Muscles and Movements of Modernity: Europe’s Physical Culture Revolution

By the 1800s, Europe was changing fast. The Industrial Revolution had shifted work from fields to factories, and with it came a new problem: physical stagnation. In response, a wave of physical culture swept the continent, part revival of ancient ideals, part social reform, part nationalistic impulse. It was fitness not just as training, but as identity.

As discussed previously, at the forefront of this movement was Friedrich Ludwig Jahn of Germany, better known as the “Father of Gymnastics.” In 1811, Jahn founded the first Turnverein, or gymnastics club, in Berlin. His goal wasn’t just to build strength; it was to build citizens. Jahn believed that physical fitness cultivated character, unity, and the kind of resilience a young, post-Napoleonic Germany needed. On grassy fields known as Turnplatz, his students sprinted, climbed, jumped, and swung on apparatus he helped popularize: parallel bars, rings, balance beams, and pommel horses. The training was rigorous, varied, and deeply symbolic.

Gymnastics, in Jahn’s model, was a means to forge both body and nation. Turnvereins soon spread across Europe and into immigrant communities in America, where “Turner” clubs continued the tradition. Public exhibitions were a spectacle of synchronization and strength, as teams performed complex routines in unison, displaying not only athleticism but also cohesion. Fitness became more than an individual pursuit. It was a visible statement of order, discipline, and pride.

In Sweden, Pehr Henrik Ling was developing his own system of physical education; less militaristic than Jahn’s, but equally influential. Ling emphasized health, posture, and natural movement through calisthenics and gentle stretching. His “Swedish gymnastics” system focused on mobility and therapeutic benefit. While the German approach emphasized toughness, the Swedish system promoted wellbeing. But both agreed on a central point: fitness should be systematic, inclusive, and built on balanced development.

These movements shaped education policy across Europe and beyond. By the late 19th century, structured physical training, including jumping jacks, toe touches, and rhythmic drills, had been introduced into school programs across several countries. The belief had taken root: fitness wasn’t just for warriors or athletes. It was a civic responsibility.

Strength as Spectacle

While educators formalized fitness in schools, another parallel movement brought it to the stage. Traveling strongmen dazzled crowds across Europe, lifting horses, breaking chains, and balancing platforms of people on their backs. Among the most famous was Eugen Sandow, a Prussian-born showman who combined raw strength with classical symmetry. Sandow wasn’t just a performer; he was a marketer. He sold the idea that anyone could build strength, that the ideal male physique was both attainable and desirable.

Sandow opened one of the first commercial gyms. He published training manuals, sold mail-order equipment, and launched a magazine devoted to “physical culture.” In doing so, he helped ignite a broader fitness craze, one that romanticized strength, symmetry, and visible muscle. His performances were as much about aesthetics as ability. He posed like a statue. He challenged Victorian notions that the ideal man was cerebral and stoic. In Sandow’s world, physical power and mental discipline were two sides of the same coin.

This era saw the rise of strength contests, athletic clubs, and public fitness festivals. It also marked the formalization of many modern sports. Gymnastics, swimming, weightlifting, and track and field, once informal practices, were now structured, standardized, and elevated to competitive events.

Fitness as National Virtue

The cultural shift was not just physical. It was moral. Movements like Sokol in Eastern Europe used gymnastics to cultivate national identity and solidarity. In Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), for example, Sokol festivals featured mass calisthenics in traditional dress, with each routine serving as a symbolic act of unity and defiance under imperial rule. Sport became political. Fitness became a form of self-determination.

In Victorian England, the “Muscular Christianity” movement wove physical development into moral upbringing. Athletic effort was viewed as character-building, a means to develop courage, fairness, and self-discipline. This philosophy influenced everything from scouting programs to school curricula. Boys were taught to be hardy, self-reliant, and virtuous through physical trials. Fitness was no longer just about health or vanity; it was about who you were becoming.

Even the early Olympic movement, revived in 1896 by Pierre de Coubertin, was infused with these ideals. Sport was to be a proving ground, not just for performance, but for integrity, resilience, and international cooperation.

By the 20th century, Western nations had fully institutionalized physical training. Schools mandated calisthenics. Military prep included obstacle courses and strength drills. Physical education had become national policy. And the stage was set: all-around fitness, once the domain of warriors, monks, and dancers, was now expected of every citizen.

Endurance and Hybrid Challenges in the Industrial Age

As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, industrial society began to flirt with its own limits. While machines took over manual labor and urban life grew increasingly sedentary, a counter-movement emerged, one that sought not efficiency, but endurance. People became captivated by feats of prolonged effort and physical resilience. It was a cultural swing back toward the body, and it helped set the foundation for the modern hybrid athlete.

