2,500 years of gyms (and you’re still better off walking the dog)

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. Not that it wouldn’t see action: Greek gyms were hotbeds of gay sex, to the extent that boys were told not to sit in the sand lest the impressions left by their genitals arouse the elders. A more calming influence was the flute music that accompanied proceedings, the ancient equivalent of Bruno Mars on the iPod.

Fourth-century Christians banned gyms (indeed all athletics) — ironic from the viewpoint of today, when the gym has replaced the church as many people’s place of worship. An Italian physician of 1569 recommended holding your breath as a way of exercising, but it was the 19th century before gyms really flourished again. Mac-laren’s in Oxford boasted the trunk of a 60-foot Norwegian spruce as its climbing frame, while at the gymnase de Triat in Paris groups of men were put through their paces dressed only in red tights.