Beyond Play, Playfully: The Cultural Location of Fitness Activities

This paper explores the cultural location of fitness training. It locates fitness training as a particular style or frame of activity intersecting the fields of leisure, sport and body transformation. It shows that non-competitive, recreational physical activities may indeed be as imbued with ideological values as competitive sports, and that the instrumentalization of pleasure is a powerful element of contemporary commercial leisure culture. However, it also goes further to consider how “fun”, which is organized as a relevant experience of fitness training, is related to a particular image of self which stresses autonomy, flexibility and “positive thinking” as key elements of wellbeing.