like Richard Simmons is fine,
leave him alone, he doesn't want to be bothered anymore.
Just him, let him live his life, you know. So
(29:52):
winding down the talk of aerobics is when I want
to talk about my mom for a minute, because Lyvia
points out that, you know, it was marketed to women
as a way to like get in shape and lose weight,
but also to empower yourselves and to have some time
with other women. And my mom was like, and it
(30:12):
sounds like your mom to a certain degree, but my
mom specifically was sort of ideally in all the wrong ways,
situated to really get into this because she was. It
was in the eighties. She was in a very unhappy marriage.
Without getting into a lot of specifics, it was it
(30:33):
was not a good scene in my house, and my
parents didn't like each other much. My dad wasn't a
supportive good guy, and my mom dove into aerobics at
the American Fitness Center like I'd never seen anyone dive
into something.
Speaker 3 (30:50):
Before, become an instructor. She became an instructor.
Speaker 4 (30:53):
She later became a spinning instructor into her seventies I think,
or at least late sixties.
Speaker 3 (30:59):
And my dad was and I didn't.
Speaker 4 (31:02):
Really realize this at the time, but this is all
what was sort of just coming into my eyeballs and
my ear holes as a kid. He was not supportive
of it. He was threatened by it. He was a
I wish I could cuss. He was a real jerk
about it.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (31:15):
It's just interesting to look back at, like there were
a lot of women like my mom, I think in
the eighties.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Yeah, I could see him like talking her down about
it and her just being like, I can't hear you.
I'm empowering myself right now.
Speaker 4 (31:28):
Did your mom do this like would she just sit
around while the TV was on and do like leglists
and stuff.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Yeah, she was into all sorts of stuff like that,
like just had any like made for TV, not made
for TVs as seen on TV. Like exercise item we
probably had, remember the thigh master, Oh sure, and that
one thing It was like kind of a weird metal
cradle that helped you do sit ups and crunches better.
You just kind of rock back and forth on. We
(31:52):
had one of those. Had the mini trampolines. We had
all that.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
I remember it was called the something Rocker. I think,
actually I do remember.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Probably it had to have been not that was a
real miss.
Speaker 4 (32:02):
Yeah, But just to cherry on top of this with
my mom, I think not only was it empowering for her,
but I think it was also I think she was
totally sticking it to my dad At.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
The same time. I don't think my mom was trying
to stick it to my dad. But yeah, she sure
liked aerobics. Yeah, I'm sure it was empowering for her too,
definitely for sure.
Speaker 3 (32:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (32:23):
All right, so second break, second break starting now, all right,
(32:47):
so we need to talk about gems and gym culture.
The word gymnasium comes from the Greek gymns for naked
They in Germany. I think in the eighteen hundreds that's all.
They got real into gyms for a while and exercising,
but it was very spotty and obviously not a very
big thing at all culturally in the world for the
(33:09):
most part. But gyms were known, you know, like YMCA's
in the sixties and seventies were around.
Speaker 4 (33:15):
They were kind of not great. They kind of were stinky,
like any gym back then just wasn't like an awesome
place to go, Like, you didn't feel great walking into
one usually. But in nineteen thirty nine, a couple of
gyms opened that were that really changed the game. This
is nineteen thirty nine. Jack Lalane, health guru legend, opened
(33:38):
what's looked at as the very first health club in
the United States in Oakland, California, And that same year
a guy named Vic Tanny opened up a gym his
first gym in Santa Monica and Your Muscle Beach, both
in nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Yeah, Jack Lalane became kind of like that generation's well
I was gonna say Charles Atlas, but they kind of
overlapped its same time. I saw him on a nineteen
eighty something episode of The Richard Simmons Show as like
a special cast. But he was like a big proselytizer
and he told everybody to go work out because they're
getting pudgy, that kind of stuff. Vic Tanny he went
(34:15):
a different way. He, from what I can tell, established
the health club, which was huge in the seventies and eighties.
Health clubs where it was a place where you could
go not just work out with weights or whatever, but
they might have a pool, they probably had a racketball court.
A few of us for sure, they might have Apparently
(34:36):
some Vic Tanny clubs had ice skating rinks. I mean
like it was like you would go and you could
spend hours there and they were really nice. But vic
Tanny's whole model, I guess he overspent because they went
out of business I think in the sixties. But they
(34:56):
were so so beloved that other owners, local owners and
sometimes regional owners would just start buying them up and
just turn them into something else, which is still a
model that gets followed today.
