Given that my job mostly involves sitting at a desk, I have to devote particular effort to getting exercise if I want to be in good health.

This is not a modern phenomenon, but it is something of an elite one. If your day involves heavy physical labor in the fields or a factory, if you’re a laundress or a dyer hauling around sopping masses of fabric on the regular, if you’re a warehouse worker or grocery store stocker constantly lifting boxes, why on earth would you want to spend some of your precious non-working time doing yet more physical activity? Even if something like strengthening auxiliary muscles or stretching would benefit you, odds are low that you’re spending much time on that. When your workday ends, you want to rest.

But the more leisured classes throughout history have often understood that getting exercise improves health, and they’ve had the time, money, and energy to devote toward that goal. Depending on where you look, they’ve also linked it to spiritual development (Indian yoga) or character-building (Muscular Christianity). So what did such people do to stay fit?

Unsurprisingly, a whole swath of historical exercise looks a lot like war training. Warriors and soldiers prior to the gunpowder era often practiced with heavier versions of their usual weapons, whether those are swords, maces, spears, staves, or otherwise. Archery has likewise occupied a frequent niche, as have wrestling and boxing, even if men rarely expected to be fighting bare-handed in the field.

This extends not only to fighting, but to other things you might need to do during a battle. Climbing, for example: up a pole, up a rope, up the underside of a ladder, even running up a wall to grab the top like a modern parkour athlete. Throwing things: not just javelins but any heavy object, like a stone, a discus, or a pole (most famously in the form of Scottish caber tossing, but they’re not the only ones to do it). Riding — and not just riding, but also vaulting onto a horse (real or wooden), as if you are mounting on the run.

And, of course, the perennial classic: lifting heavy things! Often this was just stones, but purpose-built weights like the Greek halteres or Indian clubs go back a fair way. (Kettlebells are much more recent, coming from Russian weights used for crops, and then repurposed by performing strongmen.) Exactly what form the lifting has generally taken, though, is unclear to me. Deadlift? Bench press? Squat? I’m leery of assuming people have always done the same modes we do now; odds are pretty good it was more generally “pick this thing up and then maybe walk with it before putting it down,” rather than the strictly regulated movements of a modern gym.

Many historical exercises required little to no equipment. Running, skipping, jumping, swimming, dancing . . . if it moves your body and gets your heart rate up, it’s probably been used as exercise. (Unless you’re doing it in bed. Though that’s been considered exercise, too.) Calisthenics such as push-ups, which use the body’s own weight to provide resistance, are easy to incorporate into an exercise regimen, though I’ve seen indications that chin-ups might be a more modern phenomenon. Possibly this is true when they’re viewed as their own, separate movement, as opposed to the final stage of something like that wall-running exercise mentioned above. Then off in India, yoga of course has a centuries-long history — though we should bear in mind that modern yoga-as-exercise is significantly different from the historical tradition, which goes well beyond bodily fitness.

Some kinds of acrobatics seem to be fairly ancient, though it’s difficult to be sure exactly what forms people practiced. Tumbling in the basic sense — somersaults of various kinds — is another of those things that can double as a war skill, so it seems to have been common. Other movements, like bridges or handstands, are done more for their own sake, to build flexibility, strength, and balance. I haven’t been able to find out whether more advanced skills like handsprings or flips featured in exercise routines; certainly they would be practiced by actual acrobats, but I personally doubt the average person was doing them just for fitness.

Naturally, we don’t always stick to just one thing at a time. If running is good, and jumping is good, why not combine them? Now you have invented hurdles! The leisured classes most likely to engage in these activities were also not above doing elective grunt labor for the sake of fitness; ancient Greek boxers apparently thought digging was great exercise, and others have chopped wood.

Exercise also bleeds over into the broader category of sport. Any kind of physical game provides a workout; the distinction is merely whether you happen to be getting that workout because you wanted to play a game, or whether you’re play the game in order to improve your fitness. There’s no particular point in trying to separate those two — it only matters for how you present someone deciding to engage in that activity.

Though exercise has frequently been a male-dominated pastime, it’s not wholly so. Women’s health also benefits from fitness . . . but it’s true that people have often worried that too much of it might harm us, or more specifically, our fertility. A fear that is not entirely unfounded; elite female athletes do tend to experience amenorrhea, the absence of a period. But you have to train pretty hard to get that far, and the notion that your uterus might fall straight out of your body if you run a marathon has more to do with sexist assumptions and bad biology than any practical truth. (How else would all those peasant women doing heavy labor manage to have kids?)

Because of these fears, women’s exercise has tended to be lighter: walking, running (at shorter distances than men), and riding are very common. During the Victorian era, activities like archery, cycling, and rowing got added to the approved list. Calisthenics for women were much more of an innovation in that era, promoted by reformers, with much backlash and fear of what the consequences might be.

While exercise can be done in many places, then as now, we like to make it as social activity. The term “gymnasium” comes to us from the Greek institutions where men and boys would work out — naked, as the root of that word indicates — which also doubled as schools more generally. The Romans liked to pair a gym with a bath complex, so they could warm up their muscles and clean themselves off afterward. Over in India, the spiritual aspect of yoga could mean its physical practices were carried out in suitable locations like temples . . . or conversely in the wilderness, as part of a broader ascetic life. European gentlemen of the last few centuries might have rooms for boxing or fencing, or even private swimming pools, as part of their elite clubs. And, of course, where exercise is used to keep soldiers fit in peacetime, you’ll find facilities incorporated into military barracks.

Public gyms for general use, though, seem to be a phenomenon of the nineteenth century onward. And that makes sense: as industrialization and mechanized transport vastly increased the amount of time we spend sitting, as more children went to school and spent their days at desks, we started having to carve out dedicated spaces and times for working our bodies. We put more emphasis on physical education in childhood, and adults started thinking more about the need to move.

Which is my cue to stop typing and go downstairs to work out in my den. I have a goal of being strong enough for a pull-up by the end of the summer, and I want to hit that mark!