Let's Get Physical Quotes

“Jazzercise, meanwhile, continued to grow throughout the eighties, and Judi’s star continued to rise. After Jazzercisers danced for a TV audience of millions at the Los Angeles Olympics, they were invited to perform at the 1986 rededication of the Statue of Liberty, a $6 million extravaganza held at Giants Stadium. That same year, President Ronald Reagan honored Judi as one of the country’s “top woman entrepreneurs,” and she would go on to receive an inaugural lifetime achievement award from the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports alongside honorees including Bonnie Prudden, Jack LaLanne, and Dr. Ken Cooper.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Gilda and Bob incorporated as Flexatard, Inc., and before long, women in aerobics classes across the country would be wearing her garments. (Those colorful leotards Judi Sheppard Missett wore in her Let’s Jazzercise video? Flexatards!)”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Despite Bonnie Prudden’s efforts with Capezio to revamp leotards for the masses in the fifties, they hadn’t changed that much since their introduction by French acrobat Jules Léotard in the nineteenth century. Léotard’s initial claim to fame was inventing the flying trapeze—he’s the “daring young man” of the famous song. He wore the stretchy suit to “fly through the air with the greatest of ease,” and in time, dancers embraced it, too. By the 1930s, leotards dyed pink or black were dancers’ rehearsal wear of choice.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“While researching this book, I interviewed aerobics instructors across the country who began teaching as young women and are now in their seventies and older, and most described the workout as a revelation. Jean Buchanan, now in her late eighties, started taking Jacki Sorensen’s Aerobic Dancing when she was forty-four. Growing up, she had been taught, like many women of her generation, that vigorous exercise would make a woman’s uterus “drop.” After she lost her son to cancer, however, she signed up for Jacki’s classes in her then-hometown of Austin, Texas, to cope with her grief, as well as to lose the weight she had gained from stress. Through aerobics, “I became a different person,” she told me. “A stronger, more confident person.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Eventually, aerobics became a catchall term for these dance-based cardiovascular workouts.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Most notably, a former University of California–Berkeley pom-pom girl named Jacki Sorensen had introduced America to the term aerobic dancing in 1969—the same year Judi created Jazzercise—and launched a booming fitness business that offered classes from coast to coast. Other aerobics entrepreneurs built on what Judi, Jacki, and earlier fitness pioneers had started. Judi and Jacki Sorensen were “pilot fish at the nose end of a large school of women,” writes Daniel Kunitz in Lift: Fitness Culture, from Naked Greeks and Acrobats to Jazzercise and Ninja Warriors, and throughout the seventies, aerobic dance spread “on tendrils sent out by these women.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Judi pulled it off and was able to offer instructors an unprecedented deal. To become franchisees, instructors had to pay a mere $500 for training. From there, they were required to give the company 20 percent of their monthly gross income minus rent.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Military families would become instrumental in spreading aerobics across the country and then around the world.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“(Judi’s vocal cord ordeal would also lead to a fitness first: She and her instructors would begin teaching with microphones. In the period before wireless mikes were invented, this was a clunky practice—instructors found themselves tripping over cords during class. It wasn’t until the nineties, when wireless headset mikes became available thanks to technology developed by NASA, that the practice began to feel effortless.)”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“She hesitantly trained five of her most experienced and enthusiastic students to become instructors. It turned out Jazzercise as a fitness program could stand on its own.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Judi’s program initially grew through word of mouth—and it grew fast. Within a year, Judi was teaching in recreation centers and YMCAs all across the county. For publicity, she would recruit students to dance with her at local malls and fairs, farmers’ markets, and beach band shells. When prospective students told her they’d love to enroll but they had no one to watch their kids, she began offering babysitting services—her sister-in-law volunteered to do the sitting for a small fee. The two women would load up the back seat of Judi’s yellow Honda hatchback with toys and crayons, hop in, and take to the highway.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Made for just $3.5 million, the film brought in more than $237 million worldwide. Its soundtrack, which was mostly written and performed by the Bee Gees, was the bestselling soundtrack of all time until 1992, when it was surpassed by Whitney Houston’s The Bodyguard. Then”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“The seventies were becoming a decade defined by dance. The era saw the rise of discos, which offered a respite from the nation’s social and political turmoil and whose lifeblood was the pulsing, euphoric music that kept clubgoers on the dance floor until the wee hours. (That, and cocaine.)”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“It’s as if your brain can’t hear music without recruiting the rest of the body.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Kelly McGonigal, a Stanford University psychologist and longtime cardio dance instructor, in her book The Joy of Movement: How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage. “For most people, the impulse to synchronize our bodies to a beat is so strong, it takes effort to suppress it.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Since ancient times, humans around the world have recognized the power of music to move not only the body but also the soul, incorporating it into both sacred and social rituals. European fitness pioneers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries attempted to harness this power to encourage exercise, specifically, by teaching their “gymnastics” programs to up-tempo beats. One nineteenth-century fitness enthusiast observed, “I believe five times as much muscle can be coaxed out, under this delightful stimulus, as without it.