John Ryan on Jürgen Martschuka’s *The Age of Fitness: How the Body Came to Symbolize Success and Achievement*

Jürgen Martschuka’s The Age of Fitness: How the Body Came to Symbolize Success and Achievement examines the fitness industry and its cultural impact across a broad historical and socioeconomic scope. Reaching back to the mid-eighteenth century, Martschuka shows the cultural and linguistic evolution of the word “fitness” from something inherently “beyond the influence of the individual” into a dynamic, post-Darwinian obsession that “one has to work for and maintain if one is to count as a productive member of a liberal society.”^[1] He explores how modern societies shape their cultural, social, and political understanding of citizenship based primarily on an individual’s ability and willingness to accept a lifestyle where tracking physical parameters like “movement, eating, sleeping, and bodily trends in one way or another” defines the “prototype of the good citizen.”^[2] “We live in the age of fitness,”^[3] Martshucka professes and, in a nod to Michel Foucault, establishes a body-centric philosophical foundation for his argument that “body shape becomes a sign of the ability to make responsible decisions, to function in a free, competitive society, and to aid its development.”^[4] Eventually, we arrive in today’s age of fitness where “fitness creates zones of marginality and exclusion” and “functions explicitly as a hinge between lifestyle and health.”^[5] In the end, Martschukat successfully convinces us that fitness, in all its varied forms, sells and the only way for us to buy into that society is to openly display our willingness to sweat, grunt, and suffer through some kind of workout, whether we actually want to or not.

In Martschukat’s age of fitness, a person’s proclivity for physical, economic, and even sexual fitness orient where that person will fall on society’s spectrum of social and political acceptance and shows “how critical fitness is to the success or failure, recognition or exclusion, in a society that sets such great store by self-responsibility, performance, market, and competition.”^[6] Today, individual fitness is a malleable element of the self and the responsibility of each individual to optimize via some kind of physical action. Martschukat shows us through a series of historical trajectories that begin with Darwin’s Origin of the Species^[7] and culminates in today’s “neoliberal” sociopolitical systems where the worth of each individual arises from their “success as an investor in themself and from the maximization of their human capital.”^[8] Unpacking this concept of “biological citizenship”^[9] Martschukat’s work seems to be a twenty-first century update to Hanah Arendt’s idea of the homo politicus^[10] or even an expansion of Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the homo sacer.^[11] Where The Age of Fitness serves these types of academic explorations is in its adept identification of the racial and gender inequalities that inherently exist within the fitness industry and how they permeate society.

Martschukat’s chapter on sex and fitness explores one of these more interesting inequalities as he expands on his earlier interpretation of Foucault and details the association of the male body and its fitness for sexual function as a defining factor for inclusion into a society preoccupied with fitness.^[12] As we age, fitness degrades but “Viagra helps shape what it means to be a man, to age successfully or lead a fulfilling life,” never mind that “men’s dwindling capacity for erection and penetration is often associated with greater sexual diversity, which many women appreciate.”^[13] Martschukat’s historical examination of the fight against the “impotence boom” blends a series of medical studies, market research, and engaging first hand testimonials that show how viagra, and by default “masculine” sexual fitness “promotes a doing of masculinity that is often incompatible with the doing of femininity.”^[14]

As a fitness professional for over a decade and as a coach, manager, and owner of  CrossFit gyms for most of that time, as I read The Age of Fitness: How the Body Came to Symbolize Success and Achievement, I often found Martshukat’s conclusions disturbingly accurate. Our marketing efforts consistently used language of inclusion and diversity and yet the version of fitness salvation that I sold had all of the inherent biases outlined by Martshcukat. Our fitness community was predominantly white, our prices were often economically restrictive, and our desired market was actually not populated with those individuals who wanted to “resist the strict regime of fitness” but rather those possible clients who were “motivated and committed in every respect, productive, potent, willing to fight, capable of the extraordinary, and always willing to improve.”^[15] In today’s age of fitness, I found personal pleasure and financial success in catering to this market, but, as Martshukat also suggests, there will always be those who find pleasure in simply “eating burgers and ice cream cakes” and it’s worth recognizing that “not every sporting activity has to be an act of submission to the fitness regime.”^[16] The Age of Fitness: How the Body Came to Symbolize Success and Achievement offers a prescient and effective examination of the cultural and social impacts the fitness industry has on the conditions of individual success in society.

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.

Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition, 2nd edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Martschukat, Jürgen. 2021. The Age of Fitness: How the Body Came to Symbolize       Success and Achievement. Translated by Alex Skinner. Medford, MA: Polity Press.

^[1] Ju?rgen Martschukat, The Age of Fitness: How the Body Came to Symbolize Success and Achievement, trans Alex Skinner (Medford: Polity Press, 2021), 36.

^[2] Martschukat, The Age of Fitness, 8-9.

^[3] Martschukat, The Age of Fitness, 1.

^[4] Martschukat, The Age of Fitness, 14.

^[5] Martschukat, The Age of Fitness, 10-11.

^[6] Martschukat, The Age of Fitness, 6.

^[7] Martschukat, The Age of Fitness, 41.

^[8] Martschukat, The Age of Fitness, 15-16.

^[9] Martschukat, The Age of Fitness, 16-17.

^[10] Hanah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

^[11] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans Daniel Heller-Roazen (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1998).

^[12] Martschukat, The Age of Fitness, 84.

^[13] Martschukat, The Age of Fitness, 100-101.

^[14] Martschukat, The Age of Fitness, 102.

^[15] Martschukat, The Age of Fitness, 140.

^[16] Martschukat, The Age of Fitness, 140.