Might is right

Strength training is now the go-to for healthy ageing, with benefits newly revealed for the body and brain in preventing illness and injury.

- NIKI BEZZANT

When the Titanic sank into the icy depths of the Atlantic Ocean on April 15,1912, it took with it a surprising amount of cutting-edge fitness equipment. In the gym were the latest in early 20th-century machines: exercise bikes, rowers, an electric horse and an electric camel. The action of these last two was said to mimic the riding of the real animals – considered a healthful activity.

It would be decades before the idea of formalised exercise for health in adults - minus the camels - really took off. Fast-forward through World War II, when citizens were encouraged to “keep fit” at classes in public halls with vigorous calisthenics, and the 1950s when the YWCA introduced fitness classes for women, to the global trend of dedicated fitness centres such as those that sprang up here in the 70s and 80s.

Early facilities were filled with people taking organised “aerobics” classes, with dance-like routines choreographed to contemporary hits. Participants tended to be women, with men gravitating towards weights machines.

Tracy Minnoch-Nuku remembers those days. The Tauranga-based trainer started her career in fitness as an instructor at Les Mills Dunedin in the late 1980s; she could be found teaching “Step New Body”, a cardio class where exercisers used a portable step, resistance bands and “little hand weights”. These were the first hints of resistance training, she recalls, but the goal was not building muscle. “It was all about tone,” she says. “That's what we used to talk about. You would never see girls in the weights room. That was not a thing.”

Even for men, the idea of lifting weights was for a long time consigned to the body builder, a practice regarded as odd or extreme by many.

Forty years on, things have changed. Now, exercising with weights has become the must-do for strength, aesthetics and increasingly, as the research is showing, healthy ageing.