Today, Explained - The golden age of exercise

Episode Date: August 24, 2025

Americans are flocking to gyms and fitness classes. It wasn't always that way. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Miranda Kennedy with help from Naureen Khan, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Photo of an outdoor group fitness class by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images. If you have a question, give us a call on 1-800-618-8545 or send us a note here. Listen to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Alcohol and select markets, product availability may vary by Regency app for details. Huge emphasis on wanting to look thin. A lot of dudes walking around with abs and, you know. If I work out to feel strong and confident, it'll help you. This is Explaned to Me from Fox, the show that tackles the questions that matter to you most. I'm John Quillan Hill. For the past couple weeks, we've been talking about all the things we do in the name of wellness. This week, we're continuing our journey and exploring exercise.

Dozens of you called into the hotline to tell us about your relationship with making your body move. I do this thing called exorainment, where I do one thing. class and then I do another and another not to lose weight per se but to be there for my daughter to be a role model in that regard you know I went from never working out really not having much energy having kind of crappy mental health to going about four to five times a week recently I just completed my first marathon and I got a sub four and I love running and I build my whole life around it my whole relationship to exercise has changed and that has transformed my relationship to my our life.

Producer Hadi-Mawaddy is back to tell us how exercise is changing in 2025. So I looked into the numbers, JQ, and according to a recent report by the Health and Fitness Association, a record-breaking 77 million Americans, nearly a quarter of all people over the age of six years old, are members of fitness clubs like Equinox and 24-hour Fitness, as well as boutique fitness studios like Core Power Yoga and Orange Theory. And then there are, of course, the budget-friendly gyms like Planet Fitness and Gold's Gym as well. People really love those places. Yeah, I can't lie.

I love me a reasonably priced squat rack. Oh, yeah? I understand. I, too, had a membership at Golds over the years. Though these days, I've been working out at a climbing gym with exercise classes in a yoga studio. It's been a great place for, you know, making community. Anyway, the last category I mentioned, the budget-friendly gym is actually the fastest growing sector in the fitness industry. Experts say it's likely because of the cost of entry.

Take Planet Fitness, for example, a monthly membership there starts as low as $15 per month. Okay, so budget-friendly gyms are the fastest growing sector of the fitness industry. But what sector is the biggest right now? So these numbers come to us from an industry report, again, released last year from the Health and Fitness Association. And they say 23.1 million Americans had a membership at a fitness studio at some point during the year of 2024. Okay, that is a ton of Americans. Do we know why these studios have the largest portion of memberships? Well, that's what I wanted to find out.

We are heading to a solid core class. It's like a Pilates situation, Reformer. But it's a little more intense. There's fun music. I have been a few times. You have not. I've never been, no. How do you feel?

Are you excited, nervous? I've done reformer Pilates. I've done Matt and floor Pilates. They all challenge me in a way that, like, traditional weightlifting or yoga does not. But yes, I'm nervous because their catchphrases fail with us. Oh, yeah, you're going to fail. But the point is the failure, because it's muscle failure.

We're going to start with Core. Cellicor is a pool-bine workout on... So as you know, JQ, we took a class at SolidCore's Navy Yard Studio with coach McKeeha Love, an educator and fitness enthusiasts who told us that there weren't too many kinds of exercise that she doesn't love. But that what she loved most about SolidCore is... I loved how hard it was. I loved that the coaches didn't apologize for the intensity, and I loved, like, feeling myself grow.

Like, you can feel yourself growing, getting stronger, like, class by class. So with that in mind, we began our class, and honestly, it was pretty tough. This is feel unsustainable. You're here for six, four seconds. Return a full weight out first. Three, two, and one. It's terrible. It's blowing for 60.

During the class, my muscles were shaking. I struggled to control my breathing, but when we were working our obliques, I know you remember working your obliques. Oh, boy, do I. I could feel my ability to hold the poses get longer. Plus, being in a group made me feel like I wasn't alone on the struggle bus. And after the class, I ran over to a woman who saved. seemed to be Macquia's star pupil. Her name was Genesis.

She had been to about 50 classes in just a few months when we met her. When I started, I was 60 pounds heavier. I had upper body issues, muscular issues. It's been transformational. I come almost every other day, and it's just a part of my livelihood routine now. Heidi, that's really awesome. I think when you think of what you want to get out of exercise, it's everything she just said. 100%.

