Jenny Gyllander spent the summer of 2019 covered in bug spray. As the creator of the review company Thingtesting, Gyllander had scored an early sample of a new outdoorsy personal-care brand called . She’d already researched Kinfield’s mission and sustainability practices, interviewed the founder, and shot photos of the products at her studio in Helsinki. The only step left was to thing-test—her term for evaluating a product—its deet-free repellent.Ěý

“I’m not a person who would wear mosquito repellent for a night on a New York terrace, so I did it my way,” she tells me. “I used it specifically in outdoor settings for a month during the summer, from FinlandĚýłŮ´Ç North America. I try to integrate the products into my life and not hysterically try them over 24 hours. That’s the fairest way to assess, Do I need this?”

That candid tone is what Gyllander’s fans have come to expect from , a review platform that as of this writing, but not for long, exists only on Instagram. The @thingtesting grid is filled with medium-shot photos of protein cereal, Veja sneakers, and bars of shampoo in plastic-free packaging, accompanied by analysis of each product in the caption. Part of her review for the repellent : “I like that Kinfield added their ingredient list to the bottle, which otherwise isn’t mandatory for repellents regulated under the Environmental Protection Agency.”

Thingtesting, as 29-year-old Jenny (pronounced “yenny” in her native Finnish) frequently describes it, aims to be the millennial Consumer Reports. She discovers interesting products and reviews them honestly. It’s a simple proposition, but in a market saturated with paid influencers and mislabeled branded content, it has earned Thingtesting more than 42,000 followers, some of whom pay a premium for additional content, and one of whom is Natalie Portman. Thingtesting’s target readers are the type of Ěýthat marketing firms spend billions trying to woo. According to Gyllander, her audience doesn’t want to impulse-buy products algorithmically served to them between wedding photos. Instead, they try to make responsible purchasing decisions with an understanding of a product’s efficacy and the brand’s sustainability practices, funding structure, and place in the market. Gyllander calls this consumer attitude the curiosity factor.

Aside from Portman, the most powerful Thingtesting followers are investors who you may not have heard of unless you’re a recent MBA graduate. Gyllander spent her midtwenties working at Backed VC, a London venture-capital firm that funds the type of excruciatingly millennial startups whose products she would later go on to review. With Thingtesting’s help, these companies and the investors who fund them are determining what our gym bags, grocery carts, and skin-care shelves will look like in the future.

Thingtesting specializes in contemporary brands geared toward young shoppers, brands that tend to bypass traditional retailers and sell directly to consumers. There’s a disproportionate amount of Helvetica and pastel. From ĚýłŮ´Ç , most of the more than 100 products Gyllander has reviewed feature a minimalist design and look like things you’d find in the same Brooklyn concept store. About half of them fall into the gear, wellness, or sustainable-living space; she often highlights the type of innovative running shoes or personalized vitamins that may already be in your backpack. (Especially if that backpack is Fjällräven.) Many of the other products have likely come across your radar, because brand strategists and marketing directors design them to appeal to a specific base of conscious consumers. If an item isn’t on your wish list already—say, an affordable cashmere sweater or a notebook made from stone paper—it may be after a scroll through the grid, especially if you’re between the ages of 18 and 35.Ěý

Gyllander photographs each product on a piece of white paper and photoshops a pale background underneath. This friendly aesthetic has come to symbolize the Instagram era, just as hot pink and triangles typified design in the eighties. Recently, Gyllander decided that Thingtesting’s appearance is a little too tied to our current moment and is now working on a rebrand. For now, the contents of the Thingtesting grid might remind you of a posh general store: you may not need anything, but it feels soothing to walk in and poke around.

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In trying times, you might expect to hear from your friends, your family, and your neighbors. But I can also guarantee that you’ve heard from every single fitness studio that has ever begged for, borrowed, or stolen your email address.

Gyms and fitness studios have been Ěýand therefore shuttered to protect both workers and clients from exposure to the novel coronavirus. It’s a necessary move for our collective healthĚýbut a terrifying time for small business owners and instructors who rely on in-person classes for income. Thankfully, every one of those endorphin-filled trainers has channeled theirĚýenergy into a new virtual workout class.

