Hello, Jen here to tell you about this week's Sunday chops. So it's the last weekend of January and possibly you had in your mind at the beginning of January that you were going to go and take up running or

I don't know, try out the number or any kind of fitness goal that you may have had in mind at the end of last year slash beginning of this new year. Possibly by this point you started to think it's quite hard. I don't know if I can be bothered anymore and that's fair enough because you know you're busy and it's hard to get into exercise.

So in this week's chops, I chatted to journalist Daniel Friedman author of the new book Let's Get Physical. We chatted about a new book about the history of the women's fitness industry and the origins of the classes that you see today. We talked about perceptions of women's strengths and the ways in which society dismisses women's leisure pursuits. And we chatted about the barriers to fitness, what puts women off where we could be doing things better especially at school age and guys.

If you are thinking of giving up on your fitness goals, brace yourself because Daniel gives me honestly the best piece of fitness advice I have ever, ever, ever received. So I hope you listen to this. I hope you find it as fascinating as I did talking to Danielle and I hope that you manage to go for that run later if you feel like it.

I'm joined by journalist bar and running enthusiasts and author of the new book Let's Get Physical Daniel Friedman. Hi, Danielle. Hi, it's so great to be here. And it is great to talk to you about your excellent book, which I am thoroughly enjoying reading. Can you tell us what the book is about?

The book is a cultural history of women's fitness and amazingly, it is the first cultural history of women's fitness, which leads me to the story of how and why I decided to write it. The book began really five years ago. I decided to take my first bar class.

It was a very kind of cliche reason I was getting ready for my wedding and I had never I am a lifelong runner, but I had never ventured into a boutique fitness studio before. So I started taking bar. I love the way it made me feel, but as a women's health journalist and a feminist journalist, I also was just, I became kind of obsessed with the larger subculture.

I also noticed that many of the moves in class felt kind of comically erotic and nobody seemed to be acknowledging that we were, you know, the sexuality. So I decided to investigate that initially I was curious as to whether bar classes had any sexual health benefits.

But then I discovered a much bigger, fascinating story about Lottie Burke, the woman who invented bar and who was very much ahead of her time in encouraging women to enjoy sex and connect with their bodies.

I wrote about Lottie Burke for New York magazines, the cut. But while I was researching her, I went down rabbit holes and just discovered that there was a much bigger story here about the birth and rise of women's fitness.

And amazingly it hadn't been told and I actually I discovered that because as I was reporting the story for the cut, I was like, it would be great to speak with the woman who wrote the book on fitness history.

And I was pretty shocked to discover that it didn't exist. But yeah, so for, for every fitness movement, there is a Lottie Burke. This story is populated with just these really fascinating, larger than life, complicated cinematic characters who had to basically, you know, fight to give women opportunities to move and to build strength in the way that we do today.

I don't even really know what to start, to be honest, Danielle, because there's so many different things that you cover in the book and there's so many interesting characters.

And you've, you know, you've mentioned Lottie Burke already as your starting point, you know, in terms of writing the book. So why not start there?

It sounds like a bit of a leap, but can you please explain to us to the listeners what an iconic British woman Mary Quant and Vidal Sezone have to do with the fitness revolution.

Of course, that's one of my favorite stories in the book. So Lottie Burke invented her bar workout, which grew into the global bar industry in the late 1950s.

And when you think about how and why she became successful, it's helpful to think about the larger cultural landscape of the world and of London at that time.

So the short version is that Mary Quant's mini skirts exposed women's bodies and especially women's legs in a way that they hadn't been exposed before.

And there was something very liberating about that, but at the same time, as you can imagine, you know, with more skin exposed, women became more self-conscious about their bodies and more motivated to want to shape their bodies and shape their legs especially.

While researching the book, you know, there was a great quote or kind of a chilling quote, depending on how you think about it, but from the designer build glass who noted that, you know, until that point, women's clothes were designed to flatter the figure and now the figure had to flatter fashion.

And so it ushered in a new, I think, much more rigorous era for women's body expectations. It wasn't enough to just be thin. Now there was, you know, more of a focus on being toned.

Anyway, so Mary Quant introduces her mini skirt. It becomes the look of the decade and women looking to shape their bodies went to one of the few, if not only places where they could do that in a intense regular way.

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