Ancient Eroticism, Pagan Workouts & Body Ideals: History of the Gym
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Hello, Betwixters. Don't mind me. I'm just back in ancient Greece, circa 700 BCE. And with the first ever Olympic Games looming, me and a bunch of fellas are here working out in one of the first gymnasiums? Gymnasia? Gymnasia? I don't know. I don't know. It's all Greek to me.

We would call it a gym. But it's not getting me very far because everybody has to work out in the nip. I think my time here may be somewhat limited. But what journey did the gym go on in the centuries that followed? All in the pursuit of a body ideal that perhaps has more to it than meets the eye. For instance, what did a period of revolution in Europe have to do with sparking the first gym boom in the 19th century?

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Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lister. Well, it's that time of year again, Betwixters. The time of resolutions, of promising yourself that this will be the year that you lose four stone and get a six-pack.

And how will you do that? Well, perhaps like many, many others, you'll be joining a gym. And gym culture is huge. But where did it all begin? Was there any such thing as a medieval gym? How about a Renaissance gym? And what's the history of the gym and the gay community?

Joining me today is Eric Chalene, author of The Temple of Perfection, The History of the Gym, who is going to take us back in time to find out. Sweatbands and dumbbells at the ready, guys. Let's crack on.

Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Eric Shaleen. How are you doing? I'm very well, thank you. How are you, Kate? I'm thrilled to be talking to you about the history of the gym. That's how I am. And this episode is going to be going out in January, which is a very good time for gym memberships, isn't it?

Exactly. Probably less so these sort of more difficult economic times, but the gym is still holding up quite well. You have written, I'm going to give you a book, the full title, The Temple of Perfection. So my first question to you, why did you want to write about the history of

not just of the gym, but of exercise and physical fitness? Well, amazingly, there's never been a complete history of the gym written. There's been some academic articles

and some memoirs by bodybuilders, people like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but never a complete social history of the gym, which I think is an important social and historical phenomenon. It dates from about 2,800 years ago. So it's one of our

oldest institutions beating the Christian church by some 800 years. Wow. Eric, are you a gym bunny yourself? I'm sort of probably a bit past the gym bunny stage because I'm sort of now retired, but I definitely was in my time. I qualified as a personal trainer when I was younger. Wow.

And I worked for fitness magazines in the 80s and 90s. So, yes, I've got quite sort of good exercise background in contemporary sports.

stuff. And I'm also a historian by training. So the two married very well. I thought a hole in the market and in our historical knowledge. What do you qualify as a gym? Not just going outside and running around until you get hungry and then coming home. How are you defining this for your research? What do you count as a gym? We're defining it as an actual building dedicated to

To the pursuit of exercise for its own sake, rather than, let's say, a sports field, which is actually like a football field, which is for, you know, you could do exercise on it and people do warm up and do training. But the purpose of it is to play football. So the gym is specifically for...

for exercise for its own sake rather than for any kind of functional activity. That makes perfect sense. And what are the earliest records that you have been able to find of gym culture and gyms?

So, as I said, about 2,800 years ago in ancient Greece, we're talking about archaic and classical Greece. And we could say that gym culture starts in around 776 BC, which is the date of the first Olympiad. So the first Olympiad means the first athletes, means that they had to do some training somewhere.

Even though we have no archaeological evidence for gyms until much later, because they were obviously sort of temporary structures which were built and rebuilt, they must have had some kind of training facility for the first Olympic Games.

which started with the main event. The first event was the sprint running race, just like it is in the modern Olympics. When I think of ancient Greece, I do think of healthy outdoor exercise culture. Is that a myth or is that something that was really important to the Greeks? What did the gym mean to these people?

Oh, absolutely. The gym was probably one of the most important institutions of civil society in ancient Greece. It was a sort of multifunctional space dedicated to the training of

male citizens. So we're talking about freeborn Greek men. The women, unfortunately, didn't go to the gym and, you know, didn't go to the gym until much, much later in historical terms. The best known gym culture is Athens.

