Physical culture

Physical culture, philosophy, regimen, or lifestyle seeking maximum physical development through such means as weight (resistance) training, diet, aerobic activity, athletic competition, and mental discipline. Specific benefits include improvements in health, appearance, strength, endurance, flexibility, speed, and general fitness as well as greater proficiency in sport-related activities.

Early history

Paganism to religious asceticism

Early instances of physical culture are found in records of exercise and weightlifting from the Zhou dynasty of China (1046–256 bce) and the Old Kingdom of Egypt (2575–2130 bce). But its real beginning, as a sustained activity, dates from the ancient Greeks. Homer’s epic poem the Iliad depicts discus throwing and stone hoisting, and the Olympic Games, originating in 776 bce, featured a wide variety of physical contests, applicable to both sport and war. The foremost warriors were the Spartans of Laconia, who endured harsh physical discipline to ensure that the finest physical specimens were produced. Spartans, in their efforts to toughen and exhibit their bodies, were also enthusiastic nudists. The greatest Greek athlete, however, was Milo of Croton, who popularized progressive resistance training by purportedly carrying a calf daily from its birth until it became full-size. In the late 6th century bce he won wrestling championships at the Pythian Games seven times and at the Olympics six times. The classical embodiment of physical development was the mythical Heracles (the Roman Hercules), son of Zeus, whose laborious feats and matchless physique served as a model for all subsequent physical culturists. The Greek, and especially Athenian, ideal of a sound mind and sound body (often expressed as arete, or “virtue”) was cultivated in the gymnasiums, where young men exercised, bathed, socialized, and discussed philosophy. Finally, the Greeks employed physical culture as a form of preventive medicine and as a means of recuperating from illnesses and weaknesses. Hippocrates (c. 460–377 bce) believed that diet and exercise would unleash natural forces to promote harmonious bodily functions. Physical culture became firmly and permanently implanted in Western civilization in part because of the many works of sculpture glorifying the body that the ancient Greeks left to posterity. Lysippus’s 4th-century-bce bronze sculpture of Heracles is lost, but a Roman marble copy known as the Farnese Hercules was found about 1546 ce and demonstrates the ancient ideal of physical development. The ideal of physical beauty has remained an important thread through the history of the physical culture movement.

The humanistic tradition continued with the Romans but with more-elaborate facilities and greater emphasis on training for warfare and gladiatorial combat. Baths replaced gymnasiums as venues for public exercise, and the philosophic component waned. During the latter stages of the Roman Empire, with the widespread acceptance of Christianity, a spiritual (even ascetic) ideal came to prevail. Physical culture was relegated to the trash heap of civilization’s pagan past. For about a thousand years after Rome’s fall (476 ce), the body, following Augustinian orthodoxy, was rejected as sinful. Exercise, no longer pursued for health and fitness, was chiefly a by-product of medieval combat or hard work in manors and monasteries. Eastern civilizations—Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, Shintō—seemed even more consumed by spiritual concerns. Human representations in artworks of the Middle Ages were abstract and otherworldly.

Humanism and national revivals

It was only with the Italian Renaissance that interest in the aesthetic development of the body was revived in Western civilization. Inspired by the ancient Greeks and Romans, this belief in man as “the measure of all things” was most evident in the great artworks of the 15th and 16th centuries. Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings reveal a profound interest in the human skeleton, organs, and muscles and their physiological purpose. The muscularity displayed in Michelangelo’s sculptures David and Moses and his painting Creation of Adam reveals an admiration for man’s great power and potential. The later scientific treatises of Andreas Vesalius and William Harvey employed the works of the 2nd-century Greek physician Galen of Pergamum to advance medical knowledge.

Externalization of this renewed physical awareness into exercise and fitness activities had to wait until the 18th century, though even then it was limited to sporadic developments in northern Europe. The earliest sustained effort was the Philanthropinum, a German Gymnasium (“school”) founded by Johann Basedow in Dessau in 1774. In addition to teaching modern languages, science, and vocational subjects, it marked a true renewal of physical culture, with an emphasis on such activities as wrestling, running, riding, fencing, vaulting, and dancing. Basedow was soon followed by the “grandfather of modern gymnastics,” Johann Christoph Friedrich Guts Muths, a leading teacher at the Philanthropinist school in Schnepfenthal, Germany, whose Gymnastik für die Jugend (1793; “Gymnastics for Youth”) enjoyed a wide circulation.