As fitness professionals were the first to realize, we now have an opportunity slash mandate to reconfigure the way we work out. It’s an upset that will permanently change the fitness industry. No one can say when we’ll be able to get back to the climbing gymĚýor, just as crucially, if we’ll even want to be near one another when all this ends. That means that online workouts may be more thanĚýa coronavirus coping mechanism. We mayĚýhave just beenĚýpushed into the future of exercise.Ěý

In the past two weeks, I’ve gotten emailĚýand push notifications from the biggies: Barry’s Bootcamp, Peloton, and SoulCycle. I’ve received email invites to an online pole-dancing class called Tone and Twerk (don’t worry:Ěýno at-home pole needed) and to a Zoom yoga class at a studio I visited once—six years ago—in Sydney.ĚýZoom allows the trainer to video-chat with many students at once, which makes for the closest approximation of sweaty group camaraderieĚýthat’s possible from our individually quarantined households. The mutual video chat allows a trainer to offer feedback on form, as long as you position your camera properly. But it also means that a studio’s worth of strangers can see your home, your pet, and the leggings you haven’t been able to wash because there’s no washing machine in your building and you’re terrified to go to a laundromat. At least, those were my concerns.

An abundance of new workout classes are taking place on Instagram Live, YouTube, and subscription-only platforms like ClassPass. Those options are more anonymous: the YouTuberĚýdoes not watch you backĚý(thank God.) But if you want to truly step into our new reality, I’m going to say the same thing that your boss, your kid’s teacher, and your book club have all told you: you have to download Zoom. The coronavirus catchphrase “” isĚýespecially true on Zoom, where fitness classes still offer a level of intimacy, even a forced intimacy, althoughĚýparticipants and the instructor are miles apart. It took countless emails from studios, and one from my editor, but I decided to give these newfangled classes a try.ĚýPlus, peer pressure has always been what motivates me to get through a full workout.

To get a taste of our upended fitness industry, I experimented with four different group Zoom classes. I started with an evening class at my home yoga studio, ,Ěýin Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which is currently eight blocks and one pandemicĚýaway. I rolled out my mat in the sparse corner of the living room that I’ve never quite figured out how to decorate. It usually holds only an infinity-shaped cat scratcher. (Which would tellĚýthe instructor and any spying fellow yogis plenty about my personality.) This weekĚýit was functioning as a storage space for bags of nonperishable groceries that I’ve left untouched in case the coronavirus is clinging to their surfaces. In between that mix of normalcy and devastation is my brand-new home gym:ĚýoneĚýyoga mat and a rolled-up shirt I’ve been using as a towel.Ěý

With my laptop on an end table at the top of my mat, I could see my fellow yogis only as long as I was sitting up and staring directly at the screen. As someone whose journalistic role model has always been Harriet the Spy, my natural instinct was to sit and stare—to take in the dogs walking across mats, and babies crying in the background, and stray roommates tiptoeing around to access the kitchen. Half as an act of mindfulness and half because I didn’t want to look like a creep, I laid down on my mat and listened instead.Ěý

I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed the sounds of yoga. The noises I now heard in my living room were the same ones I’ve internalized over years of practice—awkward hellos between people who know each other only by sight, deep breaths as your neighbors stretch out for the first time that day, other people rolling out their mats and accidentally knocking over a water bottle in the process, that weirdly airy tone of voice that instructors use even when making a joke. Eventually, everyone in the class muted their audio so that only the teacher could be heard, and we moved through a light series of not very challenging poses.Ěý

Each time I’ve returned to exercise after a period of neglect, I find solace in the fact that my body still knows how to move. I hadn’t done yoga since the previous lifetime known as early March, but the fact that I still knew how to sink into chair pose or space out my hands in downward dog was a welcome reminder of my pre-pandemic life. I didn’t exactly forget that I was on my living-room floor, but I at least felt happier to be there.Ěý

For my second Zoom workout, I decided to skip the slow stretching and tender breathing exercises and burn some calories instead. I chose a 4 P.M. class at , another Brooklyn yoga studio, this one with a reputation for speedy and sweaty vinyasa flows. But at 3:50 P.M., I was still making my way home from a tense trip to the pharmacist. Being late to a workout class is one of my top-five least favorite feelings—although I’ll admit it’sĚýrecently been beat out by waiting in a long line at a drugstore during a pandemic. Until I signed in at 4:15, it didn’t even cross my mind that silently entering a video chat is far less disruptive than sneaking into an ongoing workout session. I almost wish I hadn’t discovered how easy it is to be virtually late; even if IĚýdoĚýget some side eye, there’s no way to tell which dirty look is aimed at whom.Ěý

