Research question and purpose: Les Mills is a New Zealand-based fitness distributor with a community consisting of approximately 140.000 instructors worldwide who teach standardized workout routines. This paper aims to explore how the COVID-19 pandemic and related measurements, such as social distancing affect the everyday lives and professions of Les Mills International (LMI) group fitness instructors. The aim was met with the following research questions: RQ1: How are social distancing and social connectedness understood, and how do they condition LMI instructors' understanding of their profession? RQ2: What do LMI instructors think about the #LesMillsUnited campaign to maintain a strong trainer community in the midst of the pandemic? RQ3: How do LMI instructors think that group fitness will change long term due to social distancing? Research methods: Using qualitative measures and a case-study-based approach, data were gathered through interviews with LMI-certified group fitness instructors. Seven semi-structured focused group discussions with fifteen group fitness instructors from different countries were conducted and audio recorded. The first round of virtual discussions took place in April 2020, and the follow-up talks in September 2020. A thematic analysis was employed to analyze the material. Results and findings: According to the participants, online classes as a means of upholding group fitness in times of social distancing is an insufficient substitute to face-to-face instructing, lacking social connectedness that is normally maintained through successful rituals or social scripts. Navigating "instructorhood" during the pandemic includes emotional labor where not only relationships to clients are challenged, but instructors also experience societal pressure to reinvent themselves as instructors. Implications: With no way of telling how long social distancing needs to be practiced, the group fitness industry is facing unprecedented challenges. Making sense of the group fitness profession currently preoccupies instructors who may now have to redefine to themselves how they can teach, and who for.
Emanating from an ethnographic study of Swedish bodybuilders, this article aims to present a sociological understanding of various circumstances influencing the decision to begin taking performance-enhancing drugs. Theoretically, the research builds upon a constructionist approach, in which actors’ identity claims, the way they describe themselves and their group affiliation, are understood both as individual stories of identity construction and as discursive statements. The result shows that the willingness to perform, to focus on the body’s function, is a paradigmatic narrative being expressed throughout. As such, this performance oriented lifestyle can be related to traditional values saluted within organised sports and also understood as a fairly stable part of a hegemonic masculine construction. However, the results also show how the performance logic is entwined with a strong zest for bodily aesthetics. In the article, this cultural ambiguity is used as an analytical window through which one can see how different understandings of gender, health and doping continuously are socially negotiated in relation to contemporary fitness culture and public health organisations in Swedish society. By analysing doping trajectories in this way the article suggests that drug using practises could be understood as an activity performed along a continuum of cultural and societal (over-)conformity, rather than actions representing societal abnormality.
Kulturhistoriskt har fotboll dominerats av män och maskulinitet.
Den manliga normen inom fotbollen tvingar spelare i damallsvenskan
att anpassa sig och vänja sig vid begränsade resurser. De
känner sig oönskade, går i opposition och utvecklar strategier för att
distansera sig från den manliga dominansen.
This article analyses self-portrayals and gender constructions among Swedish male bodybuilders who are engaged in fitness doping. The empirical material comes from a larger ethnographic investigation into gym culture. The results show that there is a strong propensity to conform with particular gender fantasies that rests heavily on a binary understanding of gendered, doped bodies. However, this storyline does not apprehend the entire self-presentation of the analysed drug users. Negotiations and inclusive subversions of traditional gender norms are also expressed. For example, the narratives show how the use of performance-enhancing substances makes it possible for (heterosexual) men to approach, touch and express feelings of desire towards other men and their bodies. As such, this practice can be viewed as a contestation of hegemonic gender values, in which masculinity and fitness doping are detached from a quite heterosexist understanding, and turned into a symbolic world of homoerotic pleasure.
