CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- From Jane Fonda in the mid-1980s to "Just Do It" in the '90s, Americans were on a fitness craze. Or were they?
A University of Illinois sociologist says it never happened. "It was clearly a media concoction," says John Kelly, a professor emeritus of leisure studies and co-author of a new book, "Recreation Trends and Markets: The 21st Century" (Sagamore Publishing).
"Looking back on it now from the data that we've analyzed, to a large extent there was just a little bump. Our trend lines show exactly that: just a little bump," Kelly said. "There was allegedly also a sports boom, and the ironic thing is that the sports boom was taking place at the very time that our trend data now show there was a reduction in tennis and in a lot of team sports." The only sports boom, he noted wryly, has been in front of the tube. Kelly and co-author Rodney Warnick, a professor of recreation studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, base their conclusions on annual surveys of 15,000 to 23,000 households done between 1976 and 1996. Produced by the Simmons Market Research Bureau as a resource for media planners and advertisers, the survey data is "far and away better than anything else that's available" for getting a true picture of adult participation in various forms of recreation, according to Kelly.
The book, an update of one by Kelly published in 1987, includes statistics on more than 100 recreational activities - as varied as aerobics, casino gambling, cooking for fun, golf, listening to music, model railroads, reading books, travel, visiting museums and windsurfing.
Adult participation in most sports or fitness activities during the last two decades has held largely steady or drifted downward, Kelly said. When trends occur, they are often short-lived, and often tied to an "Olympic effect," he said. "After you get a lot of television time and promotion, you get an increase in participation, and then it goes down. It lasts, at the most, two years, and usually less than that."
Of the significant trends identified in the book, the most prominent are probably in golf, walking for exercise and gambling. The first two reflect the aging population, Kelly noted, with golf almost doubling, from 8 to 15 percent, between 1976 and 1996, and fitness walking doing the same, from 18 to 35 percent, between 1988 and 1996. Casino gambling went from 13 percent in 1979 to 28 percent in 1996.
As for reasons more people aren't "just doing it" fitness-wise, Kelly suggested that too many people may be getting the message too young that they're not good enough and drop out. "There's too much stress [in youth sports] on the competition Š rather than on participation." Also, investment dollars tend to flow toward areas of higher return or profit, "and that tends to be entertainment of various kinds," he said. "We're building Las Vegas, we are not building very many good walking paths ... to some extent, people are just responding to what's available, what's supplied."