This timeĚýthe Zoom chat showed about two dozen students, only ten of which had enabled their cameras. The screen opened onto a Brady Bunch–style grid displaying torsos and thighs where stepchildren should be. By nowĚýthe class was in midflow, cycling quickly from chair pose to forward fold to a jump-back chaturanga to a warrior pose and around again. Having missed the warm-up, I would typically take a few moments to stretch on my own before jumping into the class choreography. Even with instructors’ constant reminders to “do what feels good,” it can be awkward to deviate when everyone around you is in the same shape. After years of psyching myself up, I’d learned how to be comfortable in child’s pose when everyone else is a triangle. But without rows of people surrounding me in real life, I lost my nerve. On Zoom, each of us is the star of our own Brady box, and I couldn’t pretend that no one could see me. With no warm-up and already feeling behind, I spent most of class in lackluster attempts at poses while trying to ignore the dirty laundry that had piled up around me. By the time the class landed in the final resting pose, my camera was off, and I was answering email. At least I learned a unique lesson for our time: a trip to the pharmacy will almost certainly ruin an afternoon.Ěý

On another weekday afternoon, I tried a barre class from a studio that I always forget I hate until I’m standing on my mat with my feet in first position. Derived from ballet classes, barre workouts are centered around the “tuck,” a combination of a pelvis tilt, an ab crunch, and a glute tighteningĚýthat I find impossible to perfect. It turns out, movements that are boring and finicky in person are also boring and finicky virtually. This time, three-fourths of my fellow amateur ballerinas had their cameras turned on and framed on their hips to allow for form cues from the instructor. After the third shout-out of “Leah, hold your tuck!” I rolled off my mat for a breather, peeping classmates be damned. I used the brief break to take my temperature for the 30th time that day. I checked back inĚýjust in time for the more accessible ab series of bicycle crunches and leg lifts. I’m still sore today, and my temperature is 98.6.

Finally,ĚýI tested outĚýa new-to-me PilatesĚýclass taught by instructor . Without her room full of reformers, KontolefaĚýhadĚýshifted to no-equipment Pilates, and a handful of faithful clients had followed her onto the mat. The group all seemed to know each other; when I logged on, they were chatting away. Emboldened by my week of Zoom training, I introduced myself to everyone—something I would never do in an in-real-lifeĚýgym. I met a dog, a baby, and a few husbands before we got down to a series of low-impact core movements. The warm energy continued throughout the class, and I embraced the spirit by positioning my laptop camera tight on my lower body for personalized form corrections.
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I’mĚýnot yet comfortable letting strangers stare at my dusty yoga mat and small pile of pasta boxes. Each time I step into my sorry excuse for a home gym, I’m reminded that exercise is the one activity that pre-COVIDĚýme never did from home. (As for the excessive baking, video chatting, and working in sweatpants, I’ve been doing all that for years.) Still, I have faith that this—all of this—will get easier. Or it won’t.ĚýBut it’ll be necessary either way. I’ve signed up for more Zoom workouts next week. Awkward chatter and getting called out on your bad tuck are the point of group fitness. So, it turns out, are the strangers.

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The practice of yoga dates back to 2700 B.C., which is hard to remember at the Wanderlust Festival. ButĚýłŮ´Ç be fair, I came in the back way. Had I walked through the yoga event’s entrance in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, I would have at least been given a guest wristband and greeted withĚýa beatific yogi smile.ĚýInstead, I accidentally walked straight into rows of vendor tents hawking wellness-adjacent items, like free chickpea snacks rubber-banded to a coupon for 10 percent off.Ěý

The day’s programĚýincluded group tarot-reading lessons and a on how to use food to beat depression. The offerings felt algorithmically generated: you like yoga, so you may also be interested in Kind bars. If you were an alien who just landedĚýon earth, or a Hindu deity dropping into a 2019 yoga festival, you’d probably wonder what exactly pamplemousse-flavored sparkling water has to do with an ancient spiritual practice. But spend enough time practicing yoga in the Western world and you may forget that yoga and all its capitalist accoutrements—CBD oils and healthy snacks and thousand-dollar retreats—aren’t inherently linked. I felt less like a seeker on my way to enlightenment and more like a floating demographic for a targeted ad. Eventually, my free tote bag full of freeĚýcoconut water and freeĚýpower bars,ĚýI stepped away from the vendors and rolled out my yoga mat for MC Yogi’s headlining set.

