My favourite fact about gyms before reading this book was that the average British gym member covers 468 miles per year and the average British dog walker 676. Eric Chaline’s history of the institution has offered up some competition on the fact front — but my cynicism remains undimmed.
Chaline, a personal trainer and weightlifting instructor, certainly shows that ‘gym-bunny’ doesn’t have to equal ‘numbskull’. The book is learned and well-researched, and although this sometimes gives us sentences such as ‘The body plays a central role in the transformation of abstract social discourses into lived actions and identities’, it also furnishes some pretty interesting history.
We start with the Ancient Greeks, whose gymnos (‘naked’) gave us the word ‘gymnasium’ in the first place. That’s how they exercised, you see, although because large penises were unfashionable back then you had to tether the old chap to your waist with a leather thong.
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