The aim of this article is to describe and analyse learning processes among bodybuilders in bodybuilding environments, focusing on the ways activities form the basis for incorporation of both physical and cultural knowledge. Emanating from an ethnographic study, the arguments are based on a constructionist approach to knowledge. The result provides an understanding of knowledge as being, and becoming, embodied through different learning processes. This article shows how knowledge of exercise, nutrition and physiology is gradually acquired and physically experienced, eventually becoming knowledge ‘in the body’ rather than ‘about the body’. Through these learning processes, the individual develops perceptual as well as tactile abilities that, earlier, were unexplored or bodily inaccessible.
Sociala medier och olika internetforum har blivit en del av en ny självhjälpskultur där människor anonymt kan legitimera och diskutera sina erfarenheter av att använda prestationshöjande substanser(PED). Användarna är medvetna om att de riskerar sin egen hälsa men töjer på gränserna för att nå uppsatta mål.
Att kombinera vardagen som elitmotionär med ett fungerande familjeliv är ingen enkel ekvation. Uppoffringar, glädje, dåligt samvete och glada hejarop är en del av vardagen. Men på vems villkor och bekostnad formas egentligen elitmotionärens livsstil?
Builds on online material gathered by the authors over several years on diverse online doping forumsAnalyses development of online forums and communities and the ambitions of usersFocuses on online gender identity constructions and how communities are saturated with gendered understandings
Summary: This collection aims to emphasize the ever-changing nature of sport. In doing so, the reader is moved away from the traditional routes of organized and elite sport to consider how sport and other physical activities evolve and shift in response to and in anticipation of broader social changes. Included within are contributions stemming from the idea of “rethinking sport” that address the notion of training as part of cancer treatment, the development of informal and lifestyle sports, parkour activities in James Bond movies, and the phenomenon of Timbersports. This collection has a further specific focus on topics related to “social issues” and how sport may counter or create inequalities. This anthology includes chapters that engage in analyses of several of these topics, such as sexual abuse, drug abuse, health promotion programs, trauma-informed coaching, inclusion and exclusion mechanisms in gym culture, the long-term social impact of sport gentrification, and human rights and racialization in sport. Built on the work of established and emerging scholars, this collection includes research from a variety of disciplines including sociology, sport science, social work, cultural studies, gender studies, and more.
Understandings of image and performance enhancing drugs (IPEDs) and their use has largely been conceptualized through the lens of male hegemonic patterns, treating women’s doping as a threat to the “natural” gender order. This article focuses on an exclusive, women-only online IPED forum. It aims to describe and analyze how this new forum was met within the broader doping community, and how issues related to IPED use and gender are addressed by women when their views are not backgrounded by potential male commentators and misogynistic discourses. The results show that first-hand knowledge is disseminated by women, which contributes to the foundation of a women’s ethnopharmacological (sub)culture. Women, their bodies, and experiences become the standard and the “unspoken” norm in the discussions. The secluded space allows women to challenge patterns of hegemonic masculinity, while building and reinforcing women’s experiences, bodies, and expertise as the standard. This stresses the importance of moving beyond hegemonic conceptualizations to understand the ongoing socio-cultural changes to the gender balance of IPED use and to center women’s doping experiences, and the risks associated with use. This has implications for the formation and development of both this community and of a “sis-science” based on women’s knowledge and experience.
Through hegemonic ideas about muscles and extraordinary performances, image- and performance-enhancing drugs (IPEDs) and their use have been traditionally connected to hypersexualized masculinities. This link has resulted in spectacular ideas and fantasies about what IPEDs can do to/with men regarding their bodies and sexual performance. However, these ideas do not always manifest or correspond with daily life. Using a qualitative and case-study-based approach, this article investigates the relationship between doped and spectacular masculinities as they are presented and constructed in and through an online doping community, and users’ experiences of side effects of the doped body and its social consequences. Analytically, the article draws on Guy Debord’s work on the relationship between the spectacle and the real, and the ongoing theoretical debate on different reconfigurations and redefinitions of doped masculinities. It argues that anticipations of and effects from IPEDs can bring alternative ways of enacting doping masculinity and sexuality in the context of online communication while also blurring the lines between fantasy and lived experience.