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In the wake of the French Revolution, a new and distinctly modern impetus was given to exercise through the nationalistic movement of the Prussian Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, often dubbed the “father of modern gymnastics.” This awakening was fostered by a strong reaction to the defeat of Prussia and other German states by Napoleon Bonaparte. Jahn’s physical regeneration ideas complemented the military reforms instigated in Prussia by August von Gneisenau and Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst and by Johann Gottfried von Herder’s Romantic concept of the Volksgeist (“national character”). Jahn led young men on fresh-air expeditions, taught gymnastics and calisthenics, and inspired a love for the Fatherland and the purity of the Volk (“people”), thereby instigating a nationalist tradition that filtered down to the Hitler Youth movement many decades later. He invented horizontal and parallel bars and sponsored periodic physical culture festivals that attracted as many as 30,000 enthusiasts. Jahn’s movement was influential in organizing the Burschenschaft (“Youth Association”) and nationalistic exercise clubs, called turnvereins, after 1815. Although he was imprisoned and his organization was banned by the reactionary Carlsbad Decrees (1819), Jahn’s ideas soon spread throughout Europe and America.

In Sweden similar principles of physical regeneration, though with less nationalistic fervour, were developed independently by Per Henrik Ling, who emphasized the integration of perfect bodily development with muscular beauty. He invented wall bars, beams, and the box horse.

Activities distinctive to Scottish culture, such as caber tossing, hammer throwing, and the shot (stone) put, along with traditional running, wrestling, and jumping events, constituted the Highland Games that began during the Romantic swell of the 1830s and later led to the sport of track and field.

By the mid-19th century, national physical culture movements were also emerging in England and France. Development in the former was stimulated by Charles Darwin’s discoveries pertaining to the relationship between fitness and survival. In 1849 the first English athletic competition was conducted at the national military academy at Woolwich. In 1858 an enterprising Scot, Archibald MacLaren, opened a well-equipped gymnasium at the University of Oxford, and in 1860 he trained 12 sergeants who then implemented his training regimen for the British Army. Another inspirational influence for Britons was the Muscular Christianity movement, a reconciliation of Western religious doctrines with the need for national physical regeneration. It was inspired by novelist Thomas Hughes, historian Thomas Carlyle, and clergyman Charles Kingsley.

In 1847 physical culture pioneer and strongman Hippolyte Triat established a huge gymnasium in Paris where aristocrats joined spirited youth in pursuit of fitness. In the 1870s physical education became a principal focus in French schools, where battalions of healthy young men were trained to avenge the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to the Germans. It was in this heady nationalistic atmosphere that Edmond Desbonnet, a protégé of Triat and proponent of Swedish gymnastics, firmly established a physical culture tradition in the Francophone world. A great teacher and publicist, he eventually established hundreds of gymnasiums with many thousands of pupils.

Other burgeoning movements included the Sokol (“Falcon”), founded in 1862 to foster a Czech national awakening, and the Polish Falcons (1867), which had similar aspirations. These kinds of cultural groups often sponsored national dances, songs, language revivals, and traditional athletic contests. The Gaelic Athletic Association closely coincided with the Irish literary and political renaissance in the late 19th century. Everywhere people seemed to develop a fitness culture rooted in their ethnic or national identity.

By this time, European physical culture traditions were taking root in America, particularly among German American immigrants. In 1823 George Bancroft and Joseph Cogswell founded the first American gymnasium, Round Hill School, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and hired German immigrant Charles Beck to teach calisthenics. But the true pioneer was George Barker Windship, a Harvard Medical School graduate (1857) who incorporated apparatus and heavy-lifting movements into an exercise regimen designed to promote the ideal of “Strength is health.” His death from a massive stroke at age 42, however, hardly promoted the cause.

