ABSTRACT
In addition to the culturally specific site of the health club, and the fitness media’s lessons in the practices and rewards of the fitness lifestyle, the fitness field is further consolidated by the emergence of a “cadre of experienced producers” (Ferguson 1998: 603): personal trainers, who serve as instructors, motivators and status symbols for their clients. These elements – place, media, consumer, producer – converge in the entrenchment of the definition and function of fitness as commercial leisure, and as a consumer lifestyle that requires particular products and services. As the frontline service workers of the fitness field (Smith Maguire 2001), personal trainers are key figures in both the production of fitness services, and the promotion and consumption of the fitness field more broadly. Through the occupation of personal training, the practices of the fitness field are institutionalized as the specialized skills and knowledge of a select corps of experts. Furthermore, the personal trainer embodies the ethos of the fitness field; the body’s status as a site of investment, a form of capital, and an expression of self is nowhere better illustrated than in the figure of the personal trainer.
