Saturday, July 6, 2013

Figure Salons and Rolling Machines

As you may have heard, I'm getting ready to take the CPT exam, either in September or October (yes, I'm going to need that long to study...). CPT stands for a Certified Personal Trainer, which is what I am aiming to be. I got my study book today, which is a quite large textbook that goes over everything a CPT should know and everything I will need to know for the exam (all in all, quite a lot of information), but I am super excited to get started and began reading it today. I wanted to share a little bit that I learned in the first chapter.
This first section is about the history of personal training, starting in the 1950s with the men's fitness centers, which were called 'gyms'. Women's centers were brought about in the 1960s and were referred to as 'figure salons'. The men's centers concentrated on body and muscle building, while the women's concentrated on figure and weight loss (in many people's minds, this is not too much different than how we stereotypically portray genders at the gym). Similar to today's advertised workout tools, there were many different machines and accessories that people would use in order to help attain the desired results. For women, there were two machines that were mentioned in my studying. The first being the rolling machine which was supposed to roll away the fat, and the second was a jiggle machine, which was supposed to jiggle away the fat especially from the thighs.
I looked for a video of either of these two machines but there weren't really many that showed what I had wanted so here's an old exercise video from that time. This was the original television fitness show called The Jack LaLanne Show. Enjoy!


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