FITNESS The health industry – a symptom of modern life

The coming of the ‘fitness industry’


Personal trainer
Paul O'Brien

BEFORE fitness became an industry, it was simply a way of life. Or, more specifically, it was a part of life. The words ‘fitness’ and ‘industry’ would never have appeared together a little further back than a single generation. Nowadays fitness is big business. So how did this come about?
As someone who makes his living from the fitness business, I am also intrigued by its origins. These, believe, can be traced back to the 19th century and the coming of the industrial revolution. This epochal event in our history marked the watershed between an emphasis on physical work and the move to the greater emphasis on the sedentary lifestyles that are prevalent today.
A century ago, the vast majority of our ancestors, our grandfathers’ generation, worked on the land. Agriculture still held sway as the dominant employment sector in this country.  The spread of industry offered factory job to both men and women. Before the onset of large-scale mechanisation and a half century before computers entered the fray, the emphasis was again on human effort, a great deal of this being of the physical type. Physical labour was also the trend at home, working small plots of land to grow crops and raise livestock. With a high percentage of the population engaged in physical labour, physical well-being was a part of the fibre of life. It wasn’t necessary to engage in ‘physical exercise’ as a separate pursuit.
As the pace of industrialisation accelerated, it began to fundamentally change how we live. Advances in technology and the dawn of the computer age demanded more skilled workers to both produce and operate the fruits of their labours. The effects of the onset of industrialisation and technology impacted every sphere of commerce – construction, transportation, law, marketing etc. This was, of course, accompanied by a move away from the land and more traditional occupations such as fishing and farming. This was driven by the lure of higher wages for those qualified and skilled in the new industries.
The path to the modern, sedentary lifestyle runs parallel to that of the rise of our technological society. The explosion of office-based jobs in a myriad of support and service industries has helped bring about a change in our life-style.  More and more people sat at desks – developing, administrating, accounting, legalising and providing countless more support services for burgeoning new industries. The emphasis was now clearly more on ‘brain’ than ‘brawn’.
As the demand for people with the right ‘smarts’ increased, the structure of education changed to meet it. So focused on developing and exercising the brain, we paid less attention to the body. The ‘payoff’ was an exponential rise in heart disease, cancers and a plethora of other ailments. Though these would also have afflicted our ancestors, they were not the pandemics we are attempting to deal with today.
We are only beginning to redress this imbalance. The chronic rise is child obesity, early-onset diabetes and cardiovascular disease and their impact on all our lives has begun to bring us to our senses. Since the 1970s or 1980s, the fitness industry has risen in answer to this call. We now talk about ‘holistic’ fitness, caring for the well-being of body, mind and soul.
Sometimes when using a treadmill in a gym, I am struck by a strange thought. Here I am, using a machine to progress my physical fitness. A machine, itself a product of the 19th-century revolution that was, in part at least, responsible for our current, sorry condition. Ah, the irony!

Paul O’Brien is a Personal Trainer and Life Coach and runs his own fitness and coaching business in Westport. He is the founder of Bootcamp West, a fitness programme running in Westport, Castlebar and Louisburgh. For information about fitness training, coaching, bootcamp programmes and new TRX classes, email Paul at paul@bootcampwest.com or call 086 1674515.