PIONEER: someone who helps to open up a new line of research or technology or art, groundbreaker, innovator, trailblazer, conceiver, mastermind, originator; someone who creates new things. —Definition by The Free Dictionary
BONNIE WAS A best-selling author, teacher, educator, the first woman to have a National Ski Patrol badge, the top woman climber in the world in the late 40s and early 50s, TV personality… and much more.
And lucky for us, Bonnie was blessed with acute observation skills, curiosity, and solutions. “It never makes sense to complain much about conditions unless you’ve put your mind to devising ways to change them,” she said.
Here we will focus on Bonnie, The Fitness Pioneer. According to Jonathan Black in his book, Making the American Body, “Few people, men or women, ever equaled the contributions she made to fitness.”
Danielle Friedman’s new book, Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World, devotes the first chapter to Bonnie. “Our story begins in the fifties, when the first real women’s fitness celebrity, Bonnie Prudden, pitched exercise as a novel solution for housewives who felt trapped in their homes and struggled to find purpose outside their roles as wives and mothers.”
It all started in 1947 when her curiosity took her to her oldest daughter’s gym class only to observe that it would do little to contribute to her daughter’s fitness. Bonnie’s solution was to start her own “conditioning” classes with the neighborhood children based on her own early training in various dance forms, gymnastics, German Turnverein and Alveny School.
Her little class grew and grew, and when 100 new students joined she borrowed the Kraus-Weber Test from her friend and climbing partner, Dr. Hans Kraus. This tested the minimum strength and flexibility of key posture muscles, the ones you use to carry yourself around on a daily basis. Everyone should be able to pass it. What she found was that 58% of the newly enrolled students failed, and only 7% of the original classes of students failed.
Her subsequent groundbreaking research of over 5,000 children ages 6 to 16 from all over the world revealed that American children were the weakest and least flexible. In numerous medical papers, Bonnie and Hans described their findings. They labeled the medical implications or the role of inactivity in the production of disease (obesity, diabetes, muscle tension, heart disease, high blood pressure, low back pain) Hypokenetic Disease. On a July day in 1955, at the request of President Eisenhower, they presented their findings at a White House summit. It became known as The Report that Shocked the President, making headline news throughout the country — and it propelled Bonnie into the national spotlight.
In 1954 she bought an old school house, gutted it, and created the Institute for Physical Fitness complete with gyms, dance studios, massage rooms, a Finnish sauna, snack bar, office, and an outdoor obstacle course that incorporated the first climbing wall.
Imagine… a gym when there were very few, owned and operated by a woman where men, women, and children were welcomed. Bonnie’s program of exercise — always done to music — adapted to all age groups and abilities from pre-natal and infant exercise through nursing home and special needs. NO ONE was left out.
She designed the first fitness fashions as shown on the cover of Sports Illustrated August 1957. They were comfortable, revealed bulges and curves, and allowed movement with ease.
First you have to “take stock” and then realize that “No matter what condition you are in at this moment, you can make it better.” Inside the August 7th edition she demonstrated four floor exercises, the first in a pictorial column that would run in more than forty issues of the magazine. Along with the four exercises was a pullout chart for women asking them to check their measurements and a two-page fashion spread, debuting Bonnie’s own designs for the entire family.
In 1956 she wrote the first book on exercise — Is Your Child Really Fit? — and followed it over the years with eight more about exercise, including a talking book for the blind. She wrote the first chapter on Sexercise, but she did it with style and purpose. It appeared in her book How to Keep Slender and Fit After Thirty in 1962, and also within 
the pages of Eros. She demonstrated the exercises on a late night Johnny Carson Show. And she wondered: ”What shocks me is that it is necessary for me to be a pioneer in writing this chapter.” The pelvic tilts, she noted, are the same ones you would teach to a beginning skier or dancer, so why should “the air be rent with shrieks of protest?”
After leaving The Today Show with Dave Garraway where she had a weekly spot (they were advertising a fraudulent and dangerous diet pill in front of her name and she would have nothing to do with it), she made 65 black and white TV shows for syndication in 1963, and in 1967 she made 135 more in color. The 30-minute Bonnie Prudden Show consisted of an exercise segment, an interview, and a mailbag.
It wasn’t just an exercise show.
Bonnie talked about lots of serious topics: death, suicide, executive fitness, sex, blindness, veterans, heart attacks, and depression. These were topics that no one else was addressing but the country was experiencing. Click here to watch one of her shows, The 51st State!
Over the years she cut six exercise albums… invented numerous pieces of equipment for home, playgrounds, schools and pools… introduced the first mom/baby gym and swim programs… and developed programs for camps, Ys, schools, executives, social clubs, hospitals, mental institutions, prisons, insurance companies, factories, special needs, nursing homes, and many more. She gave lecture/demonstrations to every group imaginable throughout the country.
A veteran of thousands of workshops, Bonnie spent decades convincing people that they are capable of controlling much, much more of their physical destiny than they ever believed possible. Today’s exercisers with their running shoes and their aerobic dance, their exercise machines and their emphasis on health and well-being, can trace their beginnings to Bonnie’s determination to wake America up: to get it moving, walking, running, pushing up, sitting up, and lightening up.
Her energy and indescribable “it” has compelled everyone from presidents to kids to just plain every day folks to Keep Fit, Be Happy.
——————————————————–
If you have questions or need help, email me at enid@bonnieprudden.com.
For more information about Bonnie Prudden®, Bonnie Prudden Myotherapy®, workshops, books, self-help tools, DVDs, educational videos, and blogs, visit www.bonnieprudden.com. Or call 520-299-8064 if you have questions or need help. Enid Whittaker, Managing Director, Bonnie Prudden Myotherapy®