During the 1870s and 1880s, one of the era’s most curious obsessions took hold: pedestrianism. These ultra-distance walking and running events, some lasting six full days, were staged in indoor arenas, often featuring grandstands, live music, betting, and packed crowds. Competitors circled wooden tracks day and night, pausing only for short naps and fuel. It was both an athletic event and a public spectacle. Some athletes logged over 500 miles in a week. The rules were simple: go as far as you can. The appeal was primal.

Figures like Edward Payson Weston and Ada Anderson became household names through sheer grit. Weston famously walked over a thousand kilometers in six days. Anderson completed 2,700 quarter-mile intervals in 2,700 quarter-hours. Newspapers covered these events like prizefights. The public was enthralled not by elegance or speed, but by sustained suffering. Endurance had become entertainment.

The Birth of Hybrid Events

Alongside these ultra efforts, a new category of competition began to emerge, events that blended athletic skills. The steeplechase, originally a horse race over countryside obstacles, became a human footrace by the late 1800s. It asked runners to sprint, jump, and recover repeatedly: speed and agility woven together.

Cross-country running followed a similar path, transforming a natural survival skill into an organized sport. In the snowy north, Scandinavia transformed necessity into tradition with the advent of cross-country ski races. And among the most demanding of these hybrid events was the biathlon, which originated as a test for military patrols. Ski hard, then shoot with precision. Calm your hands after chaos. Move fast, then be still. It was more than a sport. It was a lesson in controlled duality.

By the early 20th century, these multi-skill formats had become institutionalized. The Modern Pentathlon, introduced in 1912 by Olympic founder Pierre de Coubertin, was designed to reflect the ideal 19th-century soldier. It combined running, swimming, fencing, shooting, and horse jumping. It wasn’t about specialization; it was about well-rounded readiness. It was the pentathlon reborn for a new era.

Other military and adventure clubs experimented similarly. Cadets trained in orienteering, rowing, climbing, and obstacle running. Early stage races in cycling, like the grueling Tour de France in 1903, pushed athletes through multiple days of mountainous terrain. Each of these competitions played with the same question: what does it mean to be truly fit?

While early hybrid competitions explored what it meant to be physically capable across varied terrains and tasks, the military was arriving at similar conclusions, through necessity, not novelty. As nations prepared for large-scale conflict, fitness could no longer be theoretical or symbolic. It had to be functional. What sports tested for glory, armies now tested for survival. And in doing so, they created the blueprint for the functional, multi-domain fitness we see in both modern military training and today’s obstacle-based races.

Forged for Battle: The Military Origins of Functional Fitness

In military contexts, the thinking evolved in parallel. By World War I, armies had begun formalizing physical assessments that tested multiple capacities. In 1917, the U.S. Army introduced one of the earliest functional obstacle courses, along with an “Individual Efficiency Test” combining sprints, jumps, throws, and timed obstacles. The goal wasn’t aesthetics. It was battlefield readiness.

The British military was on a similar trajectory. In the early 20th century, the British Army formalised its own physical standards, emphasising all-terrain marching, loaded carries, and gymnastic drills designed to build practical strength and resilience. By World War II, British commandos were training on rigorous assault courses in Scotland’s rugged highlands; courses that mimicked the unpredictable demands of combat. These weren’t designed for spectacle. They were brutal, necessary, and functional. Even today, the British Army’s Physical Employment Standards and infamous selection events, such as “Test Week” for the Parachute Regiment, continue that tradition: multi-day trials that blend endurance, strength, and the psychological toll of uncertainty. Fitness, in this context, is not a vanity metric; it is a survival imperative.

These tests laid the groundwork for the obstacle-based races we see today. The modern Combat Fitness Test, the rise of outdoor bootcamps and bootcamp-style gyms, and the entire category of military-themed fitness challenges can trace their lineage to this era.

The groundwork had been laid. By the early 20th century, both American and British military institutions had embraced functional training not as a trend but as a necessity. But it was the global crucible of war that would take these practices from specialized assessments to mass implementation. What began as elite preparation became standard procedure. And in the mud, chaos, and urgency of the world wars, fitness left the parade ground and entered the battlefield, with lasting effects on soldiers, civilians, and the very definition of training.

Bootcamps and Battlefields – Functional Fitness Through War and Peace

The crucible of the world wars in the 20th century did more than redraw borders. It reshaped the body. In the trenches, on assault courses, and across muddy fields, modern functional fitness was forged. War demanded capability, under fire, under load, under pressure. And in response, militaries around the world transformed how people trained.

