Can-Fit-Pro, The Fit Body and The Field of Physical Fitness.

• Main Author: Trotter, Kathleen
• Other Authors: MacNeill, Margaret
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: Fitness; Body; 0566; 0626
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/42960

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.