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“She had one of Bonnie Prudden’s Keep Fit / Be Happy records lying around somewhere. But while she was new to the nascent fitness industry, her program, she would later learn, was building on a centuries-old tradition of exercising to music and reinventing it for the modern woman.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“After the last song ended, the room broke out in spontaneous applause, “for me and for themselves,” Judi wrote. “Without the mirror, they’d engaged the theater of their minds, seeing themselves as active participants in a theatrical performance, rather than passive, non-dancing audience members.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“For music, she chose Top 40 hits by popular groups like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Neil Diamond. There was no choreography—she told her students to simply follow her lead as she led them through very basic steps. Let me be your mirror, she said. Once the class started, she shouted a constant stream of Looking good, ladies!”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“As Judi thought about their responses, a lightbulb went off. Why not teach a dance class for regular women focused less on technique and more on sweat? A class that approached dance not as art per se, but as exercise and fun? Judi ran her idea by Gus. He gave her the go-ahead, “so long as it occurred downstairs in the rarely used back studio.” She posted flyers advertising a new adult class called Jazz Dance for Fun and Fitness. And she personally appealed to her dropouts to come back and give her another chance.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“The class, they told her, just wasn’t fun. It was too hard. It was demoralizing. “I hated seeing all the things I couldn’t do in the mirror,” one woman told her. “I’ll never be on Broadway,” another said. “I just want to look good for my high school reunion this fall.” She heard the same refrain over and over: The women didn’t want to be professional dancers, they just wanted to look like them.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“In the summer of 1969, Gus asked Judi if she would be interested in leading a new Saturday-morning class called Jazz Dance for Adult Beginners. Most of the women who had signed up were moms of girls already taking classes at the studio. “They were there anyway—knitting, reading, sitting around waiting for their kids,” she wrote. “Why not dance a little themselves?” Judi agreed. She carefully selected music and choreographed simple jazz routines. At first her students were excited to learn. But after a few weeks, she saw a depressing 90 percent dropout rate. What had she done wrong? She sincerely wanted to find out, so she began calling her dropouts and asking for answers.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Gus believed that, unlike more traditional forms of dance, jazz “emanates from the soul, the emotional and physical core of our being.” His performances were sleek and fluid and sexy. “Gus’s style was challenging, precise, and full of pent-up passion,” Judi later recalled in her 2019 book, Building a Business with a Beat: Leadership Lessons from Jazzercise—An Empire Built on Passion, Purpose, and Heart.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“She’d set her sights on the school when she discovered it shared a hometown with the esteemed Gus Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago—the first studio in America dedicated exclusively to jazz dance (her favorite), run by its “godfather.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“In 1969, Judi Sheppard Missett began teaching adult dance classes for fun and fitness, ushering in a new chapter in exercise, and feminist, history.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“My mom accompanied Jan to class, and she was hooked. She loved the music, the energy, the adult company; she also began to look forward to the endorphin high. She and my dad had met at a disco in the late seventies, and now that she was again dressed in Lycra and losing herself in the beat, aerobics didn’t feel that far off from her former nightlife, minus the cigarettes and vodka.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“By the early 1990s, nearly 30 million American women participated in aerobics, making it the country’s most popular fitness activity after walking. My mom discovered aerobics in the early 1980s, when I was a toddler. She had never exercised in any formal way until then. But when Jan, a neighbor friend, mentioned she was checking out a dance exercise class at a nearby shopping mall in our Atlanta suburb, my mom was intrigued. Her”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“This belief lured waves of women who had never exercised before through the doors of studios and community centers to try aerobic dancing—which involved at least thirty minutes of vigorous movement to music—for the first time. Dancing felt safe, particularly for women uninterested in smashing any gender barriers. Dancing was conventionally feminine; dance classes were a popular activity for little girls. Few men felt threatened by a room full of mostly middle-class moms shimmying to Tina Turner.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“But in the years after Cooper convinced more Americans to make exercise a regular part of their lives, women discovered that dancing—when done regularly, vigorously, aerobically—made them feel happy. It made them feel strong. Americans of a certain age had grown up believing that for exercise to count, it had to feel like work—regardless of how many times Bonnie Prudden told them keeping fit can be fun! Dancing? That was something you did at a party. Dancing was pleasure and play.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Freedom means different things to different women. In the late seventies, while thousands were lacing up jogging shoes, others were slipping into a leotard for the first time since girlhood—and slipping out of the house to dance to Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” until their spandex was soaked with sweat. Freedom, for them, was aerobic dancing.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World