In my new article on Return of Kings, I look at the state of fitness, how much suck it has, and I seek to find the point where it started to suck.

The state of fitness absolutely sucks nowadays. We all know this to be the case at even the most casual of glances around. But once you observe that such a phenomenon exists, then you have to ask why? More specifically, not only have people become less fit, but the practice of fitness itself seems to be less effective than ever. There are certainly more gyms around then you could shake a stick at, but despite the sheer ubiquity of fitness facilities, people are getting fatter than ever. Why?

While training likely existed as long as humanity has been walking on two feet—and naturally, movements such as hewing wood, hunting, and stone knapping were arduous physical labors—the first evidence of dedicated physical training as a discipline comes from the first large states/empires that arose millennia ago. Evidence of physical training and strenuous sports exist in civilizations as diverse as the Egyptians, the Persians, and the Greeks.

Naturally, the majority of these sports and trainings were done for practical purposes: namely, to train the young man for war. Remnants of this “classical” fitness can be seen in the Olympics: the running events, javelin throwing, boxing, wrestling, and discus illustrate this point.

…The dark ages and medieval ages, perhaps due to the Christian eschewing of the flesh, didn’t focus much on physical training—what physical training there was was largely from heavy labor and military training for the noblemen. Instead, we can skip ahead to the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods to see the rebirth of physical fitness as its own discipline.

Writers and physicians such as Cristobal Mendez and Mercurialis published some of the earliest fitness related tomes that still exist to this day—De Arte Gymnastica and El Libro por Ejercicio Corporal, the latter of these providing the featured image. Various parts of these books advocate such exercises as rope climbing, the balance beam and, you guessed it, even more calisthenics.

You can read the article here