Watch 100 years of workout trends in 100 seconds flat
It’s 2015 and the different ways to make your body sweat are infinite. There’s Insanity, Zumba, Soulcycle, Boot Camp, Candle Flow, Crossfit, and Power Yoga. Also sitting on your couch watching Netflix while rapidly petting your cats has to count as a low-impact workout, right? We’ll also count dancing around the room with a hairbrush-microphone to Taylor Swift, because that is absolutely sweat-inducing.
The fact is, fitness has evolved over the past 100 years, and so have our definitions of what it means to exercise. Back in the 1910s and 20s, stretching was considered a pretty routine to get that heart rate up. The ’50s was all about hula-hooping, and I’m sure many of us still remember our moms and dads getting ready for their Tae Bo class in the ’90s (the giveaway? High-waisted neon shorts and all-white Reeboks).
Benenden, a UK-based health coverage service, recently hopped on the “100-year” viral video train and captured those evolving, kinda-ridiculous, sometimes-awesome fitness trends we’ve gravitated to between 1905 and today. For some reason, they didn’t include bedroom dance-a-thons and power-petting, but we’ll let that slide.