Speaker 4 (35:09):
Yeah, like if you like to go to a gym
that has a whirlpool at a sauna and a steam
room and like you said, a racketball court. Like you
can thank Vic Tanny for that. He was the guy
that came up with this sort of all encompassing really
like something for everyone and also a place that you
(35:29):
want to go to that's not smelly and gross.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Right, I mean, they're always a little bit smelly, It depends.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
It depends. We used to go to one called Urban
Active and it did not smell, and Urban hold out
to La Fitness and it began to smell. Yeah, it
was very disappointing. Man, I'm telling you. The men's sauna
totally fine, and then within weeks it was like this
smells like button here. I can't even say in ten minutes.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Did the rules change or the cleaning methods?
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Like the cleaning methods, it's the explanation.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
Did everyone never mind?
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Yeah? I don't know, because I don't think the clientele
changed that quickly. You know, everybody's membership got transferred over.
It's just I think they stopped cleaning the butt smell
out of this aunus, which is what you want to
do if you have a public sawn.
Speaker 4 (36:15):
Okay, So now the health club is established in the
sort of mid early to mid nineteen sixties, like you said,
people jumped in there when Vic Tanny's chain went out
of business.
Speaker 3 (36:27):
Some were mom and pops.
Speaker 4 (36:29):
Sometimes companies would come in to start their own new
jam and buy up a bunch of them. Nautilus was
one of those that bought up a bunch of Victanny's
closed stores or what are we calling fitness centers stores,
And Nautilus was a big deal because it's like, hey,
like free weights can be intimidating for some people, and
like at Nautilus you can just change the setting and
(36:51):
it's a big machine and it's the same as freeweights.
I don't really know if it's the actual same or not,
but they marketed it as like you're still lifting weights.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
No, it's true, you definitely are. And it allowed people
a lot more entry into it. Like today, like you
go into a gym, there's so many machines there. That's
directly from Arthur Jones and his Nautilus machines that he
he started creating by hand. Basically he was like a
Kellogg brother.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
Oh wow, I like those things.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
Yeah, for sure. His whole thing was you you can
also exercise, get a full exercise or full workout and
much shorter amount of time than you could with weights,
and he basically emphasized working out until you just you
you had a temporary muscle failure and then you knew
you were done with your workout for the day. Right,
(37:40):
So seriously, that's what he encouraged.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
Muscle failure. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (37:44):
Uh So by the seventies when these clubs were opening up,
there were there were a couple of different models. One
was sort of the country club style that was probably
a country club and also had like racket sports and
all that other stuff, whirlpool and steam room. And then
there was the ones that my mom went to and
probably your mom went to that was probably in a
shopping center. Some of those could be really good and
(38:07):
some of them were pretty CREDI like anything else. If
it's just sort of not some huge chain, you know,
some are gonna be awesome, some aren't.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Yeah, my family went belonged to several different racket clubs
in Toledo, And the reason why so many is because
we had a long string of getting like your multi
year memberships at a racquet club and then within a
few months it would just go under. So we'd move
on to the next racket club and they'd take a
lot of our money too. So I think we did
this at least three times that I was aware of
(38:35):
when I was a kid. But we always had a
racket club membership somewhere.
Speaker 4 (38:40):
I fully thought you were gonna say, because you had
a run of getting expelled as a family went around.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Luckily not, No, we knew how to am in.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
Okay, I wish that would have been the case. That
would have been a good time.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
I can lie if you want to go back and
re record that part.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
No, that's right.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
So I think one of the gyms that people associate
with gyms in general is Gold Gym, And even still
to this day, that's like if you if you want
serious training and you're going to like you're not messing around,
You're not there to meet anybody except maybe a mentor
who's going to teach you how to get even more buff.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
That's where you would go as a Golds gym for sure.
Speaker 4 (39:16):
That was started by a bodybuilder named Joe Gold. And yeah,
you're totally right. I mean since the sixties it has
that rep. Is like a sort of serious weightlifters gym
Bally Total Bally Total Fitness, which if I'm not mistaken,
there may still be some independent American fitness centers, but
the ones that we belonged to, I believe Bally bought
(39:37):
them out and took them over.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
If I'm not mistaken, Well, Bally's gone now.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
I saw a twenty fifteen article there were five left
in the world.
Speaker 3 (39:44):
Really well this is a name.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Ok.
Speaker 4 (39:47):
Yeah, it was during the boom Sure and that was
founded by a former employee of Vic Tanny named Donna
Hugh Wildman, and like you said, was huge and then
sort of gave way to a their places like La
Fitness and twenty four hour Fittes.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
Yeah, and that whole reputation of gyms and health clubs
being impossible to cancel your membership and taking advantage of you,
that model was paided by Ballytotal Fitness. They were the ones. Yeah,
like they would you signed up for a three year contract,
but they didn't tell you that when you were signing up,
like business tactics like that. I wrote a story about
a woman who signed up for a lifetime contract in
(40:24):
nineteen eighty seven, paid fifty three dollars I think a
year and was still getting billed after Ballytotal Fitness went
like bankrupt, Like that's how much of it like shady
they were. They could still bill you even though they
weren't around any longer.
