‘Shut up and squat!’ Learning body knowledge within the gym

Abstract

The aim of this article is to describe and analyse learning processes among bodybuilders in bodybuilding environments, focusing on the ways activities form the basis for incorporation of both physical and cultural knowledge. Emanating from an ethnographic study, the arguments are based on a constructionist approach to knowledge. The result provides an understanding of knowledge as being, and becoming, embodied through different learning processes. This article shows how knowledge of exercise, nutrition and physiology is gradually acquired and physically experienced, eventually becoming knowledge ‘in the body’ rather than ‘about the body’. Through these learning processes, the individual develops perceptual as well as tactile abilities that, earlier, were unexplored or bodily inaccessible.

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