Working out: consumers and the culture of exercise.

NORTH AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE CAN BE CHARACTERIZED BY ITS obsession with fitness and exercise. American consumers spend billions of dollars annually on exercise products (Howell) as diverse as health club memberships, whey supplements, yoga videos, and zip-up sneakers. Cultural institutions encourage this focus on exercise; in the media, a dramatic increase can be seen in the number of exercise articles written for women's magazines over the last thirty years (Wiseman et al.), and specialty magazines and TV programs targeting specific exercise segments have proliferated (Featherstone). In addition, government exercise and health propaganda has been widespread (Leepson).

Learning why exercise has become such an important part of modern North American culture has proceeded along many fronts. Researchers have examined individual motivations to exercise by using beliefs and attitudes (e.g., Jayanti and Burns; Williams et al.), normative health models (e.g., Moorman and Matulich), and social comparison theory (e.g., Frederick, Havitz, and Shaw; Gulas and McKeage). At the group level, researchers have examined exercise differences based on age, gender, and ethnicity (e.g., Duke; Howze, Smith, and DiGilio; Jackson and Henderson). At the institutional level, researchers have started to explore the role that the media plays in presenting different views of health (Andsager and Powers) and fitness (Duncan and Messner). However, these pockets of research in social psychology, health, sociology, communication, and sports marketing are difficult to integrate into a coherent story about the way that exercise permeates our culture. Although Thompson and Hirschman's poststructuralist model of the body is most apt at illuminating several aspects of exercise culture, their focus on the overall "socialized body" leaves other important exercise elements in the shadows.

This article introduces a framework to help us understand exercise as a modern cultural phenomenon. I will argue that Arthur Frank's typology of "body use in action" can be applied to exercise consumption situations to explain individuals' exercise behaviors and identities. In addition, the typology helps us to understand how advertising and the media exert pressure on exercise consumers and instill complex cultural meaning in exercise products. In-depth interviews with six exercisers support the usefulness of the typology and provide insight for its application in the real world.

Because Frank's typology and its application to exercise, advertising, and the real-life behavior of individuals are intertwined, I will describe the interview method before presenting the typology and situating it in relevant literature. This outline avoids needless repetition of main ideas and integrates conceptual theory, previous empirical research, and key support from the interviews.

Method

Three male and three female exercisers who were graduate students at a southwestern university were asked to participate in in-depth interviews to discuss their exercise behavior. To be eligible, participants had to meet the minimum government standard for regular physical activity, defined as a half-hour of light to moderate exercise at least five times per week ("Most Americans Fail"). To ensure natural responses, students who had no specialized knowledge of exercise, fitness, marketing, or advertising were selected. Participants were between the ages of 23 and 30, had body weights in a normal range for their heights, and exercised between four and nine hours per week at weightlifting, aerobics, racquetball, exercise machines, basketball, softball, jogging, in-line skating, and walking.

Participants met with the author individually and were asked to describe several aspects of their exercise behavior, including times when exercise went well and went poorly, the reasons they liked and disliked exercise, and their preferences regarding working out alone or with others, and with men or women. They also were asked to describe how they felt when they could not exercise, the products they needed in order to exercise, and an individual who did not exercise. Finally, informants were asked to articulate why they thought they exercised. The interviews were semistructured; questions were open-ended, and participants were allowed to lead the discussion to topics of interest to them. Each interview took between one and two hours to complete.