PIMP MY BODY
Fitness instructors flock online to pump you up
It was a little after noon in March, and Naomi Campbell was working out in her living room in New York City.
Disco music on blast, she crushed a set of squats, guided by her personal trainer, Joe Holder, who had tailored the 40-minute workout. As she started a gruelling set of flutter kicks, Campbell stopped and glared at her trainer.
“Oh my God,” she said. He couldn’t help laughing.
Holder was not in the room, however. He was monitoring her on camera as she cycled through the circuit. Thousands of other people on Instagram Live were watching, too — and participating — in what is usually a private workout between the supermodel and her trainer.
During the coronavirus lockdown, free fitness workouts, many of them delightfully low-tech, are multiplying on social media platforms. They are being delivered by trainers and yogis and retired athletes. Holder calls these people the “player-coaches for the real world”.
While he and Campbell were doing their workout, two big-bearded trainers in Los Angeles were leading their clients through a similar session, as was an Olympic hopeful in the triple jump. An Ironman triathlete in Malibu led a flow yoga class. Those are just a few of the sessions available on social media each week.
Facebook Live also has thousands of options. Nike has made its premium content free through mid-June, and actor Chris Hemsworth recently made his Centr app free for six weeks. As a result, views of workouts, articles and recipes have nearly quadrupled.
Even lesser-known trainers and studios are going live and finding an audience. Nic Knerr, 36, and Scott Forrester, 29, teach high-intensity interval-training classes at Circuit Works in Santa Monica, California, where they have cultivated a devoted client base because of their James Harden beards, goofy humour and upbeat attitudes. That training is now available, live, six days a week, on their new joint Instagram feed (@homewerkbnc). They are averaging 10 to 15 students a class.
Tilita Lutterloh (@iamtilita), 39, coaches a handful of students through group workouts from her living room in Leimert Park in Los Angeles. Lutterloh, who was hoping to qualify for the Olympics in the triple jump, makes her living as a fitness coach and nutritionist. With the Olympics postponed, she offers classes three times a week, attended by a half-dozen students. A triathlete, ultradistance runner and longtime yoga instructor, Ted McDonald (@teddymcdonald), 49, teaches dozens of yoga students on Instagram and Facebook Live.
Video fitness instruction is nothing new, but often what makes this current content so appealing are the low production values and an intimate feeling of being in the instructor’s living room or backyard.
The equipment can be just as DIY. On a recent morning, Knerr and Forrester had students doing triceps dips off the end of a chair. Lutterloh demonstrated toe taps on an ottoman, and Holder picked up a vase of flowers to demonstrate crossbody chops and presses to Campbell and her followers.
Although much of the content is free, most fitness trainers, the heart and soul of a nearly US$100 billion global fitness industry, are self-employed and could face hard times with an extended stay-athome period.
Gin Dietz, a personal trainer based in Silicon Valley, estimates that she has lost 80% of her income. Like Dietz, Pixie Acia (@purposefulpixie), a SoulCycle instructor in Southern California, is used to relying on multiple streams of income, but the pandemic has cut them off.
“In one second you go from crushing it,” Acia said, “to having all the rugs pulled from underneath you.”
It’s too soon to assess the effect on the industry, but ClassPass, an app that allows users to book classes at more than 30,000 gyms and studios in 30 countries, lost 96% of its revenue in two weeks. Among the two dozen fitness and yoga instructors and gym and studio owners interviewed for this article, only three were well positioned to deal with an extended loss of income. (ClassPass is offering video classes on its app, too, by the way.)
“It’s definitely scary times,” Forrester said. He has a wedding to pay for this summer, if that’s not cancelled, too.
Knerr signed up for unemployment immediately after the stay-at-home order was issued in Los Angeles County, though it will not be enough to cover his rent. By the time Forrester attempted to sign up, California’s online unemployment enrolment system had crashed from intense demand. He eventually enrolled, and although his landlord has signalled a willingness to delay rent payments, he has student loans and credit card debt.
“If this lasts a month, I feel we will be fine,” he said. “But if it lasts longer than that, it’s like, how do we survive?”
Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the challenges they face, fitness professionals are adapting. Many are using video social media for the first time to reach existing clients and a new audience, and some ask for donations at the beginning and end of the classes they offer.
“Just because everything is cancelled doesn’t mean your life is cancelled,” Lutterloh said. “It’s not about looking for the out, it’s about looking for what works.”
As Holder put it: “Moving the body and physical fitness get your blood flowing to help your lymph system, and that creates a beneficial response in your immune system. But you’re also disengaging from an anxious state, and that anxiety has a huge impact on mental health and your immune system.”
While Campbell, a celebrity for decades, has 8.7 million Instagram followers, Holder has 107,000. After playing football at the University of Pennsylvania, he worked for a nutrition startup and moonlighted at a boutique gym training clients.
In 2015, he signed with Nike to become one of its master trainers who film workouts delivered to subscribers on the Nike Training Club app, but he never stopped training private clients. In 2017, Campbell became a regular. Given their travel schedules, the sessions are often held remotely.
On March 17, Campbell went live on her Instagram feed while she and Holder were working out on FaceTime. Since then, Holder estimated, more than 100,000 people have tuned in to their workouts. “It’s cool to see,” he said, adding that he would keep providing the workouts online free.