And there were three large public gymnasia in Athens in the outskirts, the best known of which is called the Academy, after which the Academic Academy is called. But it was one of the main gyms in Athens. And it's a sort of if you arrive there, it would be a large enclosed park with gyms.

courtyards for exercise. So sort of porticos built in a square. And then inside those, you would have sort of people sort of wrestling and boxing and doing exercises. And then outside you would have things like the javelin, the discus, a running track, tracks for horses and for chariot racing, which was also part of the Olympic Games. Did they have like memberships?

If you were a male citizen of a city like Athens and freeborn, you were automatically a member. The city appointed a wealthy person to run the gym for a year and he had to sort of fund everything, the staffing, the maintenance, everything.

everything out of his own pocket for a year. And it was a sort of privilege to do so. So imagine, you know, if it was today would be Elon Musk would be funding the gym. Or somebody like that. Anyway, a philanthropist. But Athens was a direct democracy. So it was run directly by its citizens who went to a citizen assembly. So it

That's how everything was run. Magistrates were elected from the citizen body and all they were chosen by lots. And they did their stint as magistrates for a year. And the guy who ran the gym was just another one of those people. Is it true that the Greeks exercised naked in the nip?

Absolutely, yes. I think we can be pretty sure it's very well attested, not just in sculpture, but also in vase painting. There aren't that many references in literature. There are some references in the plays of Aristophanes and also in the dialogues of Plato.

of people going to the gym and talking about the gym and sort of being near the gym kind of thing. There are no sort of direct descriptions, but yes. So you arrived in the gym and the first thing you did is you stripped off your

to prepare to exercise. And you didn't go into the gym proper completely naked. You were oiled up. And then they sprinkled dust onto your body. In hot weather, they used clay to be cooling. Or in cold weather, they used asphalt to be heating. So it was sort of a medical idea that if you covered yourself in dust, it would actually benefit you health-wise. This...

All sounds a bit sexy to me. Maybe that's just me putting a very modern lens on this. But we're all going to go to the gym. We're all going to take our clothes off and get oiled up. Exactly. And we're all boys together. All boys together. All boys together. And there was definitely that element of...

same-sex eroticism and attraction. And in fact, in ancient Greece, in classical Greece, there was a system of older, younger mentorship between older men and sort of younger boys between 14 and 18. So even though those relationships were not necessarily always sexual, ideally, I think in practice,

quite a few of them were. I think, yes, same-sex attraction was definitely...

something that made people go to the gym and carry on going all through their lives. So if you were a freeborn Athenian boy, you spent the first seven years of your life with your mum in the sort of women's quarters of the house. And then between seven and 14, because there were no public schools of any kind, the only schooling that was offered was in the gym. So they studied sort of

reading, writing, basic skills, music, and started their training. And between seven and 14, that's what they did. And then between 14 and 18, they just stayed in the gym and did whatever they wanted. And then between 18 and 20, they were military cadets. They were called the Ephibes.

And every freeborn man went for these two years of military training, which was also held at the gym. What were women doing? Women were, well, if you were a highborn, a freeborn Athenian lady, you just sat at home and wove. I'm afraid. And had children and ran the house.

Obviously, there were sort of poorer women who ran market stalls and, you know, were in the country. It was also a very, a slave economy. So there were a lot of slaves around. They were dealing, the people who go to the gym are purely male freeborn citizens. Slaves weren't allowed to go. Or they worked there, but they weren't allowed to train. I'll be back with Eric after this short break.

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The Greeks seem to know a thing or two about a very buffed male body. If you look at their statues and the art that's left, six packs and hamstrings and quads, it's all very taut and toned. Do you have any idea of what an exercise regime might have been for them? Like today you'd go to the gym and you'd have leg day or arm day and you'd have sets that you'd do. Is there any evidence of what they were actually doing in the gym to look like that?

Oh yeah, we have evidence from vase painting, but they didn't really use weights. They actually trained in the sports in which they performed. So there were six Olympic sports.

