This review of Lift: Fitness Culture, from Naked Greeks and Acrobats to Jazzercise and Ninja Warriors, by Daniel Kunitz (Harper Wave/HarperCollins. 2017. ISBN 9780062336194) was originally published in the Wall Street Journal in July 2016.

When I entered the world of serious cycling in 1980 I met a man named Phil Guarnaccia, a burly weight-lifting gym rat who could also pedal a bicycle with ferocity. On local group rides in Southern California he would routinely trounce men half his age (like me), and then retreat to his home gym and push iron for another couple of hours. I lived near Phil and worked out with him, and I would often see world-class athletes and Olympic cyclists there trying to figure out what they could do to enhance their performance (legally). He liked to tell the story of how, in 1952, he won the Mr. California bodybuilding contest and the Mr. Physical Fitness competition, and on a lark one Sunday morning he joined the San Francisco Wheelmen for a 30-mile loop through the rolling hills around the bay area. “I was dropped on the first hill and it wasn’t even that steep,” he told me. “And here I was, Mr. Physical Fitness, being thrashed by a bunch of skinny cyclists.” Phil realized that looking buff was not the same as being physically fit, and he vowed thereafter to train his whole body through multiple modalities. (He had a $5,000 challenge to anyone who could follow him through his daily gym workout routine and last the entire 45 minutes, which no one was able to do, including me).

This vignette is emblematic of the ever-evolving nature of fitness and the industry surrounding it, artfully narrated in Lift by Daniel Kunitz, a writer for Vanity Fair and Harper’s Magazine and an editor at the Paris Review. The latter is apropos for this book because the publication’s co-founder, George Plimpton, carved a literary niche for himself as a sports participatory journalist, famously playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions, going into the ring against the Light Heavyweight world champion boxer Archie Moore, playing goalie with the Boston Bruins hockey team, and flying through the air on a circus trapeze. But Plimpton wasn’t interested in actually becoming a jock, whereas Kunitz set out to sculpt his flaccid body (“muscles were for lunkheads” he once believed) into a physically fit athlete. But what does it mean to be fit? This book, among other things, sets out to answer this all-important question, starting with the physical form.

It is understandable that so many people equate fitness with the look of the physical body, as ever since the Renaissance, Kunitz explains, Greek statuary set the standard of the “muscled warrior-athlete in midstride, with pecs and abs worthy of an armored breastplate.” Bodies that mimic this form but can’t run a dozen kilometers into battle and be ready to throw spears, wield swords, and engage in exhausting hand-to-hand combat, however, are not fit. The form should be a proxy for strength, endurance, and coordination. But how do you achieve that balance?

The 1950’s gyms of Phil Guarnaccia’s generation were dank, smelly, and poorly lit, but by the 1980s they gave way to stylish health clubs featuring mirrored walls, chrome-plated dumbbells, scientifically designed Nautilus and Universal weight machines, stationary bikes, treadmills, saunas, whirlpools and sports physiology test equipment. I recall the fashionable meme at the time that isolating muscle groups was good. But why? One pragmatic (and legal) reason was apparent: to reduce injuries. You could spring loose into a gym an entire class of unsupervised high school students or random adults off the street and not worry about people getting hurt. Free weights and their attendant exercises—such as the Olympic snatch or clean-and-jerk—if not done correctly, which usually means supervised by a trainer or coach, could easily result in herniated disks, pulled muscles, and torn ligaments. But free weights do something Nautilus and Universal weight machines can’t do, and that is engage the entire body, integrating muscles, tendons, and ligaments into whole-body movement from core to extremity. When you bend down to pick up a barbell off the floor and lift it over your head (or move a couch or desk from one room to another) you are involving far more of your body than any weight machine ever could. The Greeks trained for life, not looks.

Training for life is what Kunitz calls the New Frontier Fitness (NFF), which incorporates “nutrition, community, neuromuscular integration, brain health, meditation, visualization, ethics, and emotional well-being.” The competition is not against others but with oneself, with an aim toward betterment in how we perform in the world, not in the gym. The CrossFit Games are an exemplar in the competitive form of NFF. CrossFit athletes don’t even know what specific workout tasks they will be assigned until hours or days before the competition, meaning that they have to be ready for anything, from standard weightlifting, stair climbing, and gymnastics movements to scaling a peg-board, flipping tractor tires, hauling sandbags, rowing, and open ocean swimming. Watching highlight reels online is humbling. These athletes are fit beyond anything I saw or experienced in the 1980s.

What does it mean to be fit? Kunitz’s short list, based on CrossFit guru Greg Glassman’s now canonical essay “What Is Fitness?” (free online), includes weightlifting (deadlift, snatch, and clean-and-jerk), gymnastics (pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits, and holds), and cardiovascular (bike, run, swim, row, etc. hard and fast). You should be aiming for cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy. Oh, and you should eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, and some fruit—in amounts commensurate with your exercise energy output—but low starch and no sugar! The goal is not to look good naked (although that doesn’t hurt), but to hoist a heavy bag of dog food on your shoulder, to carry your child for hours, to move furniture around your home, to run from a burning building, or whatever other unexpected contingencies come your way. “You’ll never see a person do a bicep curl or lat raise outside a gym,” Kunitz notes, “but you will see them jump, run, and heave loads from the ground over their heads.”

That is what it means to be fit, and Daniel Kunitz’s engaging Lift captures the movement in its ascendency.