Health fads

More attractive to mid-19th-century Americans were various non-exercise treatments, cures, and dietary schemes designed to encourage overall health and well-being. Naturopathy, including such practices as hydrotherapy, electrotherapy, herbal medicine, nutrition, massage, and homeopathy, drew on the Hippocratic notion of the healing power of nature and the capacity of the body for regeneration. One early health reformer was Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister who preached temperance and advocated a vegetarian diet, sexual restraint, and water (bathing) treatments. He is best known as the inventor of graham crackers, made from whole-wheat flour. Ellen White, an advocate of vegetarianism and hydrotherapy, was a founder of the Seventh-day Adventists, a religious group that embraced naturopathy and claimed to enjoy better health than the general population. With her husband, James, White created the Western Health Reform Institute; it was later appropriated by John Harvey Kellogg, an eccentric physician who started the first sanatorium at Battle Creek, Michigan. Proper diet, regular exercise, correct posture, fresh air, rest, and avoidance of “unnatural” sexual practices formed the “Battle Creek Idea.” Kellogg’s sanatorium accommodated several thousand health seekers annually, many of whom were rich and famous. In 1894 he and his brother William also devised a flaking process for ready-to-eat cereals. Along with associate Charles W. Post and quixotic nutritionist Horace Fletcher, the Kelloggs brought about greater dietary consciousness and fostered the beginnings of the health food industry.

These physical culture innovations were complemented by advancements on other fronts, including the formation of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (1874) and the Anti-Saloon League (1893), both based in Ohio. In 1866 Mary Baker Eddy, once a sufferer from poor health, believed that she had experienced physical regeneration through spiritual revelation. This healing through the “Divine Mind” led her to found Christian Science (1879) in Boston. Hydrotherapy, avidly practiced by the ancient Greeks and popularized by the Romans at such resorts as Bath, England, enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in the 19th century in the form of “water cures,” first in home-based versions and later at mountain retreats and spas in New York, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Georgia. Here the middle and upper classes could escape the stresses of urban and industrial life by “taking the [mineral] waters.” Naturism (or nudism), instituted in 1903 in Germany, was a controversial offshoot of this same search for health and freedom from the inhibitions of modern civilization. Eventually the body, and even sex, would be approached in a more open manner.

Athletic clubs and sports

Meanwhile, more physically challenging approaches to fitness were coming to the fore, brought on in part by the mass emigration of Germans after the Revolutions of 1848. The first American turnverein (gymnastics club) was founded in Cincinnati in 1848. Germans were also instrumental in founding America’s first athletic club in New York City in 1868. What popularized physical culture most, however, was the National Police Gazette, which sold 2,225,000 copies weekly by 1895. Edited by Richard K. Fox, it offered a steady dose of sporting excitement, along with articles on crime, scandal, and gossip. The Gazette also aroused working-class passions by sponsoring world championships in everything from wood chopping to water drinking, and it featured the exploits of pugilist John L. Sullivan and the feats of Louis Cyr and Katie Sandwina, billed as the world’s strongest man and world’s strongest woman, respectively. Fox virtually invented sports pages. His efforts were complemented by the garish entertainments of Coney Island, which provided a healthy outlet for the teeming immigrant masses, much as spas appealed to their social betters. Frolicking on the sunny beach, tackling daring rides, and marveling at the physical oddities in sideshows were exhilarating experiences for the urban proletarians. It was at Coney Island that famed stuntman Joe Bonomo got his start and where Warren Lincoln Travis harness-lifted the world’s largest dumbbell for decades. Eager audiences thrilled to physical culture exhibitions in countless pleasure parks, fairs, circuses, and vaudeville houses across the nation.


A leading advocate of the “strenuous life” was America’s 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, who had overcome childhood sicknesses by hardening his body through riding, shooting, boxing, and wrestling. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) owes its existence to Roosevelt’s concern over the number of deaths and serious injuries in college gridiron football games. By emphasizing training for all students at Harvard University, not just the athletically inclined, Dudley Allen Sargent virtually founded the discipline of physical education. Luther Gulick, a student of Sargent and a devotee of Muscular Christianity, infused a sport and fitness component into the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), founded in 1844. As director of the YMCA Training School (now Springfield College), Gulick ordered assistant James Naismith to develop a game that would occupy students during the winter months when it was too cold to play rugby or gridiron football in Massachusetts. Hence, in December 1891, Naismith invented basketball. It provided a fitting complement to baseball, already a national pastime since the 1860s. Gridiron football was legitimized by another physical culturist, Walter Camp, who, in addition to his spectacular success as a player and coach (1876–92) at Yale University, was a prolific writer and promoter of the sport. For his many innovations in play and rules, he is recognized as the “father of American football.” He is also known for the book The Daily Dozen (1925), which outlined a regimen of exercises he had designed for naval recruits in World War I. It became a household phrase and was copied by countless fitness gurus in succeeding generations.

