Group fitness instructors as local level health promoters: a Foucauldian analysis of the politics of health/fitness dynamic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As fitness professionals, group fitness instructors play an important role in promoting recommended public health initiatives to various communities. While their practices are connected to public health policy, their certifications are often provided by commercially operated agencies in the North American context. The interrelationship of commercial and governmental control creates a complex environment where certain ways of understanding health and the fit body become dominant. In this paper, consequently, we were interested in what fitness knowledges informed Canadian group fitness instructors’ practices. Approaching our topic from a Foucauldian perspective, we conducted semi-structured interviews with five instructors who had a provincially governed fitness qualification. The findings revealed that two knowledges – health as illness prevention and the aesthetics of health – strongly directed the instructors’ class design despite their willingness to think, particularly about health, differently. Their certification reinforced the medical, physiological, and psychological knowledges that tend to assign health as individual responsibility, but left the social issues behind the healthy, fit body unproblematized. From a Foucauldian perspective, these dominant knowledges locked the instructors within dual control of anatomo-political and bio-political neoliberal power relations. To assist the instructors to problematize the control mechanism behind the dominant knowledge structure, we call for inclusion of broader knowledge base in their certification training through which serving the multiple needs of their various clientele can be constructively negotiated.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".