Gym closed but you can still get pumped up

NEW YORK • It was a little after noon on March 26, 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 the 49-year-old started a gruelling set of flutter kicks, she stopped and glared at her trainer.

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 normally a private workout between the British supermodel and her trainer.

As America hunkers down during the coronavirus pandemic, free fitness workouts, many of them 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 on 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.

Home workout posts on Instagram feeds and stories in the United States increased over fivefold on March 18 compared with a few days before, a Facebook spokesman said, which was around the time governors in some states began imploring people to stay home.

Facebook Live has thousands of options, as well. Nike has made its premium content free until mid-June, and Chris Hemsworth, the actor, recently made his Centr app free for six weeks, and 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 thanks to their James Harden beards, goofy humour and upbeat attitudes. That same flavour is now available, live, six days a week, on their new joint Instagram feed (@homewerkbnc). They are averaging 10 to 15 students per class.

Tilita Lutterloh (@iamtilita), 39, coaches a handful of students through group workouts from her living room in Leimert Park in Los Angeles. She was hoping to qualify for the Olympics in the triple jump and 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, ultra-distance 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 cross-body 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 (S$142 billion) global fitness industry, are self-employed and could face hard times with an extended stay-at-home period.

Gin Dietz, a personal trainer based in Silicon Valley, estimates that she has lost 80 per cent 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," she said, "to having all the rugs pulled from underneath you."

It is too soon to assess the impact on the industry, but ClassPass, an app that allows users to book classes at over 30,000 gyms and studios in 30 countries, lost 96 per cent 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.

"If this lasts a month, I feel we will be fine," Forrester 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."

NYTIMES