| Summary: | This thesis presents an examination of how the body is situated within the field of physical fitness: it examines how individuals learn what a ‘fit’ body looks and ‘performs’ like, and explores the benefits of having the appearance of a fit body in our society. The research findings, observations, and conclusions contained within this text are drawn from two inter-related sources: a commonly used fitness industry textbook called Foundations of Professional Personal Training (Anderson, Bates, Cova, & Macdonald, 2008) and my own experiences as a professional within that industry, captured in an auto-ethnographic journal. There are three main, highly interconnected, hegemonic discourses that frame the Foundations of Professional Personal Training text: biomedical expert knowledge, neoliberal biopedagogy, and, most importantly, the discourse of risk management mediated by healthiest risk discourse.
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