Group fitness instructors as local level health promoters: a Foucauldian analysis of the politics of health/fitness dynamic

ABSTRACT

As fitness professionals, group fitness instructors play an important role in promoting recommended public health initiatives to various communities. While their practices are connected to public health policy, their certifications are often provided by commercially operated agencies in the North American context. The interrelationship of commercial and governmental control creates a complex environment where certain ways of understanding health and the fit body become dominant. In this paper, consequently, we were interested in what fitness knowledges informed Canadian group fitness instructors’ practices. Approaching our topic from a Foucauldian perspective, we conducted semi-structured interviews with five instructors who had a provincially governed fitness qualification. The findings revealed that two knowledges – health as illness prevention and the aesthetics of health – strongly directed the instructors’ class design despite their willingness to think, particularly about health, differently. Their certification reinforced the medical, physiological, and psychological knowledges that tend to assign health as individual responsibility, but left the social issues behind the healthy, fit body unproblematized. From a Foucauldian perspective, these dominant knowledges locked the instructors within dual control of anatomo-political and bio-political neoliberal power relations. To assist the instructors to problematize the control mechanism behind the dominant knowledge structure, we call for inclusion of broader knowledge base in their certification training through which serving the multiple needs of their various clientele can be constructively negotiated.

KEYWORDS:

• Fitness
• instructors
• Foucault
• health
• the fit body

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The existing research on personal trainers, in many ways, intersects with research on group fitness instructors (e.g., Frew and McGilligvray 2005, Smith Maguire 2007, George 2008, Donaghue and Allen 2015, Wiest et al. 2015). We have chosen not to detail this research here because of the differences in the certification process and the instructional practices between personal trainers and group fitness instructors.

2. Despite these pressures, the instructors are generally satisfied with their bodies, but, nevertheless, prefer to be leaner and more toned (Prichard and Tiggemann 2005, D’Abundo 2009, Mansfield 2011). There are also several psychological studies that identify group exercise instructors as a risk group for eating disorders (e.g. Martin and Hausenblas 1998, Mcnelis-Kline 2000, Smolak et al. 2000). In addition, 35% of the instructors in Hoglund and Normen (2002) study reported eating disorder experiences. More recently, Bratland-Sanda and Sundgot-Borgen (2015) estimated that up to 40% of group fitness instructors had symptoms of disordered eating or severe eating disorders.

3. The executive director of the Fitness Unit provided the following information:Mission: The Fitness Unit inspires our community to be physically active through advocacy, education, working in strategic partnerships and by supporting professionalism in the exercise industry.Vision: All [individuals] have access to safe, effective active living strategies to live healthy active lifestyles.

4. Despite our inquiry, the executive director did not provide any details regarding the constitution of the FLCA board membership. However, the Exercise Theory manual lists five women as the FLCA past and present directors. They include the executive director, a professor of exercise physiology outside of the host university, and three FLCA trainers.

5. The main theme, health, had the following sub-themes: health enhancement and disease prevention through physical fitness; health promotion through instructor practice; health as a personal responsibility; health linked to physical fitness; and health linked to the ideal feminine body. The second main theme, the ideal feminine body, had the following sub-themes: ideal feminine body equated with health; weight loss as a primary goal in class design; obese and over-weight bodies as unacceptable; the pressure for a fitness instructor to conform to ideal feminine body.

6. While the university hosts both the FU (and the FLCA), a certifying body, and the Campus and Community Services they operate as entirely separate units. Recreation services, thus, can hire instructors with any type of certification.

7. CSEP also provides specific guidelines for three ‘special populations:’ multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injury, and Parkinson’s disease (http://www.csep.ca/en/guidelines/physical-activity-guidelines-for-special-populations).

8. In the North American context, contract group fitness instructors are required to finance and obtain personal instructor liability insurance. This is also a requirement for teaching at the university recreation services. This practice further reflects the neo-liberal context where the responsibility for liability of practice is moved from the employer to individually contracted (part-time) employees.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Alberta [EFF-SAS].