If you practice yoga, you’ve likely heard MC Yogi’s instrumental tracks—he calls them “omstrumentals”—on a studio playlist. MC Yogi, whose real name isĚýNicholas Giacomini, is the Diplo of yoga festivals. He’s a yoga devotee, teacher, and studio owner who also travels the world to play his music at events. He has , and his song “Shanti (Peace Out)” has racked up tenĚýmillion plays on Spotify. As a 40-year-old white man with glasses and short hair, who often wears a fedora, he looks more likely to mix you a $14 cocktail than to write songsĚýabout an ancient Indian god. But his lyrics are where he embraces the full MC Yogi persona.ĚýHere’s a typical verse, spit over a South Asian beat: Ganesh is so fresh, chillin’ on his throne / Surrounded by incense, fruit, and gold / With a heap of sweets piled in his bowl / He guards the gate and protects the threshold.

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Sitting on a gym floor in Brooklyn, Araliya Ming Senerat and two other members of the describe how powerlifting has helped them overcome trauma. The actual goal of powerlifting, they explain to me, is to lift the most weight. But the sport has also enabled these women to cope with eating disorders, PTSD, and suicidal thoughts. Imagine a 1980s ideal of a meathead, then add empathy and send her to therapy, and you’ll have a pretty good sense of the WSC lifters’ vibe.

Senerat, the organization’s vice president, had been lifting for two years when she came up with a plan to commit suicide. “Powerlifting was the one place in the gym where I felt like I knew how to cope with what I was dealing with,” she says. “I actually planned out my suicide, and then, the day that I decided not to commit suicide, I deadlifted 185 pounds, which was the most I’d ever done.” The accomplishment kept her alive. Now she can deadlift up to 300 pounds.

Founded by Shannon Wagner in a burst of post-election ire, the WSC unites lifters under the goals of social justice and increased access to strength training. In just its first year, the organization has coordinated five charitable events in four cities. Wagner organized the first one—a powerlifting meet to benefit Planned Parenthood at her home gym, —after last year’s Women’s March, as she searched for an active way to channel her newfound energy. When Lift for Planned Parenthood sold out in six days, Wagner decided to turn the one-off event into an entire organization. “Powerlifting communities already exist in pockets across the country, so the idea is to tap into each of them and get them involved,” she says.

Today, the WSC is a 501(c)(3)-certified nonprofit with advisory and directors boards and a network of affiliated gyms across the country. The group gets so many volunteer offers that it’s having trouble finding work for everyone. The group’s tagline—“Using our collective strength to impact the world in a meaningful way”—is so catchy that it makes one want to pick up a barbell immediately. The first Lift for Planned Parenthood raised more than $14,000. By June 2017, the organization went national. WSC members in New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C.,Ěýorganized “Pull for Pride” competitions to fundraise for local LGBTQ charities. Next year’s Pull for Pride is shaping up to be an even bigger draw, with gyms across the country already signed up to host their own affiliated competitions.

As many WSC members told me, there’s a need for inclusive, deliberate planning in powerlifting. Unlike traditional powerlifting competitions, the WSC does not require lifters to identify a gender on event registration forms, weigh in before competition, or wear tight-fitting singlets. “The WSC is booming, and I’m really happy to see that,” says D.C.-based lifter Breanna Diaz. “I think one reason is that this diverse group of woman-identified individuals, femme, or gender-nonconforming people have always been here in the fitness world. We just haven’t had some sort of group that really represents us and is advocating for us and acknowledging us.”

