[DOWNLOAD] "Lift" by Daniel Kunitz # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free

eBook details
- Title: Lift
- Author : Daniel Kunitz
- Release Date : January 05, 2016
- Genre: Sports & Outdoors,Books,History,Health, Mind & Body,Health & Fitness,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 2339 KB
Description
A fascinating cultural history of fitness, from Greek antiquity to the era of the âbig-box gymâ and beyond, exploring the ways in which human exercise has changed over timeâand what we can learn from our ancestors.
We humans have been conditioning our bodies for more than 2,500 years, yet itâs only recently that treadmills and weight machines have become the gold standard of fitness. For all this new technology, are we really healthier, stronger, and more flexible than our ancestors?
Where Born to Run began with an aching foot, Lift begins with a broken gym systemâone founded on high-tech machinery and isolation techniques that arenât necessarily as productive as we think. Looking to the past for context, Daniel Kunitz crafts an insightful cultural history of the human drive for exercise, concluding that we need to get back to basics to be truly healthy.
Lift takes us on an enlightening tour through time, beginning with the ancient Greeks, who made a cult of the human bodyâthe word gymnasium derives from the Greek word for ânakedââand following Roman legions, medieval knights, Persian pahlevans, and eighteenth-century German gymnasts. Kunitz discovers the seeds of the modern gym in nineteenth-century Paris, where weight lifting machines were first employed, and takes us all the way up to the game-changer: the feminist movement of the 1960s, which popularized aerobics and calisthenics classes. This ignited the first true global fitness revolution, and Kunitz explores how it brought us to where we are today.
Once a fast-food inhaler and substance abuser, Kunitz reveals his own decade-long journey to becoming ultra-fit using ancient principals of strengthening and conditioning. With Lift, he argues that, as a culture, we are finally returning to this natural idealâand that itâs to our great benefit to do so.