A whole bunch of workout booklets and fitness courses for the masses were in international circulation in the late-1800’s - early 1900’s; surely a benchmark in it’s own right.
:smack: I thought Forrest Gump invented jogging.
Int the 1870’s, the YMCA started locating gymnasiums near major train stations to serve the crew members between shifts. Train culture, as well a car culture, contributed to the need to work out!
During the period about 1895 to 1915, Theodore Roosevelt was a central figure in promoting vigorous outdoor activities for a healthier body (and mind). While I don’t think he did much “working out” in the sense of exercise with no other purpose (e.g., hunting; or, preparing for a sport, or for military action), I do think he sometimes manufactured an excuse for exercise (e.g., exploring Brazil’s River of Doubt), when his primary purpose was really the workout itself.
No, but he was at the forefront of every phase and movement of his time. Jogging and Ping Pong were just becoming big in the seventies. Ping Pong is due for a comeback!
You’re quite right, but what I find most interesting in terms of the modern working out / gym culture is all that material in my link, put out by various retired Vaudeville strongmen, champion weighlifters and proto-bodybuilders, which, unlike the efforts of Teddy, really were all about getting bigger muscles through “futile” exercise with weights, straps, posing etc., with titles such as Treloar’s Science of Muscular Development (1904) and Physical Culture by Means of Muscular Resistance & Breathing Exercises, both published in 1904. People have been busting their balls off at the gym to look good naked ever since, worlds apart from cross-country marksmanship and canoe expeditions.
I’m reading the The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism [Doris Kearns Goodwin] currently and most Teddy fans know how as a child he started working out to overcome his asthma. He went to a gym at first and then his father built a gym in the house*. I figure the gym was built around 1870.
Meanwhile Taft as a young man; recently engaged; wrote to his future wife about how she has inspired him to go to the gym. This would be around 1885.
Actually Teddy was known for daily swims and really fast walking. At first he boxed and wrestled a bit and then after an eye injury switched to jiu jitsu.
*I’ve seen it in fact, I visited the house last year.
Bernarr Macfadden had a lot to do with it in the US with his Physical Culture magazine, before Charles Atlas and Jack LaLanne.
Some people credit Jim Fixx and his best-selling book, The Complete Book of Running, with starting the running/jogging craze in 1977.
And by 1903, Physical Culture had monthly sales of over 100 000 copies - things were well on their way.
Fixx may have caused a significant increase in the popularity of jogging as a standard exercise, but it was already known in the 1960’s.
Earlier, and far more culturally important than Teddy, was Eugen Sandow, the world’s most perfectly developed man. The video of him on that Wiki page was taken by Edison’s team in 1894.
Florenz Ziegfeld put Sandow on what was the emerging vaudeville circuit, where he dazzled crowds with feats of strength. But his real importance was in his outfit: his lack of one. In an era when vaudeville was squeaky clean and the nude showgirls Ziegfeld would make his trademark were still decades in the future, Sandow posed in the skimpiest briefs anybody had ever seen in public. Both men and woman never showed flesh in public; even bathing costumes covered almost the whole body. Male nudity on stage was as explosive as female nudity would become. Ladies were reported to faint just from touching his muscles. Sandow was one of the handful of top stars, playing before thousands, maybe millions over all.
He coined or popularized the terms physical culture and bodybuilding, opened a series of gyms, started the world’s first bodybuilding competitions, and proselytized the sport and field in ways that all the later names like Bernarr Macfadden, Joe Weider, Charles Atlas, and Jack LaLanne would slavishly copy. It’s all older than people remember today.
Sandow had a huge impact through his physique (far from the Greek ideal, in fact) and the publicity, but mostly as an inspiration, not as a fitness source, as evidenced by his utterly useless yet shamelessly marketed spring-loaded dumbbells. It seems Sandow was (understandably) less interested in promoting fitness than in promoting himself as the world’s most perfectly developed man, and raking in the profit.
It is the slightly later trainers and authors who actually provided the common folk with useful training resources, ie. methods of progressive resistance training with real kettlebells, dumbbells and barbells, complete with motivational gems like “Weakness is a crime - don’t be a criminal.” 
Cycling for leisure was big among the working classes in the industrial cities of late 19C
Britain. It was not so much for exercise as to get out of the (literal) smoke and into the countryside.
…to enjoy a nice smoke, surely. 
I’m a cultural historian: I don’t care if it worked as long as people noticed.
But if you’re going by how worthwhile his stuff was, remember that he was competing against radium ointments and worse. He’s a gleaming shaft of light by comparison.
But thanks for the info and links to that period. Good stuff.
I’m sure that’s true to some extent, but in the 1870s, more people lived on and worked farms than lived in cities and worked cushy office jobs sitting on their butts.
And I maintain that, as far as the cultural history of “when did people start working out” is concerned, Sandow, although important, was not nearly as important as many seem to think 
His pioneering impact is in the professional bodybuilding realm, ie. public display of physique, rather than what people did or did not do for their health and strength.
Agreed. But there are virtually no fields in which the creators were as important as the legion of followers.
Slightly off topic:
There’s a reason we call exercise weights “bells”, dumbbells and barbells, though they don’t ring.