I spoke to a fitness instructor back in Austin named Carla May O'Connor. She's taught all the trendy sorts of classes, dance, bar, high-intensity interval training. And she told me that she has seen a shift in what her clients want from classes over the past decade. I think that cardio was so huge then, right? Everybody was focused on how many calories can I burn, how much can I sweat. Carla May says people working out today want different physical results from their workouts too. I would say, you know, eight years ago I'm getting started. I'm talking to a lot of people like, why are you here?

They're saying, oh, I want to lose weight. I want to be thinner. Now, when I talk to my clients, they say I'm coming here because it's made me feel stronger. Strength, functionality, community, even improved mental health. These are the sorts of things clients say they want from fitness students. I visited. Bodybuilders want the peak. We want the height of the bicep.

If I want... I visited another spot in Austin called Correct Fitness. And I talked with the owner and CEO Alex Earle. Alex showed me around the massive industrial building where Correct Fitness is located. And talk to me about some of the things the studio offers clients. The main gym, this is where a lot of the classes, the classes kind of move around throughout the whole space. But anybody who's a member here, regardless of the membership level, they can come in and use any of this equipment. This gym is serious business.

There are cold plunges, saunas, free weights, but also like heavy items that look like medieval weaponry. You know, we use steel maces and kettlebells and steel clubs. Alex says these memberships are definitely more expensive than a traditional big box gym. But he says that the group workouts, which take months to develop and are led by World Class Class trainers, and are included with every membership, sort of make the cost a pretty good deal. We do a workout on Friday called Fuck You Friday that has become insanely popular, but there's so much camaraderie, there's so much, I mean, it's grueling, but by the time you're done with it, you're like, oh my God, this is great. I can get started on an amazing weekend.

Now, I don't know how to calculate whether Alex is right, JQ, but I looked up the cost for booking an hour of personal training as well as an hour of group training. And a personal trainer would likely cost about $150 an hour. And if I did that twice a week, I would already be at the cost of the second tier membership at Correct Fitness. And that includes small group training classes too. So honestly, Alex might be right. This might be a pretty good deal. Okay, Hadi, thank you so much for helping us get a handle on how folks are exercising nowadays. Absolutely, JQ. Up next, we'll take a look back at the history of exercise and we'll get a handle on how we got to where we are today.

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The new outlander. Bring out your adventurous side. Mitsubishi Motors, drive your ambition. We're back. Okay, so classes are full. There's a line at the squat rack, and someone you know probably has a stationary bike sitting somewhere in a corner of their apartment. When it comes to exercise in 2025, we're kind of

in a fitness golden age. Danielle Friedman says, that's a real progression. She's the author of the book, Let's Get Physical, How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshape the World. But if we go back to the 20th century, that's a different story. It was the post-World War II era. It was actually a time when Americans were moving less than ever before. That helped give rise to what would come. But after all of the hardships of the Great Depression and the war, Americans were really embracing what they called the modern way of life, which largely meant sort of exerting yourself physically as little as possible, particularly in the middle and upper classes. You know, push-button appliances became popular. Ranch houses, eliminated states,

driving, replaced walking in a lot of cases, and TV exploded. It became this huge national pastime. So the good life meant a life of little sweat, you know, for the most part. And it was at that point when the first real fitness influencers stepped onto the scene through TV. Thanks very, very much for letting me come into your home. My name is Jack Lalane. And I'm here for one reason and one reason only to show you how to feel better and look better so you can live longer. In the late 1950s, there were a few really popular TV fitness personalities.

Host Grape Nuts presents Bonnie Prudence. Want to take some off of here and possibly a little there? Feet apart. Hands up. Twist. Twist. who had to work really hard to convince the country that exercise, first of all, would not kill you. There was a lot of fear. Whoa, what? Yeah, there was a lot more fear about over-exertion than under-exertion at the time. There were still, you know, outdated kind of beliefs about the idea that you were only born with a certain number of heartbeats and you didn't want to waste them on exercise.