By World War I, obstacle-based drills and full-body conditioning had already become standard for building combat readiness. But it was in World War II that these methods became fully systematized and scaled. The the military put recruits through rigorous obstacle courses that mimicked combat terrain: climbing walls, crawling under barbed wire, swinging on ropes, jumping ditches, and balancing on logs. These weren’t workouts. They were simulations. And they worked.

Photos from the 1940s show young soldiers hauling sandbags, vaulting over barriers, and dragging one another through muck, all in uniform, all under stress. Physical training became universal, mandatory, and mission-critical. As a result, fitness levels among the general male population surged. Civilians who had never trained now did daily calisthenics, ruck marches, and physical labour as part of military life.

Military Training Goes Public

After the war, that military ethos filtered into civilian culture. Concern grew, especially in the United States, that peacetime youth were growing soft. When studies showed American schoolchildren lagging behind European kids in basic fitness tests, President Eisenhower responded by launching the President’s Council on Youth Fitness. Soon, American schools began implementing their own versions of military PT, including shuttle runs, pull-ups, sit-ups, and the infamous Presidential Fitness Test. It was part education, part readiness campaign.

Other nations followed similar paths. The Soviet Union, driven by Cold War rivalry, embedded physical training into every level of education. Olympic dominance was seen not just as athletic glory, but geopolitical proof of superiority. And so, physical fitness, once a niche interest, became a national priority. It was democratized, organized, and standardized. By mid-century, movement was no longer just a personal responsibility. It was patriotic.

Functional Fitness Takes Shape

Out of the military’s influence, a new training concept emerged: functional fitness. That is, training not just to look strong, but to be strong for real-world tasks. This wasn’t bodybuilding. It was battlefield readiness. British commandos trained in the Highlands by running up mountains with logs. The motto was simple and enduring: Train hard, fight easy.

Veterans brought these ideas home. Coaches, teachers, and gym owners began incorporating obstacle-style training into physical education and recreation. Bootcamp-style classes gained popularity. Hiking, rucking, and outdoor survival courses began to mimic the drills of elite soldiers. Even children’s obstacle races and school field days carried echoes of the parade ground.

In the 1960s, Canadian physician Bill Orban developed the 5BX plan—five basic exercises in 11 minutes a day—for Air Force pilots stuck in confined quarters. Jumping jacks, sit-ups, push-ups, and simple calisthenics formed the core. It was minimalist, efficient, and brutally effective. It became a global bestseller and inspired the circuit-style training still used today in fitness racing prep.

Fitness as Readiness: Built for Emergency

By the 1980s and 1990s, the concept of the all-around fit individual—the soldier-athlete—was prevalent. Militaries around the world formalized their Physical Fitness Test, often consisting of push-ups, sit-ups, and a run. Some tests included rope climbs, swims, loaded marches, and obstacle navigation. The message was clear: strength alone wasn’t enough. Neither was speed. You had to endure, adapt, recover, and move with purpose under stress.

This training philosophy spread rapidly. Group classes mimicked military routines. Boot camp workouts, loaded carries, and high-rep calisthenics became mainstream. The term “functional fitness” began appearing in magazines and gyms, and as elite military units, such as Navy SEALs, SAS, and Spetsnaz, captured the public imagination, their training methods gained mythic status. People didn’t just want to look fit. They wanted to be capable, like the best-trained warriors in the world.

Fitness racing was also inspired by the emergency services. Long before gym-goers were sled-pushing through arenas or chasing wall balls on polished floors, the groundwork for fitness racing was already being laid, in turnout gear, on concrete, under stress.

In the world of firefighting, physical preparation isn't optional. It’s not about aesthetics. It’s about survival: yours and someone else’s. That urgency gave birth to some of the earliest standardized, job-specific physical competitions. And whether they meant to or not, firefighters helped invent the functional race.

The Firefighter Combat Challenge was one of the first to make that connection visible. It was a timed course designed to mirror the real tasks of frontline responders. Stair climbs with hose packs. Rope hoists to upper decks. Hammer strikes on weighted sleds to mimic forcible entry. Hose advances. Dummy drags. No theatrics, just work. Every station was a replication of what might be required on a two-alarm call at 3 a.m., when adrenaline’s high, oxygen is low, and someone’s counting on you to move.

It wasn't just a display of strength. It was a test of usable capacity: coordination under pressure, breath control in chaos, and recovery between brutal efforts. It didn’t matter what you looked like in turnout gear. What mattered was whether you could move, lift, climb, and endure again and again.

