People/Products

Believe it or not, more than a century before we could Aerobicise, Tae Bo, or SoulCycle our way to a svelte physique, Victorian England had its own preoccupation with getting buff. In a 1903 letter to the editor of the Guardian, Arthur G. Mears bemoaned the state of London’s flabby youth, “painfully apparent in the public streets.” Physical strength, he wrote, was the element “upon which the future of the nation depends.”