There was running, which was very popular. Wrestling, which is also incredibly popular. Discus and javelin. And the last one was the pancration, which is sort of the no holds barred boxing come wrestling where people just beat each other often to death in contests in the Olympic Games.

serious injuries and fatalities. So it wasn't sort of, you know, nice, effete, oh, let's go for a nice run in the park. Some of it was quite hairy. And what happened to the gym then? Because I can see that it was really big for the Greeks. And I know that the Romans had training areas as well. I'm racking my brain trying to think of a medieval gym, and I can't think of any.

Now, the gym basically closes down. Well, it carries on through the classical period and through the Hellenistic period. So that's Alexander the Great and his successors. But when the Romans take over, they're much more prudish. They don't want to strip off unless they're in the baths. That's all right to be naked there, but they're not going to be naked in public like the Greeks did.

If you remember the Parthenon frieze, which represents a big festival in Athens, a lot of the guys, the younger guys especially, are naked. And that was probably a fair, you know, an accurate representation. People actually went with sort of vague a cape over one shoulder, but actually completely in the buff.

But the Romans were much more considered that quite decadent. And when the empire became Christian, obviously anything to do with nakedness, anything to do with the pagan gods, as the gyms were dedicated to the pagan gods and the Olympic games were dedicated to the gods, all that was out. The Olympic games were abolished along with all other pagan ceremonies at the end of the fourth centuries.

of the Christian era. And that was it for the gym for about 1200 years. Bathhouses survived, didn't they? Bathhouses survived, yes. But during the Middle Ages, they were considered sort of little more than brothels. Naughty. Naughty, yes. And probably accurately that people did get up to things in the bathhouses.

So the gym sort of reappears in the literature during the Renaissance. You have a lot of doctors, physicians who rediscover ancient medicine and a lot of ancient medicine was concerned with the benefits of exercise, the benefits of moderation, exercise, good diet.

which are not well known and not well attested in the Middle Ages, where if you were rich, you stuffed yourself. If you think of Henry VIII, who's a bit later, but that kind of figure, he just basically ate himself to death. And

You might counsel him moderation if you were really brave. He did a lot of exercise, but it was all related to military training. It wasn't exercise in the same sense as classical Greek exercise or modern exercise. He went jousting, he went hunting, he did archery, he did all those skills. So that kind of exercise went on. But exercise for its own sake or exercise for sport, obviously,

that sort of disappears. So it starts to come back in the Renaissance. Can you describe what a Renaissance gym might have looked like? They are aware of exercise and that gyms existed, but nobody actually went and built one. It was just the elites were just not interested. They were interested in better medicine, which is why they encouraged the study of ancient medical texts.

But the first gyms really come with the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century. And what actually triggers the recreation of the gym is the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars, because all the sort of royal professional armies were

had been completely destroyed by the French Revolutionary armies and then by Napoleon. And so a guy in Germany called Friedrich Jahn decided that the German nation needed to be rebuilt from the body up, and he created the first open-air gym.

which was called in German a Turnplatz, an exercise place, which was, again, an open air park. But instead of the Greek sports, he created really the ancestor of artistic gymnastics. So there were sort of parallel bars and things to climb and

as well as running tracks and things. But it was all sort of that kind. Imagine a sort of adventure playground with with masts, except it was all, you know, without padding or anything. So if you fell off a 50 foot mast, you probably did yourself an injury. So that style of gym sort of exists for

the next 80, 90 years before we start to get indoor gyms again,

And then you start to get sort of recognisable, a sort of building with equipment. But that really comes in the 19th century or the early 20th century. And what's happening to the ideal body, beautiful image as we're moving through these periods? Has it changed a lot? I noticed that women's forms change a lot from the ancient world to now, but male forms were still buff, buff, buff, everything rippling.

Yes, but you have this sort of 1200 year gap. So with the Middle Ages where the body is, unless you count a sort of crucified Christ as a naked body, but not a particularly sensuous one. Yeah.

