Hi everyone, I'm Conor Heffernan, a historian of sport and the body and Lecturer in the Sociology of Sport at Ulster University. I'm here to talk about my new book, When Fitness Went Global: The Rise of Physical Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury, 2026).
The book asks a deceptively simple question. Why do people all over the world train their bodies in such similar ways, and when did that start? The short answer is the long nineteenth century. From yoga and gymnastics to Indian club swinging and jiujitsu, I follow fitness practices as they travelled across borders through empire, military education, print culture and expanding trade networks. Along the way, exercise became tangled up with ideas about nationalism, gender, race, medicine and empire, while muscular and ‘beautiful’ bodies were increasingly presented as evidence of national strength and imperial power.
I'm just as interested in the practices that didn't go global as the ones that did, and in how people adapted, resisted and transformed the exercises they encountered.
Alongside the book I run Physical Culture Study, a long-running history-of-fitness site, so I'm very happy to range well beyond the nineteenth century too. Strongmen, bodybuilding history, the origins of the gym, forgotten exercise crazes, dubious health advice, weight training, fitness culture, or why your New Year's resolution is about 200 years old are all fair game.
Ask me anything. I'll be answering from 9am to 12pm ET, and then following up after I do bedtime with my kiddo.
Also note that you can currently pick up a copy from the Bloomsbury website for 30% off thanks to their back to school sale.
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