[A] well-researched and original book.

Global Europe

A must-read book for anyone interested in how the modern fitness industry first spread globally during the nineteenth century. Well written, drawing on a prodigious amount of research, Conor Heffernan impressively analyses just how physical culture practices first critically clustered around a clear set of ideas, movements, products and body ideals.

Dr Mike Huggins Emeritus Professor of Cultural History University of Cumbria, UK

Conor Heffernan takes us into a 19th century world where, every day, elite Swedish gymnasts, drilled Indian soldiers, and loose-limbed American university athletes all shared the same physical exercises as hundreds of thousands of London School Board kids. Just as weight-lifting and yoga, diet and calisthenics, posture and movement, inhabit our lives, so they inhabited theirs. Not only a history of the search for the perfect body, it is a history of the search for control. Beautifully written, it's part of who we are.

Robert Colls, Professor Emeritus, De Montfort University, UK

Heffernan has produced a readable and informative global history of fitness cultures, one that makes important contributions not just to the field of sports history but suggests new and tantalising avenues for world historians and scholars of the British Empire to explore. To that end, he is to be commended.

Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

This is an excellent exploration of the development, transformation, regulation and promotion of fitness over time, which has brought us to where we are today. It deserves to be read by researchers and students alike who want to know about the origins of the ideas they hold about health and fitness. But beyond the academic audience, I encourage it to be read by anyone who commits a large part (or even small part) of their identity to the pursuit of fitness. For all of us who are bombarded by 'influencers' and global corporations that promote fitness, When Fitness Went Global is an illuminating education into how and why we hold the ideas we do about fitness, and why we devote so much of our time and energy to it.

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