Situated within a framework of a globalized gym and fitness culture, this paper aims to investigate and compare how fitness doping can be understood in relation to, and how it is affected by, different national and local contexts. Representing different forms of welfare state regimes, the comparative analysis focuses on policy, practice, and prevention in the United States and Sweden. The findings indicate, among other things, how national level policy and implementation reflect local priorities, understandings, and values. Sweden’s choices form a pattern reflecting the priority of protecting the collective good over individual pursuits. Conversely, that the U.S. does not police outside formally governed competitions in sports or in criminal contexts. Further, U.S. bodybuilders do not feel targeted for their appearance in the same ways, illustrating the priority of individual choice. Further, the paper discusses how each country implements anti-doping in ways consistent with global policies, but are also informed by various local understandings and values. This interplay between the supranational structures and locally diverse implementation is not only complex, but can seem contradictory as each locality partly remains within a global system of anti-doping in sport, and partly operates outside this context. We suggest glocal fitness doping needs to be understood as a process through which global ideals, organisations, and more contribute to influencing local and national prevention policies and cultures, and vice versa.
Why has doping, both as a practice and a social phenomenon, been approached largely as a question of context: sport or fitness? Individuals may use substances to enhance sporting performance or within the framework of gym and fitness culture to create a perfect body. But clearly, people who dope are not bound to a singular context. It is quite the opposite, as individuals weave between and move across various settings in their trajectories to and from doping, as goals, identities, ambitions, and lifestyles change over time. Still, these stark categorizations often made in public discourse – and reinforced by scholars – have continued to ignore these lived experiences and limited our understanding of doping. Building on data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork, studies of online doping communities, and in-depth case studies, this book embraces the challenge of moving beyond traditional and historical doping dichotomies – such as those of sport or fitness, online or offline, pleasure or harm, masculinity or femininity, and health or harm – and, in a sociologically informed analysis, it develops new terminology to understand trajectories to and from doping. It argues there are multiple ways to understand doped bodies and doping practices, and that we must approach these questions from the perspective of both/and rather than either/or. By imploding these divisions, it offers updated and nuanced ways of both empirically and theoretically rethinking doping use and experiences attached to the practice.
Utilising data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork this article investigates (a) how asylum seekers portray family life in relation to their decision to flee their country of origin, and (b) how asylum seekers’ ways of doing family life intersect with the Swedish migration context. Analytically, the article leans on sociologically informed theories of family practices and a conceptual discussion on deportability. The results show how family life among the participants is reconstituted both in terms of geographical closeness and distance, and in terms of ideas about a previous family life in the country of origin and hopes for a possible future in Sweden. The insecurity and the strains placed on people and their family bonds by current migration policies, and the risk of deportation, are interpreted as a specific form of administrative violence that cuts into family practices, serving to maintain physical and emotional distance between family members and break down social bonds.
Men have increasingly been dedicating time and effort to childcare. Consequently, the idea of the ‘new’ emotionally involved father has been discussed in the literature. This article focuses on narratives of divorced Swedish fathers with joint physical custody of their children. This arrangement, a new model of post-divorce parenting, has become increasingly popular in several Nordic countries. The article aims to analyse the experiences attached to and emanating from this particular form of post-divorce agreement, and how it is understood in relation to the Swedish childcare system. The fathers interviewed had a strong ambition to share things equally, as well as to carry on family practices in gender-equal ways. This desire was, however, balanced with a number of obstacles, such as work requirements, living conditions and conceptions of gender differences. In this way, the fathers’ subjective aspirations and strivings were filtered through structural and cultural conditions in society, with clear connections to Swedish family and gender politics.
