Fit for Consumption

<p>This is the first text to offer a comprehensive socio-cultural and historical analysis of the current fitness culture.</p><p>Fitness today is not simply about health clubs and exercise classes, or measures of body mass index and cardiovascular endurance. <em>Fit for Consumption</em> conceptualizes fitness as a field within which individuals and institutions may negotiate - if not altogether reconcile - the competing and often conflicting social demands made on the individual body that characterize our current era. </p><p>Intended for researchers and senior undergraduate and postgraduate students of sport, leisure, cultural studies and the body, this book utilizes the US fitness field as a case study through which to explore the place of the body in contemporary consumer culture. Combining observations in health clubs, interviews with fitness producers and consumers, and a discourse analysis of a wide variety of fitness texts, this book provides an empirically grounded examination of one of the pressing theoretical questions of our time: how individuals learn to fit into consumer culture and the service economy and how our bodies and selves become ‘fit for consumption.' </p> <p>1. Making Sense of Fitness 2. The Roots of Fitness: Physical Culture and Physical Capital 3. Health Clubs: The Stratification of Fitness Sites 4. Fitness Media: An Education in the Fitness Lifestyle 5. Personal Trainers: In the Service of Fitness 6. Lessons from the Fitness Field</p>