Okay. Oh. Okay. And for women, exercise was seen as especially dangerous. There was a widespread belief, strenuous exercise would make your uterus fall out. Muscles were seen as unseemly and unladylike beyond just the, you know, the life of leisure. Because heading into the 60s, people like Jack the Lane, Bonnie Pruden, were saying, no, no, no, no, no, it's safe. You need to do it. And as people started following their lead and discovering that a regular exercise habit made them feel good, in some cases improved measures of health, slowly the cultural messaging began to take off. A push-up is a little thing, but little things add up the way little words mowed up to make important sentences.

We also had a president at the time, JFK, well, he famously wrote a piece in Sports Illicit. illustrated before he even was inaugurated called the Soft American. There is nothing, I think, more unfortunate than to have a soft, chubby, fat-looking children. So all of these cultural forces were sort of helping to shape what happened in the early 60s. And we started to see some of the first really early group fitness classes. Let's fast forward one decade. Parliament Funkadelic is on the radio. People are wearing bell bottoms.

It's the 1970s. This is a decade you've written that has changed fitness forever. What happened in the 70s? There was the rise of the women's movement. And books like Our Bodies Ourselves, the seminal feminist health tome actually had a chapter about exercise

and they were telling women, you know, muscles, it's okay for women to have muscles. And it was all sort of part of this messaging that women can be independent and self-sufficient. There was the passage of Title IX in 1972, which created, you know, so many more opportunities for girls to play high school and college sports. So there was a whole new generation of women who were active and wanted to continue to be active. And there was also the birth of exercise science, which is huge. And so for the first time, really, the late 60s, there started to be research into the physiological effects of, it was mostly

aerobic exercise at that point. And in the 70s, we saw what we would now look at as like, almost like the virality of so many workouts and modes of exercise that laid the groundwork for how we move today. What are some of those exercises that lay the, the groundwork. Running or jogging. Before the early 70s, people who ran for fun and ran in public were really seen as kind of kooky. And they would sometimes have cans thrown at them. The idea that you would run for the sake of running for health, for fitness, was not established yet. And particularly for women, women were not allowed to run most. marathons. Wow. It was in

1972 that for the first time women were officially allowed to enter the Boston marathon. The 70s was in many ways the decade of dance. A chorus line was this huge Broadway hit. You know, there was disco, there was Saturday night fever.

We just washed the hair. Dance was cool. Like, everyday Americans wanted to have good dance skills. And that helped to fuel the rise of aerobic dancing and at the time it was jazzercise was the most successful of the aerobic dancing brands and for a lot of women at that time going to a jazzercise aerobics dance class was the first time that they had ever worked out as adults before the 70s while there were some bodybuilding competitions,

of all of the workouts we've talked about, it was probably the most kind of fringe. Is this sort of thing that was a sport, or is it just sort of self-love? Men who really focused on strength, training, and building muscles were viewed sort of suspiciously, either as being narcissists or in pop culture, in movies, they were often portrayed as like thugs or bodyguards.

Enter Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm like getting the feeling of coming in the gym. I'm getting the feeling of coming at home. I'm getting the feeling of coming backstage when I pump up. So I'm coming day and night. Who was a champion Austrian bodybuilder at the time and kind of defied a lot of the stereotypes that had existed about male bodybuilders because he was very charming.

It was very articulate. He was kind of a ladies man. And he really not completely single-handedly, would almost help to make bodybuilding and strength training aspirational in this country. None of them had quite the impact as Jane Fonda. So Jane Fonda, at the time, and this is the late 70s, was already an Oscar-winning actress, and she had become kind of notorious for her anti-Vietnam War protest. So she was the first Hollywood celebrity also to become a fitness influencer.

And part of her success was kind of selling herself and the idea that if you do like me, you can be like me. But her biggest impact came in 1982 when she released the Jane Fonda workout video. She, more than anyone who came before her, made exercise aspirational, especially for women. Next, what happens to wellness when we put mind over matter? points faster. And then you can redeem your points on things like travel and more. And we could all use a vacation. Apply now and get up to 60,000 points. So many points. For more info,

visit bemo.com slash eclipse. Visit us today. Terms and conditions apply. Bank more oncores when you switch to a Scotia Bank banking package. Learn more at ScotiaBank.com slash banking packages. Conditions apply. Scotia Bank, you're richer than you think. We're back. This is explaining to me. So far, we've spent some time talking about the kinds of workouts that make you sweat and where you do those workouts.