It's with the Renaissance, you get sort of renewed interest and obviously classical, neoclassical art. So something like Michelangelo's David. Oh, he loved a buff boy. He loved a buff boy. He was definitely had sort of, he was either fully homosexual or bisexual. Oh, anyway, some form of same-sex attraction. And as the sort of main expression of

the human personality, your embodiment becomes important again. Before it was all about saving your soul, but now it's about appearing to be the perfect Superman again.

just like in ancient times. I suppose fashion must have played a part in this as well. In the Middle Ages, very covered up, everybody was sort of very covered up from the tops down to the toes. And when fashion starts to shift and bodies become more visible, does that have an impact on exercise? Not till the modern period, because people remain covered up

most of the time. And the only time that Westerners strip off completely naked is when they go swimming.

So people like in the 18th century, when they went to the beach, men just went naked. Women still had to wear a sort of like a big sort of shift kind of thing. But often they went naked as well. But men definitely swam naked until the end of the 19th century. And then sort of prudity got the better of it. And the beaches insisted on people wearing the one piece that you remember from the old movies. Yeah.

Let's talk about the Victorians because they were health fanatics. They brought back

Lots of health regimes, lots better than others, it has to be said. Yes. I mean, when the sort of leading light of Victorian health and fitness is a German guy called Eugen Sandow, who came to England, and he started off his career as a prizefighter, then as a sort of vaudeville strongman. Yeah.

And he realized that there was a sort of demand for physical training amongst the upper classes who had, let's admit it, overdone it in eating, drinking. They all had gout. So there was an awareness that people needed to get fit again. And they turned to men like Sandow.

He had a sort of very naturally muscular physique. In fact, he posed naked a lot for reproducing classical statues, which is how he got away with being able to pose naked because, oh, it was art and anatomy with its largest fig leaf. So he wasn't completely naked. But still for, you know, the 1890s, it's quite...

something that they managed to get away with it. And people would buy these photographs and postcards, especially women who seemed to be quite fond of them. And we've got the emergence of strong women in the 19th century as well. There was a female Eugene Sando. Yes, there were quite a few in England and in France and Germany, but they were considered women.

pretty freakish. And you could say that even now female bodybuilders don't get an amazing press, do they? They're still considered masculine and odd. That's true. Yeah. So yes, they were, but they were a tiny minority even compared to male exercisers.

So it's only in the modern period and only sort of post-World War II and well after World War II, I'd say that women really break into the gym with Jane Fonda and the exercise video, you know, Jane Fonda's aerobic video, which really changed female embodiment forever because it created the image of the woman

strong woman, but not the sort of not a woman who was aping a man in terms of muscularity, but who was sort of taking control of her own body and remaining feminine at the same time. I think that was the main selling point of the Jane Fonda.

And she transformed gyms. I mean, I remember before Jane Fonda's exercise videos, gyms were sort of quite sort of masculine, not particularly attractive places. And then gyms,

were not very attracted to women. And then after sort of the aerobics revolution had come, gyms had transformed. There are dance studios, there are dance classes, aerobics classes. So you have a sort of gendered division of the gym. So you have the men still going to the weight, doing weights. And then you have the women who are doing classes and then gradually they merge and you have sort of

aerobic equipment and men going to classes and classes being more directed to men. So things like circuit classes or boxer size, which cater more for men and women being attracted to the gym by nice, shiny weight training machines rather than nasty old rusty weights. It's still

quite divided by gender to this very day you still get don't you I started going to the gym in the 80s and it was really really noticeable then I mean you if there was one guy in a dance studio that was something that you'd notice my god you know there's a guy doing an exercise class

And if there was one woman in the male area in the wait room, that was quite unusual. But now, I mean, I go to a local sort of health center and it's completely mixed and there's no gender differentiation really. And age wise as well. It used to be younger people, obviously. But now it's everybody from sort of teenagers to pensioners.

