La actividad física en España ante la dialéctica modernidad-posmodernidad: El caso de los centros fitness

This article joins the debate on the change experienced by advanced Western societies, approached through the perspective of sports practice and physical activity in Spain. Based on recent data on Spanish sports practice and studies on fitness centres, this essay suggests that physical activity in this scenario reflects social change according to Fredric Jameson’s relational perspective between postmodernism and capitalism. On the one hand, some indicators point out physical activities at fitness centers as emerging and culturally different from modern sports practice; on the other hand, other indicators show more radical forms of modern practice. Therefore, the argument upheld in this essay is that the new sport system put forward by fitness centres is an expression of the new postmodern cultural turn under economic capitalist forms still in use, and thus it reflects tensions between perception of autonomy, freedom and subjectivity of individual action and rationalization, social control, and mercantilization.