KEY POINTS:
Where have all the chest expanders gone? No, not the siliconised breast stuffing, the ye olde chest expanders of days gone by, which were essentially grippy handles connected by stretchy metal springs.
You held them horizontally in front of you and pulled the handles apart a few times before giving up and throwing them under the bed with your Rubik's cube and glow-in-the-dark soul shoes.
If you stuck with them, the ads in the back of boys' comics reckoned, they were just the thing for dealing with anyone dead set on kicking sand at you and your best girl on the beach. Now they've disappeared, which is why I'm not so fond of the seaside anymore.
Aside from the obvious danger of unprovoked sandy assaults, it's scratchy, there are sea lice, the sun gives you cancer and if your dip goes horribly wrong you can end up on reality television. But never mind all that, the decline of chest expanders says everything about how far the fitness industry has shifted; the new regime of incessant dance beats, gym chicks in full makeup, and competing for mirror time in the men's changing rooms would have Charles Atlas kicking sand in his own face. But this bonfire of vanities isn't restricted to the indoors. I went for a run the other day and noted several others also taking the air in vigorous fashion. Only a couple were jogging.
As they left me wheezing in their collective dust I plodded by a few others. One was doing t'ai chi, some yoof were skate- boarding down railings and a bum was digging for butts in a rubbish bin. Clearly our old notions of what constituted exercise have merged into new notions concerning lifestyle, a trend I'd date back to Jane Fonda's legwarmers and her vinyl workouts.
Until she came along, all you needed in the way of exercise equipment was a pair of sturdy plimsolls, a pair of sturdy shorts and a shirt so sturdy you could break it over your knee. So attired, you stepped outside, did a few lusty knee-bends with arms outstretched for balance, followed by some star jumps, burpees and then four or five deep breaths, before setting off at a brisk clip. For anything more vigorous, you either bought the chest expanders or joined your local rugby clubbers on their bottle drive.
Anyone casually mentioning gym in conversation was probably referring to a shorter, if quicker run, that ended with them bounding over a wooden horse, which sounds rather quaint to anyone raised on circuit training. But remember, this was a time when the All Blacks won every game, in black and white ... then Fonda turned everything fluoro and normally sensible people crowded into sweaty halls to be shouted at by some woman struggling to be heard over a boombox playing Let's Get Physical.
Aerobics, like Grease, was the word, at least until Richard Simmons squeezed himself a leotard and everyone finally took a long, hard look at themselves. There were step-aerobics, kick- aerobics, aquarobics, and even chair- aerobics; everyone could get fit, it just depended on what kind of fit you wanted to be. But the fitness faddists weren't done and they started pimping flash new ideas like Callanetics, the slide, and some nonsense involving big purple rubber dynabands, not to mention pole-dancing, Pilates, strippercise, taibo, the bodyblade, wisewalking, corporate boxing, bootcamps, or all manner of yogas - wind-relieving Asana anyone? And that's only scratching the surface.
The Les Mills gyms alone also offer bodyattack, bodybalance, bodycircuit, bodycombat, bodyjam, bodypump, bodystep, bodyvive and RPM. Then, of course, there's the stuff on offer to those who prefer to get a sweat up in the privacy of their own home.
Ask any insomniac television watcher and they could list everything from Boflex and Ab King Pro to thigh masters and power belts that are infomercialised every night by former models or Chuck Norris during the wee smalls. If you're thinking of buying any of that tat, you may want to clear some space under your bed first.
Now, depending on who you talk to, all this carry-on is a symptom of the culture that encourages anorexia or part of the cure for the obesity epidemic. Either way, have they at least got more people joining in? Or are fads like bars, and can go from hotspot to tumbleweeds before your beer's gone flat.
Well, it could be a bit of both, so it depends on how you look at it. According to Sparc spokesman John Tulloch, New Zealanders remain as active as we've always been, despite the image of us being a nation of big-bellied screen addicts. It's more that what we choose to do is changing and increasingly varied. He says more will be known once Sparc has crunched the numbers and release its next state of the exercise nation report this month.
Meanwhile, over at FitnessNZ, they don't claim we're back to the heady days of the late-80s when group exercise was the new black and blue, but they can still point to about 410,000 paid-up members spread across their 400 affiliated health and fitness centres, a bulging 50 per cent increase in total memberships over the last 20 years.
The suggestion is that New Zealanders are slowly returning to formalised exercise after the aerobics boom and bust, a shift that is reflected in the rise of the personal trainer. FitnessNZ chief executive Richard Beddie says trainers have gone from being almost unknown in the 70s to a worldwide career option.
In the United States, personal training is one of the 10 fastest-growing job roles, while the New Zealand register of exercise professionals now lists more then 1500 of them. Beddie says some gyms report up to 40 per cent of their members regularly using personal trainers, which just goes to show that we're gradually turning back to Jane Fonda.
Of course, these new generation trainers cost a bit more and the soundtrack is at least different, if not better, but there is still a woeful lack of chest expanders. I think I see a new fitness video coming on ... anyone got Chuck's phone number?
