Sweat
A History of Exercise
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Sweat
Narrated by:
Bill Hayes
Buy Now for £13.12
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Narrated by:
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Bill Hayes
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By:
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Bill Hayes
A New Yorker Best Book of the year
An Esquire Best Nonfiction Book of 2022
From Insomniac City author Bill Hayes, "who can tackle just about any subject in book form, and make you glad he did" (SF Chronicle)—a cultural, scientific, literary, and personal history of exercise.
Exercise is our modern obsession, and we have the fancy workout gear and fads from HIIT to spin classes to hot yoga to prove it. Exercise—a form of physical activity distinct from sports, play, or athletics—was an ancient obsession, too, but as a chapter in human history, it's been largely overlooked. In Sweat, Bill Hayes runs, jogs, swims, spins, walks, bikes, boxes, lifts, sweats, and downward-dogs his way through the origins of different forms of exercise, chronicling how they have evolved over time, dissecting the dynamics of human movement.
Hippocrates, Plato, Galen, Susan B. Anthony, Jack LaLanne, and Jane Fonda, among many others, make appearances in Sweat, but chief among the historical figures is Girolamo Mercuriale, a Renaissance-era Italian physician who aimed singlehandedly to revive the ancient Greek “art of exercising” through his 1569 book De arte gymnastica. Though largely forgotten over the past five centuries, Mercuriale and his illustrated treatise were pioneering, and are brought back to life in the pages of Sweat. Hayes ties his own personal experience—and ours—to the cultural and scientific history of exercise, from ancient times to the present day, giving us a new way to understand its place in our lives in the 21st century.©2022 Bill Hayes (P)2022 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic reviews
Charming and idiosyncratic... a distinctive, often moving blend of historical and memoirist writing.
An enthusiasm it’s impossible not to share...Erudite, ludic, eccentric, energetic and historically transporting, it’s like falling through a gym and landing in a joust.
At its best, Hayes’ book reframes exercise as a deep series of questions thinkers and scientists have been contemplating for thousands of years. . . . it's a thrill to see them gathered in one place.
I was riveted by Sweat and its extraordinary tale of the ups and downs of exercise over millennia. Who knew?
If there is one person in the modern world who can reinvigorate Mercuriale’s enormous unfinished labor and bridge the physical, the philosophical, and the poetic — bridge Whitman and Warhol, Plato and Peloton, Kafka and Curie, Tennessee Williams and Serena Williams; bridge the ‘immediate bodily now’ of exercise with ‘the wisdom of the past that had faded from living memory’ — it is Bill Hayes. And so he does, in Sweat.
Bill Hayes’ peripatetic inquiry into the history of exercise is a delight for anyone who loves a good search for a missing manuscript, as well as anyone who loves being ‘so drenched in sweat as to feel amphibious.’ And if those predilections happen to overlap for you, hang onto your Bosu ball—you’re in for a treat. Hayes weaves his riveting findings in the archives with a revelatory memoir of physical exertion that begins to answer that most human of questions: what does the body mean?
At its heart, [Sweat] is a deeply personal book about the universal subject of humans attempting to grapple with the meaning of their own physicality. . . . an erudite memoir of a lifelong fitness enthusiast who is looking to place his own forays into weightlifting, swimming, boxing, and yoga in the context of a historical tradition that spans from Hippocrates to Jane Fonda.
Perhaps because exercise is such a universal—and universally humbling—part of our lives, Sweat does, seemingly effortlessly, what all good history books should do: take the past and make it vastly more human.
An appealing, essential addition to the shelf. . . Hayes brings his resilient good nature and charming candor to the page. . . Whether in a library, a gym or the Grecian ruins of an ancient locker room, Hayes captures the majesty of bodies in motion.
Hayes blends science, travel, history, and memoir into a thoroughly engaging, and idiosyncratic, narrative inquiry into ‘exercise'... Hayes writes with panache as he crosses three continents in search of fitness routines past and present, from fencing to Jane Fonda.
Hayes entertainingly describes his adventures in the world of fitness, learning how to box at a pugilists' boot camp, swimming, running, and performing power yoga in a New York gym class. A brisk jaunt through the history of working out in Western civilization.
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