Speaker 3 (40:39):
Yeah, it was. It was the cell phone contract of.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
The exactly exactly, but that came from Ballytotal Fitness and
then twenty four hour Fitness actually won a different way.
A guy named Mark Mastrov was the first one to
institute monthly memberships rather than the standard annual ones.
Speaker 3 (40:54):
Great ideeah for sure.
Speaker 4 (40:56):
Yeah, people loved it and they got that name after
Mastroff realized it was originally six am to eleven, but
he was like, people are out here waiting for this
place to open. They don't want to leave at the
end of the night, So screw it, I'm taking the
locks off the door exactly.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Let yourselves in have a great time.
Speaker 4 (41:13):
What else, So you mentioned Curves, That is a huge thing.
There were women centric or women only fitness clubs like
as early as the nineteen sixties, but Curves is the
first one that was really like, you know what, if
you're over forty five and you're a woman and you
don't want to go to the gym to get hit
(41:34):
on by these gross guys and get galcked at or
laughed at or whatever, come to curves, we got a
program for you. It was started by a husband and
wife team, Gary and Diane Heaven with an Eye, and
I believe at one point or maybe still, it's the
largest fitness franchise in the world.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
They had like one hundred thousand different one hundred thousand locations,
ten thousand Oh was it okay? Still?
Speaker 3 (42:00):
Yeah, but that's still a lot.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
Yeah, sure, And again it was all over the world,
so it was pretty cool. Also, by the way, I
to myself pronounced their last name he even, but I
like your interpretation much more really, Yeah, okay, so Chuck.
There's still plenty of fitness clubs around. I think LA
Fitness is the leader, with more than two billion in
(42:22):
revenue a year. But one of the things that really
kind of happened starting in the nineties was that the
kind of fitness crazy just spread out. There was jogging, aerobics,
and maybe going to the gym, and then health clubs
(42:42):
kind of started. And then finally people are like, we've
done all this for a decade or so, now we
need some other stuff. So in a few cases they
actually went back to the future and grabbed some established
means of working out or exercising and revamped it for
the for the new millennium.
Speaker 4 (43:01):
Yeah, and yoga was certainly one of those. I just
started yoga two weeks ago, by the way, Yeah, for
the first time.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
In the last month or so. It's kind of gotten
under my skin. It's really awesome, isn't it.
Speaker 4 (43:12):
Yeah, And it's kicking my butt too. And I didn't underestimate.
I wasn't like, oh, you're just stretching and you're on
the floor and doing stuff like posing and stuff. It
wasn't like I thought it was going to be easy.
But it's kicking my butt and I'm like more sore
than I've been doing almost anything else.
Speaker 2 (43:29):
It's awesome. You also gained strength very quickly, though, like surprisingly.
Speaker 4 (43:32):
Quickly, and balance, and yoga is a great thing to
pick up at any time, but especially like you know,
in your fifties, because balance and core strength and all
that stuff as you age is really super important.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
For sure, It's always important. Yeah, well, yeah, flexibility.
Speaker 4 (43:49):
But yoga started, you know, in the nineteenth century and
in the sixties and then seventies or a couple of
really big PBS shows that grabbed the attention of a
lot of people and it's just always been pretty popular
and has never been more popular than it is now.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
Yeah, the nineteenth century is when it first was introduced
to the United States.
Speaker 3 (44:09):
I think, oh, is it like an ancient practice? Probably?
Speaker 2 (44:12):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it goes way back, way back.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
I think that's what I meant.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
And there's where my one hundred thousand came from that
I was confused about curves. There's at least one hundred
thousand yoga studios in the United States alone, and one
thing that's cool about yoga in particular is there are
some franchises, which is fine, but most yoga studios are
independently owned. They're just somebody who loves yoga so much
they opened up their own studio and you can come
(44:39):
to yoga there.
Speaker 3 (44:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (44:41):
And that's kind of the same with our next not
fad because it's been around for a while, but pilates.
It's kind of similar in that people will a lot
of mom and pop pilates places like for instance, the
person I dated in New Jersey, she ended up after
I left and we broke up and stuff. She moved
(45:03):
to Savannah, Georgia from New Jersey and started up her
own plate studio and This wasn't something that she did
at all when I was there, So it's definitely something
I think that, like yoga, people can get into it
and really get into it such that either I want
to be an instructor or I want to open up
my own business around it.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
Sure, and plates was named after Joseph Platts. I think
you said.
