Just in time for the work-out boom in the new year, Megan Garber remembers Dr. Jonas Gustav Wilhelm Zander, "the Swedish physician and orthopedist and all-around genius who invented the exercise machine":

Though Dr. Zander wasn't alone in realizing the market for machines that would aid in exercise -- and though exercise equipment as a more general thing has been around since long before the Greeks and their gymnasia -- it was Dr. Zander who popularized the connections between physical exertions and overall well-being. He was the one who looked at a horse and realized it could be replicated for purposes of recreation. He was the one who looked at a bicycle and realized it could be used for more than transportation.

And his inventions signaled a change in how we view exercise - as an elite past time: 

Zander pitched his machines, the writer Carolyn de la Pena notes, as "a preventative against the evils engendered by a sedentary life and the seclusion of the office." And he pitched them as well, implicitly and explicitly, as luxury experiences -- experiences that were expensive, and rarified, and therefore available only to society's elites. Mechanized workouts enforced, for the first time, a separation between exercise and labor: They posited physical activity as something to be engaged in not by economic necessity, but by personal choice. 

On a related note, Denise Winterman ranks history's weirdest fad diets. First up, Fletcherism - the promotion of extensive chewing by Horace Fletcher at the turn of the 20th century: