Feel the burn: Jane Fonda’s 1980s workout aerobics is back on trend, and it boosts your brain and body

Jane Fonda was the queen of aerobics in the 1980s, and her workout is said to have kick-started the women’s fitness industry

Now the original workout is back, and a recent study shows it improves your mental faculties as well as your fitness

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Jane Fonda’s classic 1980s workout, aerobics is back, and not only is it good for your fitness, it also gives your mood and brain a boost. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 8:15pm, 1 Nov 2020Updated: 8:15pm, 1 Nov 2020

Forty years ago, Jane Fonda was the undisputed queen of aerobics, selling millions of copies of her 1982 exercise video Jane Fonda’s Workout.

The former model and actress, who was 45 at the time, had long kept fit with ballet, but after injuring her foot, she turned to a new exercise routine called aerobics. She loved it so much that she turned it into a business, opening an exercise studio in Beverly Hills in 1979 and releasing Jane Fonda’s Workout Book, which became a New York Times bestseller, in 1981.

After her exercise video hit the market, the home workout video industry in the United States boomed, and women all over the world were inspired to get into shape. In a 2014 interview with Elle Australia magazine, Fonda claimed that her business launched the women’s fitness industry in the US because up until then, only men went to gyms and exercised with weights.

“Women didn’t work out,” she said. “(They) weren’t meant to have muscles, and they weren’t meant to sweat, and I kind of changed that.”

Fitness icon Jane Fonda, 82, shows off her toned physique during her TikTok debut. Photo: TikTok

Fonda, who will be 83 in December, is as toned and flexible as she was nearly four decades ago. This April, the fitness icon made her TikTok debut, reviving her signature leg lifts on the social media platform and inviting her followers to work out with her to help bring attention to the climate change crisis.