Speaker 3 (45:26):
I didn't say that, Oh, okay, So it is.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
Named after Joseph Platts. He was a German circus performer
and his circus happened to be in the UK when
World War One broke out and they said, oh you're German,
We're going to lock you up for four years while
the war goes on. So he and his whole troop
spent World War One locked up in the UK. And
while he was there, he started developing an exercise regimen
(45:50):
based on stretching that apparently saw cats chasing mice and
birds around the prison, and so he came up with
these exercises that imitated that. He claimed that when the
nineteen eighteen flu epidemic came to the island that he
was imprisoned on, not one person who followed his exercise
regimen got sick from it. Whether that's true or not,
(46:13):
it's a pretty great story. And then one other great
story about him is that he smoked fifteen cigars and
drank a leader of booze every day.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
What a guy.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
And he was like one of the gurus of fitness
from I mean we're talking back in the teens in
nineteen twenties.
Speaker 4 (46:30):
Yeah, that's amazing. I should probably plug Carol's studio. Oh yeah,
it's a Momentum Pilate studio and Samannah and I haven't
been in touch with her since then, So go to
Momentum and tell him.
Speaker 3 (46:44):
Tell her Chuck sent't you and she'll I'm.
Speaker 4 (46:45):
Sure she'll say like, oh, yeah, whatever happened to that guy?
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Nice? Very nice. And the people who come will say, oh,
let us tell you.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
Yeah, she'd be like a pod what.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
So Bars another one. They were definitely worth mentioning because
it incorporates elements of ballet, yoga, pilates and it's named
after the bar that well basically the handrail that runs
across the length of a wall that ballerinas frequently used.
But it was created by a German ballerina in the
(47:17):
forties or fifties now the fifties who fled to England.
She was her name was Lottie Burke, and she was
a free love advocate and so when she established bar
in the Bar exercises, she also coupled it with not
only is this going to make you feel great, it's
going to help your sex life. And that was an
overt message of taking bar from this through the sixties
(47:40):
and the seventies.
Speaker 3 (47:42):
I would have pronounced that, by the way, Lota.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Well, unlucky for you, I said it.
Speaker 4 (47:49):
First, you gather a very like Wisconsin e lotty ring
to it, Lotti, give me a lotty lotty. Burke boot
camp workouts became very popular in the nineties. Obviously took
on that sort of military style training where you didn't
need a lot of stuff, You just needed to meet
a bunch of strangers in a city park and have
(48:09):
someone yell at you for an hour for sure.
Speaker 3 (48:12):
What about Tybo?
Speaker 2 (48:13):
Tybo was created by Billy Blanks, who was legit. He
was the US Karate team captain for US Karate and
the US Olympic Karate team, so he was I mean,
he knew what he was doing, and he created Tybo,
which kind of incorporated kickboxing aerobics. If you've ever seen
(48:34):
if you were alive. I guess in probably the nineties
you saw the Billy Blanks Tybo infomercial and he managed
to sell a ton of tapes from that infomercial. It
was a very successful infomercial. I'm not sure how much
tibo is done still today, but I looked it up
to see if it was, you know, is it legit?
And it definitely is a legit workout.
Speaker 4 (48:55):
Oh sure, it's a butt kicker. I tried it once
and I was like, I can't do this. Yeah, but
it was another example of one of those that really
caught on in Hollywood in LA and so it had
a short, short ish life. I'm sure people still do it,
but the big Tybo craze.
Speaker 3 (49:11):
Was a few years for sure.
Speaker 4 (49:14):
What about high intensity interval training hitt hit. I know
this as Toabada because I was seeing a trainer for
a while and we did. She put me through Toabada
basically every time. And that was named after a sports
scientist's named Izumi Tabata who in the mid nineties was
(49:36):
working with Olympic speed skating coaches to create what was
a form of high intensity interval training.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
Right where you do something like pushups or burpies or
mountain climbers or something like that for maybe twenty seconds,
rest for ten seconds, and then you're immediately off into
the next exercise for twenty seconds, and sometimes after four
minutes you might get a minute of rest. It depends
on how long the Tobata workout is. Like a twelve
(50:04):
minute one, you would not get any rest in between.
Certainly not a minute, I should say. But the point
is you're getting a high intensity workout in a very
short amount of time. So you're doing like a twelve
to twenty minute workout and you're getting the same impact
that you would have gotten from say like a thirty
(50:25):
to forty minute workout of lower intensity, but still not
low intensity, I mean moderate intensity training. This is just
super duper intensity, high intensity training, and Tabata definitely established that.
