This week, a class about the 1980s fitness industry and culture in the United States.

Professor Natalia Melman Patrazella of the new school talks about new business models for group classes like jazzercise and innovative career opportunities.

You actually saw some of those racket clubs tearing up their

squash and racquetball courts and creating dance exercise studios as fitness becomes even more

widespread and more popular, but also moves in some ways away from sports to kind of recreational

exercise. More in a moment. Hi and welcome to FitNation. We are talking today about 1980s

workout culture. This is, I believe now, our third week together virtually. I hope you all

are doing well. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen with you and we can get right

started. Okay, great. So as always, what we're

looking at in this class today is about the rise of the American obsession with fitness,

with fitness culture, with working out, even as the United States is not a particular fit nation. And even as if anything in the past

75 to 100 years or so that we look at in this course, Americans have actually become more and

more obsessed with the idea of working out as a symbol or a signal of kind of individual virtue and morality,

even as the ability to do so and having a quote unquote fit body has become another symbol

of inequality in this country. So that's the kind of overarching arc, of course, of the class.

And today we turn to the 1980s.

So the name of the lecture today is a quote from one of the oral histories that I've done

for the book research that I'm doing, which is on which this course is based.

And it's, I would have been a PE teacher.

We're going to get there towards the end of class, and I'll tell you who said it. But that kind of idea that in another historical moment, the people who became architects of the fitness

industry would have been physical education teachers is a really important idea, I think, particularly as we

talk about the 1980s. Okay, so I would have been a PE teacher in 1980s fitness culture in the

...