What actually makes a gym? That’s actually a pretty broad question, so let me be more specific; what equipment do you need in a gym?  At our facility, we tend toward the minimal. The vast majority of our space is open and the rest is filled with free weights. This might seem strange to anyone reared in commercial gyms, where any open space is quickly occupied by expensive machinery. This is a pretty big divide. Why does it exist in the first place?

Good question. I like where you’re going with this.

Historically, we don’t need to step back terribly far. Prior to industrialized society, people were pretty active by default. Performing supplementary physical work for its own sake was relatively uncommon up until the nineteenth century. By that time, the sedentary lifestyles that technology had created were also contributing to diminished health and vitality. The physical culture movement stepped into the fray with thinkers (and doers) such as Eugene Sandow and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn.

The early proponents of physical culture used relatively little equipment – not that there was much at the time – and tended toward practices such as gymnastics, lifting free weights and stretching. Nothing changed dramatically until the 1970s. I think that there were three major events that changed the face of the commercial gym industry during this period:

1. The widening use of anabolic steroids by athletes. Although steroids were in use by Olympic athletes as early as the mid-1950s, their use didn’t become widespread for another 12-15 years. Anabolic steroids allowed athletes to work harder, longer. As bodybuilders later discovered, some types also allowed users to maximize size gains.

2. The release of the movie Pumping Iron in 1977. This movie may be remembered by many as the introduction of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger. However, it was also the first glimpse of bodybuilding by pretty much anyone who wasn’t part of its immediate subculture. These men enjoyed a combination of genetics and newfound steroids (still legal at the time), that made them gargantuan by the standards of the day.

3. The advent of commercial gym machinery. Arthur Jones, a quirky iconoclast who fancied safaris, guns and alligators, invented the line of gym equipment that became known as Nautilus.

How did all this play out? We had big guys getting even bigger and a successful film that exposed their subculture to the world. This resulted in a deluge of young men hitting the gyms in hopes of achieving big muscles and all the rewards they brought. And if there’s one thing we know about the fitness industry, any product that promises better, faster results will gain a lot of attention. Enter the machines. It only seemed reasonable that we would evolve from coarse farm boy methods of lifting free weights to the use of sophisticated equipment designed to isolate muscles – to deconstruct the body and build it up again.

While there’s plenty more room for discussion of how the subculture of bodybuilding has evolved since the mid 1970s (and why machines have limited use), we don’t need to over-think things; the shiny new lines of equipment were not only accepted, they were expected. This made all the difference in the world.

To this day, many people evaluate a fitness club on whether it has one machine or another. Effectiveness remains inconsequential because of common expectation. Not only is it expensive and space-consuming, the presence of machines generally leads to their use – even when that use is counter-productive.

The epilogue to this story is that trends are changing. People seem to be gravitating back toward the basics.  The same things that worked in the 1800s work today. We’re starting to ditch our unnecessary baggage and moving a lot faster because of it.

GG