Speaker 4 (50:37):
Yeah, it's great if you're short on time. Obviously, I
think our workouts were thirty minutes, and you know, they
were great.
Speaker 3 (50:44):
I enjoyed it. There were butt kickers, but I liked.
Speaker 2 (50:46):
It, yeah, I should say. Speaking of Toabada Japanese guy,
you reminded me that like exercise is really really big
in Japan, so much so that people have or definitely
had loud speakers in their house and like in their
local community or maybe even their region. Every morning they
(51:07):
would be like, good morning, it's time to do exercises,
and everybody would do the same exercises in their house
to the voice over the loud speakers called radio taiso.
Speaker 3 (51:17):
Oh interesting. And they also did like corporate calisthenics and stuff.
Speaker 2 (51:20):
Right, Yeah, they were just into like collective exercise for
a long time.
Speaker 3 (51:25):
That's great.
Speaker 4 (51:27):
And then the last couple we'll talk about are zumba
and CrossFit. Zumba very popular, still popular. Apparently was created
by accident in the mid nineties by Alberto Beto Perez
and he was a sixteen year old aerobics teacher in Colombia. Apparently,
as the story goes, at least forgot the usual music
(51:49):
and said, I'll just play the music that I have
and it turned into sort of a fun Latin dance
exercise class.
Speaker 2 (51:56):
Yeah, and just took off like a rocket. I think
he was on the cover of Ink magazine once. I
mean like he just like it was just crazy how
how much it took off. And it's still huge. Soom
was still very much popular a couple of decades later.
And then CrossFit is wildly popular too, not among everybody,
(52:16):
but the people that it's popular with. It's wildly popular,
so much so that it's commonly referred to as like
a cult or something like that, because people love talking
about CrossFit and proselytizing for it. But the point of
CrossFit is kind of like what Arthur Jones, the Nautilus creator,
was talking about, where you work out until you are
(52:37):
you like just short of injuring yourself, essentially, where you
feel like you want to throw up and like you
can't do anymore. And it combines weightlifting, gymnastics, a bunch
of different stuff, but it's a really really intense workout
that you really have to work your way up to.
You shouldn't just jump into a CrossFit class. And if
you go to a good CrossFit boxes what the studio
(53:00):
are called, they're not going to just let you jump
into it, right, because you can really hurt yourself.
Speaker 3 (53:06):
Yeah, I'm CrossFit. Doesn't interesting you know me either.
Speaker 2 (53:09):
We've done it before and it's not fun.
Speaker 3 (53:11):
Yeah, I'm making yoga though Emily and are doing it together.
It's fun. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (53:15):
And if you like CrossFit, hey man, we're not yucking
your young well, of course our own personal experience, so
settle down.
Speaker 3 (53:21):
No, I don't want to work out until I throw up.
That's me. Yeah, for sure, this is a good one.
Speaker 2 (53:26):
It was a good one. I hope we inspired you
to do some exercise because it's good for you. I
don't care what anybody says. It's good for you. And
even if it's not good for weight loss, which we
found over the years, definitely not, it's good for mental health.
I think we've said plenty of times. So just that alone.
Speaker 3 (53:43):
Makes it worthwhile, very worthwhile.
Speaker 2 (53:46):
If you want to know more about exercising, then just start.
It's really easy these days. And since I said that,
it's time for listener.
Speaker 3 (53:53):
Mail, I'm going to call this coliseum follow up.
Speaker 4 (53:58):
Hey, guys, quick note about the how do we pronounce
it hippogium or hypogem?
Speaker 3 (54:04):
I don't remember.
Speaker 2 (54:05):
I think I called it a hypogium.
Speaker 3 (54:07):
Hypogum, all right.
Speaker 4 (54:08):
Quick note about the Hypogeum and the mock naval battles
that were reportedly held inside the Colosseum. As you noted,
the Hypogeum was created after the Amphitheater was built. The
flooding of the floor of the Colosseum only happened in
the first decade of the structure and before the hypogm
Hypogeum sorry was dug and created. Once the Hypogeum was constructed,
(54:29):
it was no longer possible to flood and drain the Colosseum.
Speaker 3 (54:33):
That makes sense, and that is from Dave Stemble.
Speaker 2 (54:38):
Dave those great, to the point authoritative, like a shake
from Jim Carter.
Speaker 3 (54:44):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (54:45):
If you want to get in touch with this like
Dave Dave did, Dave's got a great handshake too, I'm
sure you can send us an email. Send it off
to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should
Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts myheart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(55:08):
to your favorite shows.
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