Early on in his new book Sweat: A History of Exercise, the author Bill Hayes discovers an old tome from the 1500s, De Arte Gymnastica, that talks about breaking a sweat in a very modern way. Considered the first comprehensive and well-researched book about sports medicine, its author, Girolamo Mercuriale, a doctor in an Italian court, asks foundational questions about strength, health and exercise and answers them and answers them intuitively, and with common sense. 

What is exercise? “A physical movement that is vigorous and spontaneous,” says Mercuriale, “which involves a change in breathing pattern, and is undertaken with the aim of keeping healthy or building up a sound constitution.” How should we go about it? “Everyone should begin with a relaxed and gentle exercise, increasing its intensity gradually.” Should we get incredibly jacked? “Strength is very different from good health,” he concedes. Nearly 500 years later, it still sounds pretty sensible, and Hayes follows Mercuriale’s research down the rabbit hole to uncover a deeper history of exercise, with bigger ideas than might seem evident at your local Planet Fitness.  

Though Mercuriale’s book is the first deep look at the topic, exercise had been written and thought about for a long while before, and cultures were partly defined by the way they approached sweat. The ancient Greeks’ most famous philosophers were jocks—Plato earned his name from having been a very broad-shouldered competitive wrestler—and their series of local gyms, known as Palestras, very much resembled ours. The bicycle helped usher in enfranchisement—Susan B. Anthony said it did “more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world”—and Jane Fonda’s tapes all but created demand for the VCR. Exercise is so built into life that it overflows with strange little anecdotes, like Franz Kafka wrestling his next door neighbor for fun, and Eugen Sandow, the first mega-famous modern bodybuilder, getting mentioned in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Hayes approaches exercise’s place in society—the details, the scholarship—with the same fervor he used to track down Henry Gray in The Anatomist, his examination of the author of the famous medical textbook, and he weaves in his particular perspective and experience throughout. (He’s a serious swimmer and gym rat.)

At its best, Hayes’ book reframes exercise as a deep series of questions thinkers and scientists have been contemplating for thousands of years. We might think of exercise as breaking a sweat, and recomping our bodies—which, sure. It definitely is. But it’s also an organic, lively act where the brain and the body work together, or one gives the other a break.  It’s that connection which has struck so many thoughtful people through the years, and it's a thrill to see them gathered in one place. 

GQ spoke with Hayes for more on the book—and about the wisdom and the blind spots of ancient jocks, Dr. Oliver Sacks’s record-breaking squat, and Jane Fonda.

GQ: A good part of Sweat is your Umberto Eco-like quest to find a 16th century textbook written by a doctor, Mercuriale, who uses language similar to ours when discussing exercise. Have our approaches to exercise changed a ton in the last five hundred years or since the Greeks?

Bill Hayes: They have. There's sensible advice, whether from Mercuriale in the 16th century or Hippocrates in the fifth century, BC. But they had a completely incorrect, unscientific view of how the human body works, based on the four humors—an almost fantastical view of the inner workings of the human body, where humors had to be kept in balance, and if one was out of balance that’d cause illness or distemper. The indisputable scientific evidence for the benefits of exercise in extending life didn't really come about until the 1950s. There are also forms of exercise today that didn't exist in Hippocrates’ time or Mercuriale’s. The bicycle wasn't invented until the 19th century. Yoga wasn't introduced to the west until then.

One of the things that surprised me, though, was how sensible a lot of the old advice was. Exercising moderately, incorporating exercise into your daily life—that’s the kind of advice we would give today. But there’s a lot more research into exercise now, and it’s more deeply studied than ever before.

The nuts and bolts of it sure seem different. But the approach to exercise as a routine that both the Pope and the ditch digger undertake struck me—It’s shocking how equitable Mercuriale’s book was. Is that what drew you to it?

I think that's exactly right. Hippocrates said, back in the fifth century, that “eating alone will not keep a man well; he must also take exercise.” Plato said one should exercise moderately. He understood—probably through his experience as a competitive wrestler—that you shouldn't overdo it or lift too heavy. That was a big surprise for me, how sensible and intuitive the advice was. They understood, Hippocrates, Mercuriale, Plato, and Galen that daily exercise made you feel good and could lead to better health.

What was the through line between medicine and exercise? At the start, they were related, though the medicine was all wrong. And then, there’s a convergence with exercise in the 50s becoming understood as a palliative cure.

That's absolutely true. The actual scientific proof didn't come until a long time later. It was really the trailblazing work of an innovative epidemiologist in Britain, Jeremy Norris, who put two and two together with his study of double decker bus drivers and conductors. He found conductors getting off and on the bus and climbing up stairs all day were much healthier, and had fewer incidences of heart disease than the drivers who just sat behind the wheel and drove.

Think of exercise as synonymous with movement. You don't have to go to the gym if you don't want: you could dance in your apartment or get off the bus or subway two stops early and walk the rest of the way home. But the key is to keep the body moving.

In the book you deflate the idea that exercise went away in the Middle Ages: people danced and did manual labor. Is there less of a difference between organized, gym-type exercise and movement? Are we missing out today by defining exercise as something that’s organized?

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Perhaps. I tell people who ask me how I get motivated, and say, “I'm not interested in your book because I hate exercise”—I've heard this a few times—that despite the scientific evidence, one should exercise for how it makes you feel now. Right now, in your body. Life is short. Though it’s been proven that exercise may extend your lifespan, the important thing is to find something that makes you feel good right now, and to try different forms. For some people it’s running, for some, lifting in a gym or doing group fitness, or dancing in their apartment. It’s all good.

