The First Fitness Comment Section

In the late nineteenth century, before the internet, before broadband, before anyone had even heard the word influencer, people still argued about fitness with the same mix of certainty, panic and wounded pride you find today in any comment thread. They just did it on paper. They did it with fountain pens and postage stamps. They did it in the back pages of magazines that promised better posture, stronger lungs and a more admirable physique.

If you pick up any of those magazines now, the first thing you notice is the tone. The writers are earnest and urgent and slightly breathless. They send in photographs, sometimes badly lit, sometimes taken at angles that would make a modern coach wince, and ask to be judged. They ask whether their shoulders are too rounded or their chests too flat. They describe their homemade weights. They offer advice to strangers they will never meet. And in the margins and editorial replies you get the nineteenth-century equivalent of internet strangers correcting each other.

What makes it stranger still is how quickly these exchanges linked people who had no connection outside the printed page. A schoolteacher in Dublin reads a letter from a railway clerk in Melbourne about the best way to perform a certain drill. A young man in Manchester promises to try whatever exercise a correspondent in Cape Town has just recommended. Another man, somewhere deep in the American Midwest, writes in to complain that the latest published photographs are clearly enhanced by clever lighting and that the standards are becoming unrealistic. The editor responds with polite firmness but you can feel the irritation between the lines. None of this feels distant. It reads like the internet in sepia tones.

What fascinated me when researching When Fitness Went Global was not simply the movements themselves, but the way people talked to one another about them. We imagine the nineteenth century as slow and polite. It was slow, yes, but politeness can be stretched thin when someone suggests your method of breathing during an exercise is inefficient. These letters, these little windows into other people’s training routines, became a form of shared identity. A man practising his calisthenics in a small rented room in Belfast felt connected to a man doing something similar in Toronto because both believed they were building a better, more controlled body in an increasingly chaotic world.

Arguments became entire subgenres. One month a debate erupts about whether posture can be fixed through daily drills or whether it requires something more fundamental, almost moral. The next month readers argue about the correct number of repetitions for a certain exercise. Then someone writes in claiming to have developed a revolutionary new system that will build the arms in record time. Replies pour in. Some are encouraging. Others are suspicious. One or two are faintly mocking. You begin to sense the rhythms of a community that is both competitive and oddly protective of itself.

This was the first fitness ecosystem that spanned continents. Postal systems became the arteries. Steamships and railways carried magazines across oceans. Even delays contributed to the mood. Someone sends a letter full of advice, waits weeks for a reply, and by the time the response reaches him the debate has already moved on. But the momentum never stops. The world is becoming smaller and bodies are becoming topics of public discussion. People are learning to look at themselves from the outside, to compare, to aspire, to doubt.

None of this required dumbbells made of chrome or mirrors stretching across gym walls. It required paper, ink and the desire to be seen. That is what struck me most. Even when the photographs are blurred or the descriptions imprecise, you can feel the writers wanting to step out of their private routines and into a shared, global conversation about the body. They were not modern, but their instincts were.

When I scroll through contemporary fitness spaces now, with their debates about form cues, their side-angled progress shots, their suspicion that someone, somewhere, is cheating the system, I see the same anxieties. I see the same hunger for improvement and the same fear of falling behind. What appears new is simply faster.

The nineteenth century built the template: strangers swapping training hacks across borders, bodies turned into public projects, advice elevated to doctrine, and entire identities built on the belief that through discipline the self can be remade. These early readers did not know they were helping to invent a global culture. They only knew that their letters mattered. Their routines mattered. Their progress mattered.

Their conversations became a kind of collective autobiography of the modern body. One cramped handwriting sample at a time. One hopeful photograph at a time. One argument about posture at a time.

So when we talk now about fitness communities, online discourse, transformation culture or the strange intimacy of watching strangers exercise, we are not describing something invented in the digital age. We are describing something that began with quiet men sitting at kitchen tables, shaping their bodies and sending those shapes into the world, hoping someone would write back.