When people learn that I’ve spent nearly a decade researching fitness culture, they tend to respond in a particular and telling way: by recounting their own humiliating experiences with physical education, some so intense that they were turned off exercise for years by the very classes meant to engage them in it.

I can relate, as I, too, was once a gym class anti-hero, more drawn to books than barbells. Today, however, I spend more time than most at the gym, figuratively and literally: I study fitness, teach group classes, and find both exhilarating. My journey from then to now, physically and intellectually, has given me a deeper understanding of the ironies and inequalities surrounding and suffusing American exercise culture – and convinced me that we must begin to bridge longstanding gaps between sports and fitness in order to foster a more enriching movement culture for all.

Growing up in suburban Boston, I was intimidated by all things athletic and mostly stuck to what came easily: tearing through novels, filling up journals, and dialing in Top 40 radio requests that I would then capture on cassettes in my boom box. The cavernous gymnasium at my public high school? Not my comfort zone. While there were objectively challenging activities in the curriculum, such as rope climbing or ranked flexibility tests, I remember feeling most intimidated by a physical feat that presented itself before the teacher even blew the whistle: On some days, in a pattern I could never predict to “use my skips”' accordingly, the wooden bleachers would be locked shut and pushed close to the wall. The teacher would expect us to scale up the wooden slats to sit on top and await instruction.

As if Mount Everest might loom behind the gym’s double doors, I prayed each day before class that the bleachers would be open and accessible – or that if they weren’t, my scrawny arms might miraculously be able to hoist the heft of my legs, which teen magazines taught me were too big. I managed to complete the ascent a few times, flustered with embarrassment at my clumsiness as much as the exertion. I eventually found a solution to my discomfort, buried in the student rights and responsibilities manual: an “independent study” in physical fitness, an option the department head told me no one in his memory had ever asked to exercise.

My exit from P.E. became my entry to a mid-1990s fitness culture that was an unlikely place for a bookish teenager. While my friends played sports like soccer and tennis, I fulfilled the independent study – specified only as “supervised” but not a team (no problem!) – by attending a step aerobics class at the Jewish Community Center where my family had a membership. Fortuitously, in a studio of mostly women and some men twice my age, I discovered an entirely new experience of exercise. Spinning around that step, risers stacking higher as I mastered the movements and combinations, I felt exhausted but exhilarated. It was a feeling unlike anything P.E. class or dabbling in basketball and lacrosse had inspired within me. Pretty soon, I was addicted. I saved my allowance to upgrade to a nearby Gold’s Gym; worked behind the desk at a fancy health club during my college years to get the free membership; and ultimately became certified to teach group fitness.

My exit from P.E. became my entry to a mid-1990s fitness culture that was an unlikely place for a bookish teenager. While my friends played sports like soccer and tennis, I fulfilled the independent study – specified only as “supervised” but not a team (no problem!) – by attending a step aerobics class at the Jewish Community Center where my family had a membership. Fortuitously, in a studio of mostly women and some men twice my age, I discovered an entirely new experience of exercise. Spinning around that step, risers stacking higher as I mastered the movements and combinations, I felt exhausted but exhilarated. It was a feeling unlike anything P.E. class or dabbling in basketball and lacrosse had inspired within me. Pretty soon, I was addicted. I saved my allowance to upgrade to a nearby Gold’s Gym; worked behind the desk at a fancy health club during my college years to get the free membership; and ultimately became certified to teach group fitness.