Our generation was not the first to experience “fitness fads” — the almost-weekly shifts in healthy vs. unhealthy dieting, the juice cleanses, the body-fat-burning influencer of the year — and we’re not likely to be the last.
Growing up, I had a complicated relationship with my own self-image and my relationship to fitness. Once I got to where I find myself now — knowing that health has nothing to do with the way you look, and a lot more to do with how you feel — I still had absolutely no idea where to start. Our generation is used to seeing some kind of fitness gym — all with a different philosophy and focus — on just about every street corner. We have access to more information on every definition of health than we’ve ever had before, and it can feel overwhelming to know what to try.
But social media apps, which are designed to feel intuitive, do at least make fitness feel slightly easier to tackle.
That ease is something that could be easily glossed over, but it shouldn’t be. Health — physical, mental, emotional — and its attainment with professional help is something that has constantly been the subject of gatekeeping, usually by affluent, white communities. “Most elite gyms and boutique studios are not in black communities because the economics of our communities do not meet the revenue criteria,” writes Black Pilates instructor Sonja Herbert. “This is an example of what I would call fitness redlining.” Popularized, mainstream fitness — the kind that finds viral factions of support, like Soul Cycle or Orange Theory — are overwhelmingly white both in their instructors and clienteles, which are rarely placed in low-income communities or communities of color. Physical and mental health practices have and often are co-opted for white economic advancement — the resounding image of yoga, and yoga instructors, today is that of the white western world rather than the spiritual practice in India that the practice originated in. And none of that even begins to discuss the fat-phobic and ableist origins, rhetoric, and practices of the fitness industry as we know it today.
So if you don’t have $100 to shell out for a week’s worth of classes, or don’t feel included in the mainstream fitness space, the privacy and variety made accessible via fitness apps or broader social media is an immediate blessing. Viewers have to navigate each individual platform themselves, but once they get the hang of it, they have overwhelming access to free resources for a limitless amount of body types, durations, skill and endurance levels, and time constraints.
Take Nike’s Training fitness app and its approach to strength-building, for example. You can target your workout based on what your body feels like on that day or what you feel like you want to work on specifically. It filters workouts by time, whether you’re in a gym or at home, and what your self-described fitness level is. The instructors, notably — at least from personal experience — walk you through everything without the same sense of pressure or urgency that in-person instructors offer in the name of “challenging you.”
Youtube Yoga has been my personal pandemic favorite. Finding the right yoga channel for you can be tricky due to saturation of the content on the media platform, but Youtube series and channels specifically for the practice basically eliminate the need to pay for guidance from an instructor. Youtube also expands the accessibility and inclusion of BIPOC voices in the yoga space, particularly women of color. Jessamyn Stanley, for example, instills an acknowledgment of the unrealistic expectations many people have for yoga and focuses on Gentle Flow, which is essentially a form of yoga that prioritizes being kind to the mental and physical wherewithal of the practitioner on any given day.
Black Girl Workouts is an entire channel dedicated to creating fitness content for Black women, by Black women. In these Yoga instructors’ videos — and others throughout Youtube’s platform — accessibility in fitness can be easily found with a quick google search. The same can be said for the differently-abled community. A simple Youtube search — “yoga for differently abled” — turns up walk-throughs and yoga sequences of various durations for those who use wheelchairs, those who experience chronic pain, cerebral palsy, etc. There’s this immediate access to inclusion and acceptance by a community, for a community, that isn’t found in in-person yoga classrooms.
Influencers and instructors who constantly emphasize the fat or calorie or weight-burning qualities of their routines are a big personal red flag of mine, and they’re admittedly everywhere on TikTok. But I’m going to throw the app in here anyway, because TikTok did manage to make working out somewhat enjoyable in the middle of a pandemic. The Drip Workout Challenge is a more infamous example, but TikTok is full of sequences similar to that phenomena, where people who resemble you — at least in the sense that they aren’t literal celebrities trying to convince you their plastic surgery is attainable — walk you through their workout routine step by step in a way that is largely replicable, if not quite as susceptible to an inclusive search as Youtube.
All of this is to say that modern social media platforms as we know them have democratized fitness in a way we’ve never seen before. TikTok, Youtube, Nike Training and other fitness apps disseminate so much diversified information that it creates a more inclusive image of fitness. I can find someone just like me instructing in a way that isn’t daunting or inaccessible given my limitations and strengths, and so can you. That is simply not a fact that held true in the 80’s or 90’s. Of course, social media has also created serious drawbacks in the fitness industry (and I’ll get to those 😉) but social media has provided an avenue for more people to see “fitness” as an attainable practice. This is because social media amplifies their own community’s relationship to fitness rather than whatever happens to be trendiest that year.
Love all of the examples you brought up! Will definitely be checking out the Black YouTubers you featured!