The Guardian view on keeping fit: exercise classes and the class divide | Editorial

Even before fat was a feminist issue, society was seared by culinary divides on class lines – and the question of who could afford what ingredients was only ever part of the story. “A millionaire”, Orwell wrote in the 1930s, “may enjoy breakfasting on Ryvita biscuits and orange juice; an unemployed man doesn’t.” Wholesome living has always been connected to confidence and status. At the top of the scale, there is ample scope to cultivate the virtue of deferring gratification; at the bottom, there’s a pressing need for cheap palliatives for hard lives lived, in Jarvis Cocker’s line, “with no meaning or control”. Epidemiologists observe the consequences everywhere, from the class gradient in the data on who continues to smoke, to the tendency of the better-off to do more shopping in the fruit and veg aisle.

The spread of fitness across society used to be less skewed than the distribution of super-foods. Heaving, hauling and even standing were, after all, features of manual and not desk-bound trades. And from the school playground on, the working class could compete on level terms, as they could in few areas, in sports such as football: they dominated them as a result. More recently there have been depressing signs of physical activity going the same way as smoking cessation and raw-food diets. Exercise is becoming an echelon issue.

In 2010, Sir Michael Marmot’s review for the government pointed to academic evidence that the less-educated and, especially, the workless exercised less adequately, and new data from diverse sources points to a hardening of class lines. On the basic – and most medically important – question of getting moving at least once a week, Sport England’s Active People Survey has now been running for a decade, and it registers a statistically significant rise for the higher occupational grades over this time, and a significant fall at the bottom end of the scale.

Even among those who are resolved to keep fit, new schisms are opening up. The gym industry is following the bifurcating trends of the supermarket sector. Cardlytics analysis of bank accounts suggests that subs paid to the exercise equivalents of cut-price shops Aldi and Lidl are rising particularly fast, with monthly spending up 66% in the past year. Meanwhile, earlier in the British summer, Fitness First announced that it could soon bring the invitation-only, “gated” gyms for executives that it is building in Singapore penthouses to London. In parallel, people with money to spend enjoy a burgeoning range of options to achieve the all-important spur to get themselves more active – from a Fitbit on the wrist, to a former sergeant major yelling in the ear, courtesy of the boom in military-style fitness classes.

So how to tackle the exercise gap? First, avoid the sort of car-over-pedestrian planning that ends up with America’s Centers for Disease Control having to advocate “mall walking” as an affordable way to keep fit. Second, get behind initiatives that can encourage the demotivated without requiring them to shell out – the NHS’s Couch to 5K podcasts, and the Parkrun movement being two outstanding examples. Third and finally, give some thought to the great gulf in living conditions itself. Until life gets more secure and less penurious for Britain’s poor, edicts to start exercising will continue to carry the dry taste of Ryvita biscuits.

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