Fitness Culture

"Fitness Culture" was written by Sheila McClain who speculated about the causes of the fitness culture. At the beginning of this essay, she used some data and research to state that the "fitness culture" in America continues to grow and shows no signs of slowing down. She also gave a graph to show the increase of fitness culture. Then Sheila stated the effect of fitness culture first before causes. The main effect of this phenomenon is it contribute to health and longevity. After that, she listed several reasons that people work on fitness and join fitness clubs. These causes included being part of a community, reducing stress, improving body image and having fun. 

Individually, I agree with some points Sheila wrote in this essay, but some other ideas surprised me a lot. First, for the effect that contribute to health and longevity, I completely agree with it! There is no doubt that doing exercise helps people improve the fitness and reduce the possibly of being ill. Actually, I have started to do a lot of exercise since I was in primary school because I was the member of the school fitness club. Not only did I performed very good in most athletic activities, I was the most health and strong child around my classmates. I was less likely to get ill than other children in my class. Second, I do believe that improving body image is a cause of fitness culture and I have been building my body till now. Because I think having a nice body image is much more competitive and outstanding among my peers. Gradually, I consider exercise is a kind of lifestyle for me, and have to keep always it. I feel hopeful when I do exercise as I believe I'll become stronger. Although improve the social community should be a plausible cause that most people work on fitness, it doesn't work for me. I never make any friends when I do exercise. But I still believe that groups exercise fosters  positive peer pressure that keeps people going when they might give up were they exercising along at home. One of my roommates keeps going on fitness by group exercise. Another surprising point is "traveling less provided many people with more leisure time to fill after 9/11." It can be true that people consider doing exercise as a new entertainment, and today exercise have a variety of forms which meets the tastes for different people. 

In order to make these cause credible, Sheila used a lot of outside resource to support her points. And she gave several resources for one point that strongly prove her guesses. Thus, each of these cause was an educational guesses. Plus, the fitness clubs can reflect the living attitudes of local people. More population of fitness clubs means the people are more healthy and energetic.