A Good Alternative for “Afraid Exercisers”: Changes in Group Fitness Instructors’ Reasoning About Virtual Fitness During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This article examines how group fitness instructors discursively constructed virtual fitness and its participants during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on how their perceptions evolved over time. Drawing on focus group discussions with 19 Les Mills International instructors across 10 countries over a 16-month period, the study explores how a long-term health imperative of “staying fit” was negotiated alongside the acute imperative of avoiding COVID-19 contagion. Employing a discourse-historical approach, the analysis reveals a diachronic shift: Virtual fitness was initially delegitimized as a “last resort” for “afraid exercisers” but was later reframed as a legitimate, even preferable, alternative for “non-normative” exercisers such as “introverts,” “new mums,” and “busybodies.” This shift reflected broader societal negotiations between a salutogenic and a pathogenic health paradigm, revealing how instructors deployed lay epidemiology to justify their stances. Virtual fitness came to embody a site of self-regulation, consumer autonomy, and market opportunity. Furthermore, virtual fitness reflected broader ideological shifts in how health, risk, and fitness were constructed during the pandemic.