Charming and idiosyncratic... a distinctive, often moving blend of historical and memoirist writing.

The New Yorker

An enthusiasm it's impossible not to share...Erudite, ludic, eccentric, energetic and historically transporting, it's like falling through a gym and landing in a joust.

The Guardian

At its best, Hayes' book reframes exercise as a deep series of questions thinkers and scientists have been contemplating for thousands of years. . . . it's a thrill to see them gathered in one place.

GQ.com

I was riveted by Sweat and its extraordinary tale of the ups and downs of exercise over millennia. Who knew?

Jane Fonda

If there is one person in the modern world who can reinvigorate Mercuriale's enormous unfinished labor and bridge the physical, the philosophical, and the poetic - bridge Whitman and Warhol, Plato and Peloton, Kafka and Curie, Tennessee Williams and Serena Williams; bridge the 'immediate bodily now' of exercise with 'the wisdom of the past that had faded from living memory' - it is Bill Hayes. And so he does, in Sweat.

Maria Popova, The Marginalian

Bill Hayes' peripatetic inquiry into the history of exercise is a delight for anyone who loves a good search for a missing manuscript, as well as anyone who loves being 'so drenched in sweat as to feel amphibious.' And if those predilections happen to overlap for you, hang onto your Bosu ball-you're in for a treat. Hayes weaves his riveting findings in the archives with a revelatory memoir of physical exertion that begins to answer that most human of questions: what does the body mean?

Alison Bechdel