I'll be back with Eric after this short break. If you're a facilities manager at a university, you know students rely on the cafeteria for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and the occasional late night snack. So when a dishwasher breaks down and dirty plates pile up, the mess hall can turn messy in the blink of an eye. Enter Grainger. With over a million industrial grade products and fast delivery, the product you need now is never far away. So you can turn that dishwasher back into a lean, clean washing machine. Call

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I love a body pump class. And in my body pump class, it's very, very mixed. And there is one woman who is, she must be getting on for 80 and she kicks everyone's ass in that room. She's lifting more weights than anyone else. Undefeated. So to take you back to Eugene Sando, to look at this man, and I encourage everyone to Google him, he is a proper beefcake.

Are there any records left to us as to what he's doing to look like this? Because this is pre-anabolic steroids and he looks jacked.

Yeah, he was one of those few sort of people with a naturally muscular physique. I mean, he was a prize fighter. He was a wrestler. So that's quite sort of heavy exercise. He did also do weight training. And in fact, he established the first real indoor gym in London in Pall Mall. It was rather nice wood paneled gym for the British elite athletes.

with little cubicles with curtains so people could train privately, especially women. They preferred to train behind the curtain because I suppose they had to let their corsets loose. And it was very much a sort of personal training experience. So each person got an individual trainer and their little set of weights.

And that sort of continued until the First World War and then the First World War shut everything down and people had sort of better things to worry about than, you know, what they looked like for the next 30, 40 years because there are two world wars and the Great Depression to live through.

I wonder how the World Wars actually impacted our sense of being healthy because obviously then the military becomes really present. And if we're looking at what the Nazis were doing, if we have to, but they were pushing ideas of physical fitness and the body beautiful on the perfect Aryan race, weren't they? But they weren't pushing gyms. They were doing sort of these mass group exercise classes, if you think...

They were sort of all doing sort of, you know, squat thrusts and jumps and sort of very much sort of everybody doing the same thing at the same time, very much the fascist ideology and not particularly big or buff. That comes later.

in America, where in 1938, the first Superman comic comes out. And that really represents the hyper-masculine, hyper-muscular ideal that is developing at that point in the United States.

And why exactly then? Well, I think you could partially explain it with a reaction against industrialization and mechanization, that people were becoming sort of enslaved to machines.

Think of the film Metropolis or Charles Chaplin's Modern Times, where he's sort of completely trapped by the machines. And I think people are trying to sort of reclaim their humanity.

And somehow I think it slightly overshoots and you get this sort of hyper-masculine, hyper-muscular ideal, which then becomes realized in somebody like Arnold Schwarzenegger, who becomes Mr. Hyper-masculine, Mr. Hyper-muscular. And of course, he does do it with a lot of steroids. He's admitted it.

and all that generation of bodybuilders. And they become actors. So there's him and somebody like Louis Ferrigno, who plays the Incredible Hulk. So it becomes disseminated across popular culture. And that becomes a sort of, and there's obviously the film Pumping Iron with Arnold Schwarzenegger as well, which is sort of documentary about his life.

his time at girls' gym competing for Mr. Universe. And that becomes the masculine ideal probably until the 90s. And then you have a sort of, I think, with the influence of gay people, a lot of gay men joining the gym, of the...

Male embodiment slightly changing in emphasis away from hypermascularity into sort of more very, very sort of toned, young looking, what I call the fitness body in the book. Sort of the guys you see on the posters now advertising underwear.

As a very quick side note to this, as someone who was a personal trainer and who's worked with fitness magazines, what would it take to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger? Like what would that workout route? I bet it's not a body pump class here or there, is it? He's training every day, several hours a day and eating a huge amount and taking a lot of supplements and taking anabolic steroids regularly.

which were still, well, probably not legal, completely legal, but they were sort of an accepted part of the whole thing. And now they've become very, very widespread. It's actually quite a sort of negative outcome of...

of the social media and people saying, oh, yes, you can be like this naturally. And of course, they're all on steroids themselves, but not admitting, not admitting to it, which in turn encourages the people who follow them to

to think, oh, well, I'm not getting any bigger, then I must need steroids, which is a great shame. You touched very briefly there on gay culture. And I think that we should talk about that a little bit more because from talking to you, it seems like the gym has always had

that part of it where it's bros together. If you're in Greece, you're naked and you're oiled up. But it's always been a place of male beauty, I suppose, beautiful bodies, people trying to be beautiful. What does the gym mean to gay culture, in your opinion? In the 70s, in the pre-HIV, AIDS pandemic times,

