Fitness fads date back to WWI yoga classes

According to Shelly McKenzie, a professor at George Washington University and author of Mass Movements: a Cultural History of Physical Fitness and Exercise, women’s day-salons were the precursors to today’s women-targeted exercise studios.

Around World War I, beautician Elizabeth Arden offered yoga classes, while Helena Rubinstein’s salons taught dance classes called Rubinstein’s Rhythmics.

In the ’50s, as exercise became more popular among the middle class, men and women sometimes accessed general fitness centers on alternating days.

“Women did it to be pretty, and men did it to be healthy,” McKenzie says. “That’s what we were getting from doctors, because there was a large public health crisis … men were having heart attacks.”

Specialty studios have been a staple since the ’70s, which is also when membership spiked at more general facilities.

“These days, you don’t find an aerobics studio anywhere, but in the ’70s, if you wanted to do aerobics, you went to an aerobics studio,” McKenzie says.

She views barre as an outgrowth from the Pilates/ yoga culture of the ’90s and ’00s, when “people started talking about posture and elongation, core strength and agility … a more model-looking figure.”

And those model-proportions are a return to the ’60s and ’70s, “when yoga and running were big, and bodies were thin and gangly.”

“In the ’60s, it was all about cardiovascular health.In the late ’70s and ’80s, it was about muscle mass. … The ’80s were the decade of toughness,” she says. “Everyone wanted to be strong, ready to fight, ready to do battle on Wall Street. … Somebody finds a new pursuit, science makes a new discovery, we enlarge the definition of what it means to be a fit person.”