This article describes and analyses the historical development of gym and fitness culture in general and doping use in this context in particular. Theoretically, the paper utilises the concept of subculture and explores how a subcultural response can be used analytically in relation to processes of cultural normalisation as well as marginalisation. The focus is on historical and symbolic negotiations that have occurred over time, between perceived expressions of extreme body cultures and sociocultural transformations in society-with a perspective on fitness doping in public discourse. Several distinct phases in the history of fitness doping are identified. First, there is an introductory phase in the mid-1950s, in which there is an optimism connected to modernity and thoughts about scientifically-engineered bodies. Secondly, in the 1960s and 70s, a distinct bodybuilding subculture is developed, cultivating previously unseen muscular male bodies. Thirdly, there is a critical phase in the 1980s and 90s, where drugs gradually become morally objectionable. The fourth phase, the fitness revolution, can be seen as a transformational phase in gym culture. The massive bodybuilding body is replaced with the well-defined and moderately muscular fitness body, but at the same time there are strong commercialised values which contribute to the development of a new doping market. Finally, it is possible to speculate on the development of a fifth phase, in which fitness doping is increasingly being filtered into mainstream gym and fitness culture, influencing the fitness doping demography.
Förenklade föreställningar om manlighet och mäns kroppar är vanligt förekommande i såväl den offentliga debatten som i forskningssammanhang. Män beskrivs som dominerande, disciplinerande och våldsamma.
De sägs också ha svårt att söka hjälp för psykiska och somatiska problem, att tala om känslor och att fullt ut eftersträva jämställdhet. De vill inte dela ansvar för hemmet eller vara fysiskt nära sina barn. Men stämmer dessa stereotypa bilder in på den samtida vardagsmannen?
I denna bok erbjuds en nyanserad, men också kritisk bild av manlighetens olika ansikten. Genom att analysera manlighet utifrån dels kritisk forskning om män och maskuliniteter, dels kroppsstudier, närmar sig författarna denna komplexa fråga. Boken diskuterar mäns relation till muskler, våld, faderskap, kroppslig estetisering, åldrande och sjukdom liksom en rad andra frågor.
Den perfekta mannen? utgör ett bidrag till den akademiska forskningen om män, maskulinitet och manlighetens förkroppsligande – men riktar sig också till alla som är intresserade av genus- och identitetsfrågor.
Förlagets beskrivning: Vad innebär ett vetenskapligt förhållningssätt? I den här boken får du en inblick i vad som menas med vetenskapligt tänkande och hur det vetenskapliga hantverket kan utföras. På ett översiktligt och lättillgängligt sätt beskrivs hur datamaterial kan samlas in, bearbetas och analyseras med olika kvantitativa, kvalitativa och internetbaserade metoder. Med hjälp av konkreta exempel redogör författarna för de styrkor och begränsningar som utmärker olika vetenskapliga metoder.
Men detta är inte enbart en metodbok, utan också en bok som tar ett vidare grepp om det vetenskapliga arbetet och dess grunder - med diskussioner om vilka kvalitetskrav som ställs på vetenskapliga studier, forskningsetik och vad det egentligen innebär att ha ett kritiskt tänkande.
Det vetenskapliga arbetets grunder är avsedd för grundläggande högskole- och universitetsutbildning inom humanistiska och samhällsvetenskapliga ämnen, samt för lärarutbildningen.
This article analyses fitness professionals’ perceptions and understanding of their occupational education and pedagogical pursuance, framed within the emergence of a global fitness industry. The empirical material consists of interviews with personal trainers and group fitness instructors, as well as observations in their working environment. In addition, printed material from different occupational organisations and educational companies has been included. The narratives of the fitness professionals and a case study of Les Mills are presented and analysed through the concept of the McDonaldisation of society, or more specifically of fitness culture. The results show that, even though gym and fitness franchises differ from hamburger restaurant chains, there are crucial similarities, but also differences. One can, for example, discern a tendency towards the construction of predesigned and highly monitored programmes, such as the one developed by Les Mills. Homogenisation is also apparent when looking at the body ideals produced, as fitness professionals work on their own or clients’ bodies, which makes it possible to anticipate a global body ideal. The social and cultural patterns of self-regulation and self-government found in gym and fitness culture can be understood and analysed in a global context. What we find is an intriguing and complex mixture of regulation, control and standardisation, on the one hand, and a struggle to express the body, to be ‘free’ and to transgress the boundaries set by the commercial global fitness industry, on the other.