What is a work-out?

In yoga teacher training, we recently got distracted by the term "workout." I decided to follow-up with a quick gander at the Oxford English Dictionary (I have the compact version, with 9 original pages micrographically printed on each page). However, a trip to the OED is never quick for me. Instead of writing a short email with a cute explanation to the interested party from teacher training, I wrote the rambling text you see below. Hopefully I've quoted the OED in a way that doesn't violate the spirit of copyright law.

With respect to the origins of the term "work-out", here's what I could deduce. The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed) has "work-out" as follows: A boxing bout for practice; more widely, an exercise session, practice, or test.". It has quotes from 1909 onward, with the early quotes all related to boxing:

• 1909, R. A. Wason in _Happy_Hawkins_: "I expect to give it a fair good work-out before I'm through with it."
• 1923, H. C. Witwer in _Fighting_Blood_: "I aint going to get no gym workout"
• 1927, Daily Express on 27 May: "Either in a workout or in an actual contest."

but a quote from a decade later has a clearly non-boxing context, where the subject is not a boxer, and the event is not clearly a "practice."

• 1938, M. K. Rawlings in _Yearling_: "'Will we take both dogs?' 'Nobody but old Julia. She ain't had a work-out since she was hurt. A slow hunt'll do her good.'"

The definition for "work-out" points to a subsection of the 38th definition for "work". The definition for "work" is broken into 39 meanings covering 13 pages. Definition group 38 is for "work out", and it is broken into 3 sub-categories. The third category has the relevant definition: "To box for practice, as distinguished from engaging in a set contest. Also gen. to practise, take exercise, rehearse." There's a few quotes from 1927 through the present, with a quote related to dancing in 1929, and a quote using the general sense (beyond boxing) in 1948 from Gore Vidal's The_City_And_The_Pillar_: "Jim worked out in the YMCA."

More interesting to me were other definitions in group 38. Here are entries from the first two sub-categories:

sub-category 1:

• a) "To bring, fetch, or get out by some process or course of action; to get rid of, or effect a riddance of; to expel, deliver, efface, etc." (quotes from 1595)
• d) "To wear out, esp. by labour, or by continued application of force (obsolete or rare)" (quotes from 1611)

sub-category 2:

• f) "To bring about, effect, produce, or procure (a result) by labour or effort; to carry out, accomplish (a plan or purpose)" (extra def from Shakespeare in 1597: to persevere until the end) (quotes from 1534)
• j) "To bring to a fuller or finished state; to produce or express in a complete form or in detail; to develop, elaborate." (quotes from 1821)
• k) "To study or investigate completely; to work through (obsolete or rare)" (quote from 1830)

Having copied these definitions carefully, a process which encourages me to think more carefully, I would venture that the use in boxing might have originated from uses like sub-category 2, j and k. That is, a boxer would work out his moves, or his plan for a fight. This "strategic" sense of "work out" would make more sense if boxing practice was less athletic (compared to modern "working out") in the early part of the century. From there, I can easily imagine loose usage of "working out" a plan in boxing leading to generalized "practice" exercise in a gym (as opposed a "soccer practice", which we don't usually call "working out").

It is fun to pick and choose definitions we might like for yoga, versus aerobics and other gym workouts. For instance, the catharsis of 38a is nice for all exercise, but I prefer to leave 38d to exhausting oneself through jumping rope and such. 38f and j might mean chiseling your abs on a machine, or might be self-transformation in yoga. 38k sounds much more like yoga than like aerobics -- though I suppose "total body workouts" might claim membership for 38k. My hypothesized pugilist use fits nicely with the idea of yoga, where asana is part of learning and practicing focus and awareness for life in general. Of course, such picking-and-choosing is probably hard to support academically, and is more of a mirror of my yoga-biases than of real meanings.