Women and athletics

One of the greatest misconceptions about physical culture in the modern era was that it was meant for men only. Early efforts to incorporate European gymnastics into a liberal education were instigated by Catharine Beecher, scion of a New England family that had a tremendous impact on American mores in the 19th century. At the girls’ school she established in 1823 in Hartford, Connecticut, and later at others in Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa, Beecher taught the “movement cure” (calisthenics) and fresh-air living. Later reformers, such as Dio Lewis, a Boston educator, sought to liberate women from corsets and other restrictive garments. Lewis introduced a system of stretching exercises that utilized rubber balls, beanbags, hoops, and rings to develop eye-hand coordination. His “New Gymnastics” also employed poles to loosen stiff joints, wooden dumbbells for flexibility, Indian clubs for limb coordination, and the cast-iron crown to develop neck and back muscles. Underlying Lewis’s system was an ideological agenda for women’s rights. Colleges such as Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Hood led the way in promoting collegiate sports for women, although only on the intramural level. Arguably the healthiest and most liberating experience for women came from the introduction of the safety bicycle in the 1890s, which also encouraged dress reform and greater self-confidence.

Although the Gibson Girl, and later the flapper, exemplified the independent spirit of the new woman, swimmer and vaudeville and movie star Annette Kellerman epitomized the physical culture ideal. In 1905 Kellerman swam from Dover to Ramsgate, England, a distance of 20 miles (32 km), in 4 hours and 28 minutes. She also introduced the one-piece bathing suit at a beach near Boston, Massachusetts. Although she was arrested for indecent exposure, her promotion eventually liberated women from the cumbersome multilayer garb worn since the 1890s. In such films as Neptune’s Daughter (1914), A Daughter of the Gods (1916), and Queen of the Sea (1918), Kellerman promoted the idea that fitness and physical activity were natural, even for women.

The 20th century

Mass marketing

The icon of physical culture at the turn of the 20th century was Eugen Sandow, a native of Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), who trained with the legendary “Professor Attila” (Louis Durlacher) in Brussels and London. After successfully challenging Europe’s strongest men in the 1880s, he toured North America with Florenz Ziegfeld’s Trocadero Company and attained worldwide fame. At Harvard, Dudley Sargent pronounced Sandow to be the best specimen of manhood he had ever examined. In 1901 Sandow staged the world’s first physique contest, at London’s Royal Albert Hall, and he later promoted physical culture by marketing various publications, devices, and dietary products and by operating a chain of fitness centres throughout Britain. The fit and flawless form of Sandow (often adorned by only a fig leaf) was immortalized in photographs to an idolizing public.

Physical culture’s foremost entrepreneur was Bernarr Macfadden, who spent his entire life compensating for childhood weaknesses. Inspired by the Police Gazette, Macfadden gained health and strength by boxing, wrestling, and following a vegetarian diet. As a fitness crusader, he lectured widely against inactivity, alcohol, drugs, corsets, and prudishness, published Physical Culture magazine for a half century, and staged the first physique contest for men and women in America. In the Kellogg manner, Macfadden instigated various recuperative centres and even offered a doctorate of “physcultopathy” at his Healthatorium in Chicago. By 1935 his pulp publishing empire, which included True Story and True Romances, claimed 35 million readers.

Quite inadvertently, Macfadden fostered the emergence of physical culture’s greatest symbol when Italian immigrant Charles Atlas (Angelo Siciliano) won contests staged at New York’s Madison Square Garden for “The World’s Most Handsome Man” (1921) and “The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man” (1922). Health and aesthetic considerations, along with muscularity, were included in the judging criteria. With the aid of English naturopath Frederick Tilney, Atlas developed a muscle-building principle called Dynamic-Tension, and, through the business acumen of Charles Roman, he conducted one of the most celebrated advertising campaigns in American history. In countless comic books, he assured three generations of neurasthenic youths that his mail-order course could transform any 97-pound weakling who had sand kicked in his face at the beach into a veritable Hercules who could challenge any bully. Atlas, however, was merely the most successful of many muscle peddlers of the 1920s.


