Description

Both by participating in the everyday life of fitness professionals, gym-goers and bodybuilders, and by analyzing fitness blogs and other sources, The Global Gym explores fitness centres as sites of learning. The authors examine the kind of learning processes that take place within the gym and the wider fitness industry, and investigate how knowledge is acquired, negotiated and embodied by different agents operating within this context. Beyond this, the book also addresses the construction of gender within fitness culture. Many images of the body beautiful and perfect body ideals are manufactured and sold on a global commercial market. Jesper Andreasson and Thomas Johansson illustrate various extant modes of learning by asking how physical, psychological and cultural knowledge about health and the body is incorporated into people's (gender) identity in a local, national and global gym and fitness context.