by DK Badenhorst. When Virgin Active opened its doors in South Africa at the turn of this century, I experienced the first real change in the perception of fitness.
Suddenly, gyms were no longer for professionals (who had no time to get out) and muscle junkies (who had no intention of ever getting out). A gym was not a fitness facility anymore; it was a health club. A place where ordinary people like you and me could go to have fun. Swim, run, dance, play or whatever else you’d like.
The white walls and musty smell gave way to brighter walls decorated with happy people and somehow the air became fresher.
Deafening clang
As the gym filled up with normal folks, so the muscle junkies got squeezed into the back corners and it was only really late at nights that you’d hear them moaning and groaning away, with the occasional deafening clang of triple-digit weights hitting the floor.
Weight lifting wasn’t considered healthy and bodybuilding lost the glamour of the Schwarzenegger era — there was no Goliath with a charming personality dominating the scenes anymore; all you really had was the intimidating no-neck club in every other gym.
Popular blog posts such as Slick Tiger’s guide to klapping gym boet in 2010 were a giveaway that it was finally open season on the trend. That this new language of ‘klapping gym boet’ resonated so well meant that it was already in common use and that, by 2010, the gap between normal gym goers and bodybuilders was big enough to fuel the satire in this post.
Strong for a reason
At the same time, however, functional fitness, Crossfit and MMA stepped up to fill the void between Zumba and bodybuilding. No longer were the options limited to weak and fun or strong and weird. You could now be strong for a reason. The super thin body ideal that Dove was fighting so hard to eliminate had been replaced by the Amazonian Crossfitter. In the same time that Slicktiger had us in tears over klapping it, Crossfit fanatics were launching their new mantra: strong is the new skinny.
Within a few decades, we’ve gone from pumping iron to klapping it back to strong is the new skinny. It’s a brilliant example of how the pendulum always swings back and brings a bit of learning with it.
From Arnold’s Pumping Iron, we learned that there is simply no substitute for a great physique. Superman’s Velcro muscles were nothing compared to Conan the Barbarian’s muscular chest. But it was as alienating as it was impressive, so we returned to swimming and Zumba, keeping in mind that health is important. Only to realise that defined bodies are beautiful, so we folded functionality in with bodybuilding to give us things such as Crossfit.
Relies upon sexual attraction
It’s hard to deny that the current wave of fitness relies heavily upon sexual attraction. The body ideal is influenced by icons such as Jennifer Lopez and Kim Kardashian. More and more training regimes focus on the gluteus maximus or your bum. So important is this body part that even Kat von D got an enlarged one on Tony Hawk Skateboarding.
What I’ve always found somewhat amusing is the extent to which people will photograph their hard-earned abs and bums, often accentuating a hip while blowing a kiss and then going on to talk about how healthy they look. It is strange to see how hard health language has had to work to convey the growing set of performers’ need to display their new-found sexual attraction.
But language can’t stretch forever. It either has to move (ie healthy must mean sexy) or it snaps back (healthy means healthy again and sexy means sexy). Health can’t move; it has family and a job in the health environment. Brands such as Vital and categories such as ‘organic food’ require that it hangs on to its conventional meaning. So what now?
Saturated with sexuality and rebellion
It’s true that Equinox is a luxury gym and it makes it difficult to take it for a trend. That is true. But brands such as Equinox are the blips on the horizon that ripple out and become something more.
Take a look at Puma’s forever faster.
The future of sports?
I do not imagine that this is the future of sports. There is health, self-realisation, escapism and more that all make up the growing landscape of an active lifestyle.
But it is interesting to note that it took the sporting world a decade and a half to acknowledge that Lester Burnham was not alone when he so honestly acknowledged that he’s not training for any other reason than to look good naked.
DK Badenhorst is a cultural insight and semiotics consultant who brings cultural context and long-term trend insights to brand communication. He contributes the monthly “Brand Culture” column, exploring the value and meaning interaction between brands and society, to MarkLives.com.
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