But now, we're going to explore a practice that's less about burning calories and more about the mind. So by taking a deep breath undeniably when you're moving, you're going to feel that more aliveness. You're just going to activate that part of your nervous system that's going to allow you to feel more of you and more energy. Producer Hadi Mawakdi and I met up with the Guardian's Lifestyle and Wellness Reporter Madeline Agler at a holistic wellness space in Arlington, Virginia.

Right before we started class, Hadi asked us how we were feeling. I am feeling pretty tense right now. I'm coming down from it. I've been running a little anxious lately, I will say. I've been a little high-strung lately, a lot of running around, a lot of just like, okay, what's next? Not great odds for relaxing, but we did our best. Just take a deep breath in your nose. Cahling it out.

So a lot of today's wellness treatments and exercises and practices, they promise this idea of physical health and and improved performance and self-actualization. How much of that is true? You know, the hard thing about wellness is that a lot of the practices, there's a kernel of truth there. The problem is a lot of wellness marketing takes these tiny kernels of truth and just sort of runs with them and makes really outsized claims about them. You know, I remember writing a story about lemon water at one point, and it's like, is having a glass of lemon water in the morning good for you? It's probably fine. But people were making claims like this can, you know, reduce your cancer risk. And like, that's a really big claim. That's pretty dangerous. Yeah. It's refreshing. It's delicious. It's a great

way to hydrate. But yeah, that's probably a bit much. Right. And I think the truth is that a lot of these things might make your life one or two percent better. But ultimately, it's best to think of them as sort of the cherry on top of a healthy lifestyle otherwise, because you still need to take care of the baseline of your life. You wrote an article for The Guardian about Breathwork. Why did you decide to write that? How does breathing fit into the overarching concept of wellness for you? So, I mean, for me, the best part of covering wellness is I love trying things. I love trying different classes, different trends. So I'm always on the lookout for sort of what people are doing. And breathwork was something I was a little familiar with. I've meditated and done yoga for years. And so I've done sort of little bits of breathwork in those. And also at the time, there were some reporting going around of people having sort of psychedelic experiences from doing breathwork. And so I was really curious about that.

I want to take a step back. What is breathwork? Describe to us what it actually means. So breathwork is any, you know, intentional manipulation of the breath. So, you know, right now, if you try to calm down by breathing more deeply, that's breathwork. A lot of people are familiar with box breathing, where you inhale for four breaths, hold it, exhale for full breaths, hold it. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Oh, that shit works. That's breathwork.

It doesn't necessarily need to be an hour-long class. It can be these very little exercises where your breathing sort of helps ground and center you. So breathwork practitioners also kind of make a lot of the same promises that a lot of other wellness folks makes, you know, that inner peace, that improved performance. Where did the idea come from that breathing exercises can be a little bit of a cure-all? Breathing exercises date very, very far back. They're very ancient. And I don't know that they were always considered sort of a cure-all, but what I do think is really interesting is breathing exercises sort of popped up around the globe. So the ancient Greeks did it. Ancient Greek athletes would do it to sort of help with performance.

In China, their Qigong breathing exercises, which should day back thousands of thousands of years. So around the world, people very early on realized, oh, our breath can be a tool. This is something we can use to our advantage. I have to say I feel a lot better after breathing personally. Does it actually affect our health and well-being? Is there science behind this? Yeah, there's actually a lot of science behind it. It's a pretty well-researched area and there's a lot of findings that deep breathing can help reduce stress and lower our blood pressure and lower our cortisol levels and that's our stress hormone in the body. And some of how this works is our brain associates different breathing patterns with different and emotional states. So, you know, when you're really stressed out, you tend to breathe pretty

quickly and shallowly. And when you're more relaxed, you breathe more deeply and slowly. And so what breathwork can do is sort of reverse engineer that. And so say you're feeling really stressed. If you start breathing very deeply, that activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your body's fight or flight response. It lowers cortisol. You're telling your body, I'm actually okay. We don't need to be stressed. See how I'm breathing slowly. We're good. So you started talking about the class.