Quarantine Fitness Will Change Workout Culture Forever
By: Kate Morgan
Tags: Quarantine, Workout, Exercise, Life, Fitness

Quarantine Fitness Will Change Workout Culture Forever

Even when the pandemic ends, the fitness industry will look very different — as will the ways people work out

Photo: recep-bg/Getty Images

As the coronavirus made its way across the world, Jade Wootton finally became a runner.

“I always wanted to be one,” she says. “I thought the ideology was cool, not just going out and getting fit, but also getting endorphins doing it. But I’m very slow, and that was really embarrassing for me.”

Four days into self-imposed quarantine, the 25-year-old says her embarrassment “evaporated,” outweighed by a desire to leave her Bushwick, Brooklyn apartment and to do something with her body that made her feel like she was — at least a little bit — in control. For weeks, Wootton ran every day, building a habit that became the keystone of a new daily routine.

“The first few days of the quarantine were so disorienting,” she says. Running every day helped. And then the routine changed. Again.

“The park I was running in closed, and that freaked me out,” Wootton says. “I find running with a mask on really difficult, and going outside started to feel increasingly frightening.”

Wootton’s now taken most of her workouts to Zoom, where her studio offers daily yoga classes, but she still goes for a long run twice a week.

“I just need some sort of release,” she says. “Just in general, I feel way less overwhelmed and crazy now. Running is something I never really got before; now I get it.”

While the collective quest for abs may have begun as a productive way to pass the time… it’s become, for many, the only manageable aspect of an incredibly precarious world.

Wootton’s not alone in her pursuits. In the face of sweeping stay-at-home mandates, a huge number of Americans seized an opportunity to finally kick-start a regular workout routine. Retailers reported sharp increases in sales of home gym equipment — like Peloton — and online marketplaces quickly sold out of hand weights and kettlebells. With gyms and fitness studio locations ordered closed, virtual workout classes cropped up en masse on social media and via video conferencing platforms, and search traffic for terms like “home workout” spiked substantially in March. Instagram fitness personalities began posting workouts from their home gyms, sometimes using household items like pots and pans or bottles of bleach in place of dumbbells.

But while the collective quest for abs may have begun as a productive way to pass the time, more than a month into a quarantine it’s become, for many, the only manageable aspect of an incredibly precarious world.

Chantae Reden is a travel and adventure journalist living in Fiji. When the travel industry abruptly ceased functioning, she says she lost a significant amount of work. But even more jarring were the changes to her lifestyle. She couldn’t surf or free-dive — activities she considers “a large part of [her] identity,” and was expected to stay home all day, every day, with a boyfriend who is accustomed to working in an office.

“I thought we’d argue a lot more, being home together,” Reden says. “We really weren’t sure how it’d be once we were both here all the time.”

Their saving grace has been a daily workout: Every day at 6 p.m., the pair take a high-intensity cardio class from the Nike Training Club app, and Reden says it’s both strengthened their bond and brought some routine to the day.

It’s also a way to work toward her surfing and free-diving goals, Reden says, despite, at least for the moment, not actually being able to do either of those things. “I’ve been able to strengthen my back, and work on things like arm and shoulder strength,” she says. “I’ve had more time than usual to work on these specific fitness goals,” and, she adds, making progress on them keeps those activities from life before the virus feel like they’re still in reach.