Lifting various weighted objects had been growing in popularity since the late 19th century, mainly due to the efforts of Alan Calvert, a Philadelphia businessman who was inspired by Sandow’s performance at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Calvert virtually started the “iron game” (as lifting weighted objects came to be called after the invention of iron weights) by founding the Milo Barbell Company in 1902 and by creating Strength magazine to advertise his products and promote the virtues of weight training. Most importantly, his organization began to sponsor exhibitions and competitions after World War I that led to a national weightlifting association and the standardization of rules. These innovations were instituted by Ottley Coulter, a circus and stage performer who had been in touch with Desbonnet; George Jowett, a disciple of British wrestler-strongman George Hackenschmidt; and David Willoughby, who staged the first national championships in 1923 at the Los Angeles Athletic Club. By the early 1930s weightlifting was subsumed within the organizational structure of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) of the United States, formed in 1888 to establish standards and uniformity in sport.

The AAU became such a potent force because of its links with the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The Olympic Games, revived in 1896 by a wealthy young Frenchman, Pierre, baron de Coubertin, were intended to foster a spirit of international cooperation and goodwill. Although athletes did strive to fulfill the modern Olympic ideals of “Faster, higher, stronger,” nationalist and even racist motives often underlay the competition. It was a “survival of the fittest” mentality, and for decades European nations, chiefly England, France, Germany, and Italy, were dominant. Sporting rivalries between the French and the Germans, paralleling political antagonisms, were especially intense. Adolf Hitler, resurrecting such Germanic traditions as the Volksgeist, Jahn’s nationalistic gymnastics, and Prussian militarism, made physical culture a central feature of the Nazi theories of “racial science” he supported in the 1930s. But Nazi ideas of Aryan supremacy were dealt a severe setback by the unprecedented four gold medals won by African American runner Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

  • Jesse Owens (second from right) on the winners’ podium after receiving the gold medal for the running broad jump (long jump) at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
    Jesse Owens (centre) standing on the winners’ podium after receiving the gold medal for the running …

From this point, national fitness movements took on more political than racial overtones, particularly as success in athletic competition was increasingly used to promote rival Cold War ideologies in the post-World War II era. Concurrently, physical culture became less identified with organized sports and more related to body training and shaping, especially as activities such as boxing, wrestling, gymnastics, and swimming became more specialized in the 1930s. Combining these two fitness strands was Bob Hoffman, founder of the York (Pennsylvania) Barbell Company, publisher of Strength & Health, and the acknowledged “father of American weightlifting.” Although he believed that no race or ethnic group was superior, he believed that America, as the melting pot of nationalities and a leading exponent of democracy and capitalism, was destined to become the strongest and fittest country in the world. After World War II, Hoffman led his athletes through a golden age of American weightlifting and mounted a successful challenge to the Soviet Union and the communist system of recruiting, supporting, and training athletes. The Soviets and their satellites nationalized their sports programs and trumpeted Olympic and world championship victories as evidence of the superiority of Marxism. A showdown occurred when American lifters, led by heavyweight Paul Anderson, defeated the Russians at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia.

  • American weightlifter Tommy Kono (centre), who won a gold medal as a lightweight at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, Finland, with silver medalist Yevgeni Lopatin of the U.S.S.R. (left) and bronze medalist Vern Barberis of Australia.
    Courtesy of Tommy T. Kono

By the 1960s, however, even Hungarian, Polish, Japanese, Cuban, and Bulgarian teams were defeating Hoffman’s men. A key factor in this resurgence was the proliferation of steroids and other performance-enhancing substances. Originally isolated in 1935 by Charles Kochakian, a University of Rochester graduate student, anabolic and androgenic steroids were used in limited fashion for the recuperation of wounded soldiers in the 1940s and by Russian weightlifters in the 1950s. John Ziegler, a Maryland physician, pioneered their use on American (York) lifters in the early 1960s, and their use quickly spread to virtually all sports and forms of physical activity as individuals discovered the rapid, and almost effortless, gains in muscle mass achievable with the aid of steroids. Without question, steroids revolutionized the way fitness, development, and competition were pursued.

Powerlifting, emphasizing sheer strength, was established in the 1960s by Hoffman. It has replaced Olympic weightlifting as the most commonly practiced strength sport in America, and strongman contests hold the greatest audience appeal. The first such strongman competition took place in 1977 at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. Later events were held worldwide and attracted an international field.

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