On an even larger scale, events like the Toughest Firefighter Alive further promoted that same ethos. These multi-discipline competitions included obstacles, tower climbs, hose carries, and long-distance efforts performed in full gear. They were relentless, not because they were trying to be cruel, but because the job is. And in that intensity, they revealed something: the human body, when trained correctly, can handle more than we think.

These weren’t staged performances. They were practical exams under a stopwatch. And in doing so, they became a kind of spiritual ancestor to the modern fitness race. They showed that it was possible to create a sport from functional hardship, one that measured not just how fast or how strong you were, but how capable.

The lineage is obvious now. The sled push. The weighted carry. The standardized course. The time-based scoring. Fitness racing didn’t invent those concepts. It inherited them from the men and women who trained for the worst days, not the podium. From the arenas built not for fans, but for readiness.

Before the wristbands and DJ booths, before the medals and branded banners, firefighters were strapping on tanks and racing up towers. And they weren’t doing it for show. They were doing it because being fit wasn’t a hobby; it was a responsibility.

Civilian Sport, Military Roots

Modern fitness racing was born from this fusion, where military necessity met civilian curiosity, and where performance under pressure became a public aspiration. From the firehouse to the barracks, from functional tests to full-blown competitions, a new ethos emerged: fitness wasn’t just about aesthetics or specialization. It was about readiness. About capability under stress. About the kind of strength that doesn’t just show, but shows up when it matters. What began as survival training became a movement. And what was once the domain of soldiers and firefighters became the proving ground for a new kind of athlete.

Public marathons emerged from military messenger legends. Obstacle races, such as the Tough Guy challenge, which was started by a former British soldier in England in 1987, drew direct inspiration from commando courses. The founder of Spartan Race, Joe De Sena, openly cites the Spartan agoge, an ancient military training school, as a foundational influence. The blueprint was clear: take the essence of soldiering—grit, load, terrain, fatigue—and make it civilian.

By the late 20th century, the feedback loop was complete. Fitness informed the military. The military shaped fitness. And in between, a new kind of athlete emerged: one who trained not for the podium, but for preparedness. For performance under pressure. For the ability to face discomfort and keep moving.

The Soldier’s Legacy in Sport

When a modern athlete hauls a sandbag uphill, crawls under barbed wire, or sprints between stations, they’re not just competing. They’re participating in a legacy, one built in trenches, on beaches, in jungle clearings and mountain trails. The language of fitness racing—“grind,” “get after it,” “get a grip”—is borrowed from drill instructors, military PTIs and platoon leaders/commanders.

What the wars taught us, through hardship and necessity, is that real fitness is transferable. It doesn’t live in isolation. It crosses boundaries. A truly fit person can run, lift, climb, crawl, and adapt. That philosophy, once reserved for soldiers, is now available to all.

Fitness racing is, in many ways, the peacetime application of a wartime ethic. It’s a sport, yes. But it’s also a physical trial. A way to sharpen body and mind in the absence of actual combat. A way to tap into that primal readiness, the feeling that you are capable of enduring more than you thought.

And that, perhaps, is the deepest echo of the battlefield: not the obstacle itself, but the strength it reveals.

Modern Roots of Fitness Racing

By the time the 20th century hit its stride, the blueprint for modern fitness racing was already in circulation: combine endurance with strength, add agility and functional skills, and measure the results. The seeds were there, in lumberjack games, alpine soldier drills, and commando obstacle courses. These weren’t staged for spectacle, but they revealed what humans could do under pressure. The public noticed. As more people sought ways to test themselves, not just in one domain, but across many, the idea of the hybrid athlete began to take root.

That idea reached a new level in 1978, when a group of athletes on the shores of Hawaii sought to settle an age-old question: who was the fittest: swimmers, cyclists, or runners? Their answer wasn’t a debate. It was action. They combined the island’s toughest endurance events into one brutal race: a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a full marathon. No breaks. No specialists. Just relentless motion.

That was the birth of the Ironman triathlon, a defining test of human capacity that marked a cultural turning point. What began as a dare became a global phenomenon, not because it demanded perfection in a single discipline, but because it required resilience across many. In it, we see the modern echo of the ancient pentathlon spirit, with the weight now shifted toward endurance. It was gruelling, it was epic, and it tapped into something primal: the desire to find one's edge.

But the evolution didn’t stop there.

In the early 2000s, CrossFit burst onto the scene with a radically different approach. Where Ironman was long and linear, CrossFit was short, sharp, and unpredictable. Its mantra—constantly varied, high-intensity, functional movement—redefined how people thought about training. Athletes weren’t preparing for a single event; they were preparing for the unknown. One day might require Olympic lifting, the next a rope climb, a handstand walk, or a trail run. The workouts were chaotic, but the message was clear: fitness meant being ready for anything.