Exercise is as tied up to religion as it was to medicine—working out was considered sinful and vain. The same negation is here now in the cerebral folks in the book: the professor, librarians, Alice Waters, all uninterested in exercise and shocked you were writing about it. How do you explain that rift? Is that something that you wanted to change with this book?

I think it depends on the person. There’s a very serious and influential philosopher, Colin McGinn, who wrote a great little book called Sport—it’s fantastic—with a line, “The erudite body is a good body to have,” one I quote a lot. It’s the idea that the more physical information you have about your body, the better.

For someone like Alice Waters, who puts her nose up at the idea of going to a gym, and separating exercise out from daily life, that’s just so disdainful to someone like her. But she also exercises within her daily life: walking up and down the stairs and sweeping the steps. It’s a very 19th century idea of exercise that holds true today. If other people enjoy going to the most prestigious gym in New York City or doing their Peloton, that's all good, too. The message is exercise is movement, movement is exercise, and it's as good for the brain and the soul as it is for the body.

One thing that was wild in Sweat was how many of the philosophers were jocks. Did their sweat equity affect how they approached their work and their life?

I think so, for sure. I loved finding those examples. Franz Kafka exercising by wrestling with his otherwise unknown next-door neighbor, which I came across randomly while reading his diaries. Once I had this idea for this book, examples popped out that I would not have noticed before. That famous photo of Einstein on a bicycle, which I’ve seen countless times. You wonder, did he bike every day? Or Marie Curie, a bicyclist and a hiker. I think because exercise relieves the mind from thought and focuses on the physical, it may also welcome new thoughts.

You know, my late partner was Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author, a great swimmer who also loved to work out at the gym. And he would literally—I saw this—when we swam at a lake, have a pad of paper and a pen sitting on the dock. He would compose paragraphs and sentences in his mind while he swam. He found it meditative. I have water-soaked pages on which he jotted down lines after swimming half a mile.

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I remember seeing that photo of Dr. Sacks squatting 600 lbs.

Exactly, exactly.

Did he weigh in on the book? I mean, with that lift, he was an expert. He set the California squat record, right?

Yeah, it was a California record, 600 lbs. He always had a kind of embarrassed pride about that lift because it was something he really went after. But by the time I met him, the damage had been done—his knees were completely shot. He had a knee replacement when we were together. But he looked back on that with chagrin and pride. He kept a framed picture of that squat here in the apartment. Swimming with his thing by the time I met him. He was an incredible swimmer—long distance swimming, open water swimming, put him into a pool, he could swim for hours.

How did sport define masculinity? That discus-throwing scene from The Odyssey which you bring up feels like something out of a Scorsese movie. Is it less gendered, or fraught now?

I think it's less gender defined today. One of the challenges of writing Sweat was finding the role of women in the history of exercise, and when they enter the picture. To be really honest about it, for centuries women were not encouraged, and in some cases, not permitted to exercise or compete in athletics. So while I sort of wax romantically about antiquity and Hippocrates and and Plato, and a time when the culture worshiped the human body and athletes were held up as the ideal—there were gymnasiums in almost every town in the Greek Empire, and they were quite elaborate—they were only open to men and boys from the upper classes. Women were not allowed into gyms, and not encouraged to exercise. Plato endorsed women exercising but it didn't actually happen, certainly not in an organized way. Even Mercuriale, in 1569, said women should exercise. But that was not common.

It didn’t begin to emerge until the 19th century, from a confluence of events. Women’s rights advocacy around the world, the suffragette movement, and a global reaction to the Industrial Revolution, where there was this great fear, to put it simplistically, of people going from the farm to the factory and getting too sedentary. Exercise got its due, and was revived in men, boys, and women and children. Coming off the enlightenment, physical education classes are finally being encouraged for children, and women are encouraged to exercise along with men. And the bicycle was invented that century, and became not just a form of exercise but a vehicle of freedom: for a woman to get on a bicycle without the horizontal bar between the seat and the handlebars that would make it comfortable for someone in a dress or a skirt—it was significant.

Susan B. Anthony said how revolutionary it was. Are there forms of exercising now that are tied to change? I think about how powerlifting in the past decade has become much less gendered.

I think that's really changed. It’s pretty amazing. I'm 61, I grew up in the 60s and 70s when Arnold Schwarzenegger came to prominence, and the idea of that bodybuilder body and joining a Gold's Gym became the rage. But in the beginning, it was really mostly for men—somewhat for women, but a little freakish. And that has certainly changed, where women lift alongside men. Another significant figure from that era is Jane Fonda, who I think was one of the most important figures in the history of exercise, male, or female, because she democratized exercise and brought it into people’s homes. Women didn't have to join a gym—they could exercise at home. I grew up in that era and remember aerobics and step classes, and thought it would be kind of campy to look back at it. I was a little skeptical, but once I watched her original workout tape again, and read her book, I realized it was really smart. It's a great workout, whether you're a man or a woman. Especially during the pandemic. Her whole philosophy was “just move.”

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Sami Reiss is a contributing writer at GQ. Since joining in 2018 he has covered vintage clothing, design, and health and wellness across the magazine and the website. His newsletters, Super Health, and Snake, covering design, are both Substack bestsellers, with the latter’s archives anthologized in a book, Sheer Drift,... Read moreInstagramRelated Stories for GQWorking OutBooks