Danielle Friedman

• Podcast
• Episode 84

How Women Changed Exercise & the Culture of Fitness with Danielle Friedman

   by   SheSpeaksTeam    May 03, 2022

What motivates you to exercise and what role does fitness play in your life?  

We talk to award-winning journalist, Danielle Friedman, author of the book Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World. You'll hear how women's relationship with exercise has shifted through the years, the history of women's fitness, and how the language of exercise culture is shifting. We talk about how group fitness may be more beneficial than you think and how fitness is shifting away from a beauty/weight loss too to one of mental & physical well-being.

In this episode, you'll hear:

• 8:29 The impact of women's fitness pioneer, Bonnie Prudden  
• 12:59 Hear how exercise culture has improved overtime
• 20:21 Learn about the power of community in women's fitness
• 26:52 Danielle shares how the history of women's exercise impacts her journey
   

For many women today, working out is as accepted as it is expected, fueling a multibillion-dollar fitness industrial complex. But it wasn’t always this way. For much of the twentieth century, sweating was considered unladylike...It was only in the sixties that, thanks to a few forward-thinking fitness pioneers, women began to move en masse.

In Let's Get Physical, journalist Danielle Friedman reveals the fascinating hidden history of contemporary women’s fitness culture, chronicling in vivid, cinematic prose how exercise evolved from a beauty tool pitched almost exclusively as a way to “reduce” into one millions have harnessed as a path to mental, emotional, and physical well-being. [Source: https://danielle-friedman.com/]