It's about reclaiming masculinity. So until then, until gay liberation, gay men were considered effeminate. And in fact, you know, early theories about homosexuality said that men were actually physically changing into women. That's why homosexuality was called inversion sex.

by people like Freud. And then you have gay liberation and gay men trying to, you know, abandon those labels and reclaim their sort of, their pride.

And the first sort of manifestation of that is, I don't know if you remember the clone, the gay man in a check shirt with a moustache. That's in the sort of 1970s. That's sort of the first sort of masculine iteration of gay identity. And that quickly morphs into people starting to go to the gym and sort of building up their bodies. And then you get the HIV epidemic, right?

And people become much more health conscious, especially when the treatments appear and people are not just going to die. There's a phenomenon who appears, the person who's called the POS jock, the HIV positive jock. So the really buff guy at the gym and he's HIV positive. So that sort of disappears.

disappeared now and there are far fewer gay gyms around because gay men have become much more accepted within society. So they just go to any gym, really. But I think what the impact of gay gym culture has been, it's been back onto straight men that

how gay men look has become more the ideal than the super muscular, than the Arnold Schwarzenegger type. That's seen as sort of a bit over the top. So...

So first, the sort of gym people influence gays to reclaim their masculinity. And now it's the gays influencing the straights about how they embody themselves. And there's that really interesting trope that for the longest time,

muscle magazines acted as proxy gay erotica for a lot of men in the closet because they could buy these fitness magazines and then say, I'm only, I'm just really interested in health and not have to fess up to the fact that, yeah, but you think he's really pretty though. That's probably true. And they are pushing a very standardised, I'm thinking of men's health here,

every other cover is, you know, how to get a six pack or how to lose, you know, how to get really cut or, you know, it's sort of endless repetition of the same thing, slightly altered. So you keep buying the magazine. So look good for summer, look good for winter, you know, get a six pack for summer. And as a final question,

Let's think about the future of the gym, because I think it's here to stay. I can't see another vanishing of it, like what happened with the Romans and the Greeks. I think it's very much a message in our culture now. But what do you see as the future of the gym? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely growing. When I did the book, which was about a decade ago, we had about 11-12%

people in the UK going to the gym. It's now gone up to 17%. And that figure is about 25% of 25 to 34 year olds. So it's quite a sort of increase even in 10 years. And I think, yes, gyms are becoming quite a lot of specialist offerings. So those sort of the sort of Peloton type, you know, the cycling type gyms, sort of the big, you

I mean, there's still a huge range of, you know, the budget gym has now, you know, you pay your 20 quid and you're a member of a gym. So I think there are lots of innovations within the gym as well in terms of sort of digital online stuff. So bikes with big screens so that you can cycle through the Italian countryside or, you know, the Alps or something like that.

So I think that's going to keep going. And virtual reality, I think virtual reality gyms, you know, you're going to be there in your little booth with your goggles on. Oh, yeah. Training with an ancient Greek athlete or with a 19th century German athlete or with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the gym. Yeah.

I think that's probably the future of the gym. Eric, you have been marvellous to talk to. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? In good libraries. I don't know if I'm still available in bookshops. I probably, yes, on Amazon. Yes. And there's the Temple of Perfection. And there's also the History of Swimming, which is called Strokes of Genius, which if you're interested in swimming, also goes back to antiquity. Amazing.

amazing thank you so much for talking to me today you've been wonderful thank you for listening and thank you so much to eric for joining me and if you like what you heard please don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts if you want us to explore a subject or maybe you just fancied saying hi then you can email us at betwixt at history hit dot com we

We've got episodes on everything from the brothel of Pompeii to the history of red lipstick all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom DeLarge and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again for Twix The Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

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