When the CrossFit Games launched in 2007, general physical preparedness became a spectator sport. The Games crowned the “Fittest on Earth,” not by repeating standard tests, but by surprising athletes with unknown challenges. It was an audacious idea: that adaptability itself was the highest form of athleticism. CrossFit transformed training into a performance-driven experience and function into an identity. It expanded who could call themselves an athlete, and what a gym could be.

However, for many aspiring athletes, the technical demands of elite CrossFit, including Olympic lifting and advanced gymnastics, create a steep barrier to entry. The sport, once rooted in broad accessibility, was drifting toward exclusivity.

That’s when fitness racing found its next evolution. Athletes and organizers began designing fixed-format events that preserved the grit, intensity, and multidomain challenge of functional sport, but with standardized layouts, simplified movements, and repeatable outcomes. Events like Hyrox, Deka, and Deadly Dozen removed the barrier of complex technique and unpredictable programming. Barbells gave way to kettlebells. Rings were replaced with burpees. Muscle-ups became sled pushes. The goal wasn’t to dilute the challenge; it was to define it.

For the first time, athletes knew exactly what they were training for. In doing so, this new wave of fitness racing welcomed a wider spectrum of participants. Races became more trainable, comparable, and globally benchmarked. The test didn’t get easier; it got clearer. You didn’t need to master a barbell snatch or handstand walk. You just needed the willingness to move, suffer, and endure.

This marked a philosophical shift: from technical mastery to raw capacity. From competition as spectacle to challenge as shared experience. And in that shift, fitness racing came into its own.

Let’s take a closer look at the fixed-format fitness races.

The Rise of Fixed-Format Fitness Races

In 2017, Hyrox launched with a clear mission: to create a race format that tested functional fitness and could be replicated globally. The design was clean and direct: eight 1km runs, each separated by a fixed functional workout. Ski, sled push, sled pull, burpee broad jump, row, farmers carry, lunge, wall balls. Every event follows the same sequence, whether you’re in New York, London, or Berlin. Your time is your score. It’s measurable. Comparable. Trackable.

Hyrox took what CrossFit had popularized—functional movement under fatigue—and gave it structure. No guesswork. No surprises. Just a brutal, beautifully balanced sequence that almost anyone could train for. It was competitive, but also deeply accessible. You didn’t need elite gymnastics skills or world-class strength. You needed work ethic and willpower. For the first time, everyday athletes could train for fitness itself and race it.

The result? A global movement. Tens of thousands of competitors. Massive arenas packed with spectators. Personal bests alongside world records. The model worked because it gave structure to chaos and meaning to motion.

Not long after, Spartan Race, already a dominant force in obstacle course racing, introduced its own standardized format: Deka.

Where Spartan’s traditional races involved crawling through mud and conquering outdoor terrain, Deka brought the test indoors. Ten workout zones, each separated by a 500-meter run. Lunges, carries, rowing, burpees—fundamental movements, performed under pressure. The setup was scalable. The race was repeatable. And the ethos was clear: celebrate well-rounded fitness with a format that’s accessible to all.

Deka borrowed from the grit of Spartan racing and blended it with the clarity of gym-based performance. With different formats (Deka Strong, Deka Mile, Deka fit), it offered multiple entry points. Each version asked the same essential question: can you move, lift, and push through fatigue, with precision and pace?

Then came the Deadly Dozen.

Inspired by myth and built on modern principles, The Deadly Dozen challenges athletes to twelve 400m runs, each paired with a distinct physical task—12 labours like the 12 labours of Hercules, but rather than fighting the Nemean Lion or the Lernean Hydra, competitors perform fundamental movements with fundamental equipment—bodyweight, kettlebells, dumbbells, and weight plates.

What sets the Deadly Dozen apart is its commitment to simplicity and versatility. Every task is performed with basic, universally accessible equipment: bodyweight, kettlebells, dumbbells, and weight plates. No rigs, no barbells, no machines. Just raw movement. And while the original format takes place on a 400m athletics track, the running component can be swapped for machines like the rower, ski erg, or air bike, opening the door to indoor “Gym Race” variations. These adaptations retain the core challenge while making the race format possible in any gym with adequate space. Yet, the track race remains the flagship, the main event, and spiritual home of the Deadly Dozen, where the simplicity of the tools meets the purity of the oval, and the grind unfolds in full view.

By combining track running with fundamental movement patterns (hinge, squat, lunge, push, pull), The Deadly Dozen bridges the gap between gym culture and sport, offering a unique rhythm and identity. It’s not just a race; it’s an entire training ethos.

Industrius Esto

Jason Curtis