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Now more than ever, American dads act as hands-on caregivers who are devoted to keeping themselves and their families healthy. Yet, men are also disproportionately likely to neglect their own health care, diets, and exercise routines—bad habits that they risk passing on to their children. 

In Dads, Kids, and Fitness, William Marsiglio challenges dads to become more health-conscious in how they live and raise their children. His conclusions are drawn not only from his revealing interviews with a diverse sample of dads and pediatric healthcare professionals, but also from his own unique personal experiences—as a teenage father who, thirty-one years later, became a later-life dad to a second son. Marsiglio’s research highlights the value of treating dads as central players in what he calls the social health matrix, which can serve both healthy children and those with special needs. He also outlines how schools, healthcare facilities, religious groups, and other organizations can help dads make a positive imprint on their families’ health, fitness, and well-being.  

Anchored in compelling life stories of joy, tragedy, and resilience, Dads, Kids, and Fitness extends and deepens public conversation about health at a pivotal historical moment. Its progressive message breathes new life into discussions about fathering, manhood, and health.

How is it that Americans are more obsessed with exercise than ever, and yet also unhealthier? Fit Nation explains how we got here and imagines how we might create a more inclusive, stronger future.

If a shared American creed still exists, it’s a belief that exercise is integral to a life well lived. A century ago, working out was the activity of a strange subculture, but today, it’s almost impossible to avoid exhortations to exercise: Walk 5K to cure cancer! Awaken your inner sex kitten at pole-dancing class! Sweat like (or even with) a celebrity in spin class! Exercise is everywhere.

Yet the United States is hardly a “fit nation.” Only 20 percent of Americans work out consistently, over half of gym members don’t even use the facilities they pay for, and fewer than 30 percent of high school students get an hour of exercise a day. So how did fitness become both inescapable and inaccessible?

Spanning more than a century of American history, Fit Nation answers these questions and more through original interviews, archival research, and a rich cultural narrative. As a leading political and intellectual historian and a certified fitness instructor, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is uniquely qualified to confront the complex and far-reaching implications of how our contemporary exercise culture took shape. She explores the work of working out not just as consumers have experienced it, but as it was created by performers, physical educators, trainers, instructors, and many others.

For Petrzela, fitness is a social justice issue. She argues that the fight for a more equitable exercise culture will be won only by revolutionizing fitness culture at its core, making it truly inclusive for all bodies in a way it has never been. Examining venues from the stage of the World’s Fair and Muscle Beach to fat farms, feminist health clinics, radical and evangelical college campuses, yoga retreats, gleaming health clubs, school gymnasiums, and many more, Fit Nation is a revealing history that shows fitness to be not just a matter of physical health but of what it means to be an American.

Men’s fitness as a performance—from nineteenth-century theatrical exhibitions to health and wellness practices today
 
This book recounts the story of fitness culture from its beginnings as spectacles of strongmen, weightlifters, acrobats, and wrestlers to its legitimization in the twentieth-century in the form of competitive sports and health and wellness practices. Broderick D. V. Chow shows how these modes of display contribute to the construction and deconstruction of definitions of masculinity.
 
Attending to its theatrical origins, Chow argues for a more nuanced understanding of fitness culture, one informed by the legacies of self-described Strongest Man in the World Eugen Sandow and the history of fakery in strongman performance; the philosophy of weightlifter George Hackenschmidt and the performances of martial artist Bruce Lee; and the intersections of fatigue, resistance training, and whiteness. Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity moves beyond the gym and across the archive, working out techniques, poses, and performances to consider how, as gendered subjects, we inhabit and make worlds through our bodies.

Shortlisted for the North American Society for Sports History 2020 Monograph Prize

It’s hard to imagine, but as late as the 1950s, athletes could get kicked off a team if they were caught lifting weights. Coaches had long believed that strength training would slow down a player. Muscle was perceived as a bulky burden; training emphasized speed and strategy, not “brute” strength. Fast forward to today: the highest-paid strength and conditioning coaches can now earn $700,000 a year. Strength Coaching in America delivers the fascinating history behind this revolutionary shift.

College football represents a key turning point in this story, and the authors provide vivid details of strength training’s impact on the gridiron, most significantly when University of Nebraska football coach Bob Devaney hired Boyd Epley as a strength coach in 1969. National championships for the Huskers soon followed, leading Epley to launch the game-changing National Strength Coaches Association. Dozens of other influences are explored with equal verve, from the iconic Milo Barbell Company to the wildly popular fitness magazines that challenged physicians’ warnings against strenuous exercise. Charting the rise of a new athletic profession, Strength Coaching in America captures an important transformation in the culture of American sport.