Danielle Friedman's Let's Get Physical chronicles the untold history of American women's exercise culture, from the first female joggers to the Jazzercise craze to Jane Fonda's workout empire. Friedman, a journalist who has written about wellness and women's health, shows how physical fitness became a contested terrain where women fought for autonomy over their bodies. She profiles pioneers including Bonnie Prudden, who demonstrated that American children were dangerously unfit; Lotte Berk, whose ballet-based workouts became Barre; and Judi Sheppard Missett, who turned dance into Jazzercise. The book is honest about the contradictions of fitness culture, which has offered women strength and community while also enforcing narrow beauty standards and commercializing insecurity. Friedman traces how the goals of exercise shifted from weight loss to wellness to empowerment, and how each era's fitness trends reflected broader cultural anxieties. She's particularly good on the 1970s moment when jogging represented freedom for women who had been discouraged from vigorous exercise, and on how aerobics became associated with feminism before being dismissed as frivolous. Let's Get Physical is social history at its best, using the story of exercise to illuminate larger questions about women's bodies, labor, and liberation. Readers will come away understanding both how far women have come and how much fitness culture still reflects ambivalence about female power.