During the late 1880's, there was a growing movement in the teaching of physical education to the general population in Europe and ...
During the late 1880's, there was a growing movement in the teaching of physical education to the general population in Europe and across the Atlantic in the United States. It was a changing era when most major cities from Berlin to Paris and London to New York have become heavily populated from industrialization and mass immigration. Because of this trend, there has been a growing emphasis on healthy living and physical fitness with advent of the so-called "Muscular Christianity" in the Victorian Era.
The term became well known in a review by the barrister T. C. Sandars of Charles Kingsley's novel "Two Years Ago" in the February 21, 1857 issue of the Saturday Review. English author Thomas Hughes further added: "The least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man's body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men."
Muscular Christianity eventually spread to other countries in the 19th century and became well-entrenched in Australian society by 1860. In the United States, it appeared first in private schools and then in the YMCA and in the preaching of evangelists like Dwight L. Moody.
Even before Fascist movements emerged in the late 1920's, physical education has already taken root in Europe especially in Germany. Dr. G. Zander published his exercise bible "Medico-mechanische Gymnastik" in 1892 that kick-started the gym craze even before the exercise videos of Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons became popular a century later.
Although gymnasiums, known as "zurkhaneh," first emerged in ancient Persia over 3000 years ago while the Romans later had fitness facilities of their own that were attached to their bathhouses. The first modern indoor gymnasiums only came in the 1850's in Germany. Later on, Swedish physician Dr. Gustav Zander promoted exercise as a therapeutic movement by developing exercise apparatus in medical school. He later established a state-sponsored Therapeutic Zander Institute in Stockholm.
The institute promoted health and healing through physical fitness and exercise regimen were developed mostly for the wealthier elite who had the luxury of attending to their personal health. Interestingly, wealthy people who abhor physical labor where the same people who were the first converts in the value of physical education. Although it may look like torture contraptions, it encouraged everyone, men, women and children to try doing exercise with his machines.
Dr. Zander called it "mechanotherapy" where it is the mechanization of physical labor through his various exercise contraptions specifically targeting an area of the body. He eventually won a gold medal for his machines at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia triggered a craze in the United States. By 1892, the Zander Institutes, much like Gold's Gym today, had gone worldwide and his machines were available in health spas across the United States.
The impact of physical education and the rise of organized sports during that time has also laid the foundation of the major sports that we know and the Olympic games.
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