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Exercise

What It Takes to Get an Olympic Body Slideshow

Exercise Overview

Exercise isn't a new idea. Records of people exercising go back to 1100 B.C., when the Greeks competed in the javelin throw, distance running, archery, and boxing. Hippocrates (460 B.C.-377 B.C.), the father of medicine, wrote that "eating alone will not keep a man well; he must also take exercise." Milo of Croton, in 6 B.C., discovered the Principle of Progressive Overload, in which he carried a calf every day on his shoulders and as it grew into a bull and got heavier, he got stronger (just like adding heavier dumbbells).

Skip ahead a thousand years to 1844, when the YMCA was founded and people started to do more formal exercise. Then, in 1896, the first modern Olympic games began, and by the early 1900s, gymnastics was mandatory for all American school children. In the late 1950s, things really picked up; Jack LaLanne had an exercise show on TV and the President's Council on Physical Fitness was created; the 1960s and '70s produced Jackie Sorensen and Jane Fonda exercise videos, Nautilus gyms, Ken Cooper coining the word "aerobics," and the running phenomenon started by George Sheehan, Jim Fixx, and others; and now today we have limitless types of exercise classes, technology built into every cardio machine, and all sorts of contraptions for building muscles. In this article, we'll take a more in-depth look at what exercise is all about.