How Fitness Conquered the World (and What It Still Teaches Us)

Next month my new book When Fitness Went Global: The Rise of Physical Culture in the Nineteenth Century is published with Bloomsbury. It has been ten years in the making, and, in truth, a lifetime in the thinking. I began the project trying to understand why my obsession with lifting and movement felt so personal, yet so universal. Why do people across time and cultures train their bodies in such similar ways? And how did so many of our modern fitness habits, from gym memberships to protein supplements, end up looking the same everywhere?

The short answer is that globalization did not begin with Jane Fonda, Gold’s Gym or Instagram. It began in the nineteenth century, when fitness first went global.

That moment matters. It was the century when bodies were reimagined as disciplined machines, when health became a public virtue, and when strength was tied to moral worth. Industrialisation, empire and new print cultures carried these ideas across oceans. Indian wrestlers swung clubs. Swedish schoolchildren drilled to the same rhythms as Prussian soldiers. British gymnasts trained on German bars. Japanese reformers translated British manuals on physical education. Across empires and borders, people moved to a shared tempo.

The first lesson, then, is that fitness has never been neutral.

When we talk about health today, we often mean self-care or personal improvement. In the nineteenth century, fitness was about order and control. Colonial powers exported their exercise systems as civilising tools. Local traditions were repackaged and resold as curiosities. The Indian club became a polite domestic exercise. Yoga was reframed as a science of health. What we see is not simple exchange but what I call an emptying process. Movements lost their local meanings so they could be translated for global audiences. A Prussian nationalist drill became a schoolchild’s stretch in Ireland. The body was globalised, but also flattened.

The second lesson is that fitness is always commercial.

By the late nineteenth century, men like Eugen Sandow were not only performing strength, they were selling it. Sandow’s mail-order courses, tonics and dumbbells reached every corner of the British Empire. His body became a brand long before influencers existed. The dream of the perfect body was packaged and sold through magazines, lectures and travelling shows.

The same promises remain with us: transformation, vitality, moral renewal. The fitness industry has always blended truth and illusion. Nineteenth-century strongmen boasted of magical powders. Today we buy pre-workouts with similar faith. Then, as now, the line between science and spectacle was thin. Fitness has always lived in that uneasy space between health and hope.

A third lesson is that bodies reveal who gets to belong.

The global body of the nineteenth century was not truly global. It was white, lean, disciplined and male. Empire did not just move goods and ideas; it moved ideals of beauty and strength. The perfect man Sandow displayed on stages from London to Bombay was presented as the image of civilisation itself. Women were invited into physical culture, but under narrow expectations of grace and slenderness. Non-white bodies were romanticised as exotic yet dismissed as inferior.

Those hierarchies still echo. When we call a body fit, we rarely mean only healthy. We mean morally worthy, productive, successful. Fitness has become a language of value. One reason I wrote the book was to show that these ideas are historical. The moral body was built, circulated and sold across the nineteenth century, and it still shapes how we see ourselves.

But the story is not only about control. It is also about connection.

Movement creates solidarity. William McNeill called it muscular bonding, that rhythm that binds people when they move together. I have seen it in old YMCA photographs, in military drill formations, in group classes, and in the rhythm of people swinging clubs in unison. The history of fitness is full of these moments where collective movement builds community, sometimes in service of empire, sometimes in quiet resistance to it.

Writing the book reminded me that fitness is both mirror and motor. It reflects our fears of decline and disorder, but it also produces new forms of belonging. In the nineteenth century, physical culture offered a sense of control in a world spinning with change. Perhaps that is still what draws people to the gym today: the need to find strength, stability and meaning in our own flesh.

If there is one lasting lesson, it is that the history of fitness is a history of people trying to make sense of themselves through movement. The same impulses that shaped the nineteenth century—curiosity, insecurity, competitiveness, hope—still pulse through every modern workout. Our global fitness culture was not inevitable. It was made, contested, and reinvented.

Understanding that story does not make a squat any lighter, but it does make it richer.

When Fitness Went Global is out next month with Bloomsbury, priced at £20, about the same as a tub of protein powder, and probably a better investment in long-term strength.

If you have ever wondered why you train, why you lift, or why the idea of a better body feels both personal and universal, I hope this book gives you some answers—and a few new questions. Muscles matter, but the meanings we attach to them matter even more.