The hardest day of powerlifting is often the first, especially for women. As Wagner points out, even fit women often skip the weight rack. “It’s just not something that women are socialized to want—to become stronger,” she says. “It’s a cliché at this point, but we come to the gym to get thinner and smaller.” Even after you decide to attempt a lift, the sport has a built-in intimidation factor: It largely involves massive dudes picking up hundreds of pounds of steel.

Female lifters often commiserate over the gender imbalances in the sport: , the barriers to entry for non-cisgender people are high, and the dress codes are sexist (while men may go shirtless, women are often expected to wear tight outfits). Then there’s the general lack of representation in gyms. I realized after my own sample training session (I can now deadlift my bodyweight, thank you very much) that I was instinctively keeping tabs on the muscle-bound men in tiny tank tops around me. A room full of sweaty 250-pound men certainly takes some getting used to, though during months of interviews and research, I met only sheep in wolves’ spandex and many smiley giants who were eager to talk shop.

The growing sport has spawned overarching organizations like and small groups of female lifters like the , but the WSC is the first nonprofit to unite the female lifting community with the issues they face outside the gym—and the first to encourage collective action. “Powerlifting is much more of a community than the standard fitness class,” says Wagner. Through the WSC, she’s been working to connect with existing groups of lifters and mobilize them for the greater good. Lifters love competing, she says, and this way they get to participate in society instead of “just complaining” about it from the comfort of the weight rack.

With its social justice goals and charity lifts, the WSC aims to reach beyond the fitness community. But it’s also putting money back into its roots. The organization is currently to build a dedicated gym in the outer boroughs of New York City, with the goal of creating a physical and emotional safe space for woman-identified lifters. WSC members have plenty of suggestions for an ideal gym, like no wall-to-wall mirrors, which can encourage comparison or body shaming, and workout playlists without aggressive or misogynistic music. Volunteers have already signed up to offer physical therapy, support groups, and mindfulness-specialized training. Laura Khoudari, a trainer on the five-person WSC Advisory Board, has agreed to work as a trauma-informed coach. She plans to offer a sliding-scale training program for lifters dealing with trauma, chronic pain, anxiety, or depression. She doesn’t want to replace conventional mental health treatment, like therapy or medication, but rather acknowledge that physical fitness can and should play a role in recovery.

“The body doesn’t forget trauma,” says Lisa Schieffelin, a New York–based social worker who plans to offer group support gatherings in the WSC space. “Strength training is perseverance, it’s tenacity, it’s failure, it’s conditioning.” Other WSC members believe the physicality of lifting can overflow into mental health benefits. Wagner recovered from her eating disorder when lifting helped her realize that, as she puts it, “in order to get stronger, I had to eat food.” Khoudari decided to become a trauma-informed coach after she used strength training as a supplemental treatment for her own PTSD.

At a gym session in Brooklyn, I watch as Wagner works her way from 45- to 135- to 175-pound lifts. It’s extra impressive when she tells me that she taught herself to lift at home via social media, using a broomstick as a barbell. In the three years since she took up the sport, Wagner has gone from a yoga teacher focused on stretching to a strength and conditioning specialist who can powerlift up to 290 pounds. For Wagner, powerlifting’s incremental but tangible results offer a metaphor for activism. “You go to the gym, sometimes it goes well, sometimes it doesn’t. But you know that over time that work is going to accumulate. Even if you don’t have a good day on Monday, three Mondays from now you might have a good day,” she explains. “Just having that faith that what you’re doing is important and meaningful, I think that translates directly to social justice. Every little thing you do might seem inconsequential or like you don’t matter, but you are part of this collective.”

Senerat is also using powerlifting to combat her politics-fueled anxieties. “After the election, I felt like I couldn’t do anything,” she says. “I was just one voice. I heard about the Lift for Planned Parenthood and thought I definitely wanted to be a part of it. I feel like we can grow, try to make a difference, and create a community for women to feel safe.”

In November, I attended the organization’s first official strategy meeting. The conversation took place in Brooklyn over homemade energy bars. Twelve members, including a social worker, a farmer, two med students, a librarian, and a handful of trainers, discussed how to raise $30,000 toward their new gym space in a little over a month. If you happen to know an activist powerlifter, expect a friendly fundraising phone call very soon. Fundraising expert Susan Shiroma offered this insight: “Women are mad.”

If some women channel that anger toward learning how to lift hundreds of pounds? Even better.

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