Sometime around 2012, my training partner brought a video camera to our Saturday deadlift session.
This wasn’t a phone balanced against a water bottle. It was one step below those shoulder-mounted cameras with full VHS tapes that ejected from the side. He set up a tripod, aimed it at the platform, and I asked him what the hell he was doing.
“I’m going to film us so we can see our form.”
We were training in a private studio with mirrors on every wall. Two of the five people lifting were personal trainers. We had plenty of ways to evaluate a deadlift without producing a documentary about it.
I laughed and went along with it. Everyone else did too.
The next day, I was running the register at our supplement shop while he spent hours editing the footage. When he finally finished, he proudly showed me a PowerPoint-style production of us lifting progressively heavier weights, complete with dates, names, numbers, and whooshing transitions.
He thought it was great. I thought it was overkill.
Neither of us understood what was coming.
Social media changed what exercise was for
People have always cared about how they look and what they can lift. Gyms had egos long before they had Wi-Fi.
Social media added a camera, an audience, and a scoreboard.
A workout could now produce more than strength, cardiovascular fitness, better health, improved mood, physical competence, or time with friends. It could produce content. The platform could then measure that content in views, likes, comments, and followers.
Eventually, the workout itself started changing to satisfy the audience.
I’ve watched people shout at strangers for walking through their shot. I’ve been interrupted in the middle of my own workout and asked to film someone. I agreed, walked over to where he was lifting, and learned that he didn’t want me to record an exercise.
He wanted me to help him recreate a skit he’d seen online.
I handed the phone back.
I’ve seen people film a lift and then occupy a bench for 15 minutes while they upload it and wait for the response. I’ve seen people attempt maximum-effort lifts—with no obvious preparation and no good reason—because they had just watched someone else do it on a screen.
I’ve seen fights, slaps, and invasions of privacy. I’ve watched fitness centers become quieter and more isolated: headphones on, cameras out, everyone occupying the same room while performing for people somewhere else.
These are my observations from years in gyms. They don’t prove that social media caused every change in gym culture. They do show what happens when training becomes public performance.
Comparison is built into the product
Social media presents us with an endless collection of exceptional bodies and performances stripped of their context.
You see the lift. You don’t see the genetics, drug use, injuries, failed attempts, editing, lighting, training history, or the rest of that person’s life. You’re comparing your entire reality with somebody else’s selected frame.
That comparison has measurable consequences.
A 2026 meta-analysis combined 26 experimental studies involving 6,111 young adults. Exposure to “fitspiration” content increased social comparison and unhealthy exercise and dieting motivations while harming body image, self-esteem, appearance satisfaction, and mood. These were controlled experiments, which gives us more reason to take the effects seriously than a collection of correlations would provide. The authors also noted that the research remains concentrated in young adults, so we should be careful about assuming identical effects in every population. (Gruest and Walter, 2026)
The evidence isn’t limited to women comparing themselves with fitness models. In an experiment involving 223 men, exposure to fitspiration images increased body dissatisfaction and the urge to become more muscular compared with neutral images. Men who already had greater concerns about muscularity and a stronger tendency to compare their appearance were especially vulnerable. (Yee et al., 2020)
I’ve seen the human version of that result.
A man once handed me his phone and cried while asking why he didn’t look like the bodybuilder on the screen. The man standing in front of me was in great shape and stronger than probably 98 percent of people his age.
None of that protected him from feeling inadequate next to a carefully selected image of a stranger from across the world.
Social media can take someone who is doing remarkably well and provide a daily supply of evidence that he believes says otherwise.
When exercise becomes your identity
An exercise identity can be useful.
Seeing yourself as someone who trains can make consistency easier. Research across several health behaviors has found a strong relationship between identity and habit, although that relationship doesn’t tell us which one causes the other. Repeated behavior can shape identity, and identity can reinforce repeated behavior. (Zhu et al., 2025)
The danger grows when that identity becomes narrow and conditional.
You stop being a person who powerlifts and become a powerlifter. Your numbers now say something about your value. A bad meet threatens more than a goal; it threatens your understanding of yourself.
The same thing happens with appearance.
You become the lean person, the muscular person, the hard-training person, or the one who never misses. Aging, injury, surgery, family responsibilities, and changing priorities become identity threats. Rest feels like weakness. A physician’s recovery timeline feels like an attempt to take something from you.
I’ve watched people cut medically recommended recovery periods short because returning to their routine mattered more than allowing their bodies to heal. I’ve watched novice lifters become convinced that the only things that matter are how much they lift, how they look without a shirt, and how thoroughly a workout destroys them.
I’ve also watched people become dejected when their goals inevitably changed with age.
Research on athletic identity shows why this can become painful. A recent systematic review of 24 qualitative studies found that injuries frequently disrupted athletes’ sense of identity through physical limitations, lost competition, damaged social connections, and uncertainty about returning. Some athletes eventually rebuilt a broader identity through new activities or roles. Others struggled with the loss. The review also cautioned that most available evidence is qualitative, so the experience varies and shouldn’t be reduced to a simple rule. (Liu, Noh, and Kim, 2025)
A strong athletic identity can support motivation and rehabilitation. An exclusive identity can make adaptation much harder.
The issue is rigidity.
The audience raises the stakes
Social media gives that rigid identity witnesses.
Now you haven’t merely set a goal. You’ve announced it. You’ve posted the preparation, predicted the result, and accepted encouragement from people following the story.
What happens when the result falls short?
I’ve heard of young lifters apologizing to everyone they know after a bad powerlifting meet. A friend told me about a lifter he was helping in his early twenties who reached out from a very dark place. He was considering harming himself because he hadn’t performed as well as he had told his followers he would.
He was 20 years old.
That story can’t establish how often this happens or prove that social media alone caused his crisis. It illustrates how dangerous the combination can become: a narrow identity, public expectations, and a performance treated as a referendum on personal worth.
A missed lift should be a missed lift. Useful information. Maybe disappointing. Maybe embarrassing for an afternoon.
It shouldn’t become evidence that your life has collapsed.
Long-term health gets sacrificed for short-term proof
The most disturbing consequence is watching people trade the purpose of exercise for the performance of fitness.
The guys I started powerlifting with quickly began using steroids because they wanted more strength as fast as they could get it. The goal expanded. The timeline compressed. The risks became easier to rationalize.
The same pattern can occur without drugs.
People max out too often, train through injuries, ignore recovery, chase leanness they can’t comfortably maintain, and keep following programs that no longer fit their bodies or lives. Each decision provides another opportunity to prove dedication.
Meanwhile, long-term health—the reason most people started exercising—gets pushed aside.
Exercise should improve your ability to live. It can help you remain strong, mobile, capable, and independent. It can give you pleasure, confidence, friendships, and goals worth pursuing.
Those benefits don’t require an audience.
Use exercise without letting it use you
My wife and I ran our coaching business with help from social media. We were part of that world. Reading Digital Minimalism helped us step away before it changed too much about who we were.
I was lucky.
You don’t need to abandon goals, competition, or every camera in the gym. Video can be useful for reviewing technique, sharing information with a coach, or preserving a meaningful performance. A clear purpose keeps the tool in its place.
It’s worth asking yourself a few uncomfortable questions:
- Would I still do this workout if nobody could see it?
- If an injury prevented me from training this way for six months, would I still know who I was?
- Am I following my program because it fits my current goals, or because changing it would feel like losing status?
- Does my training improve my life outside the gym?
- Am I taking risks for a meaningful result or for proof that I’m still the person I claim to be?
- Can I experience a bad workout, a missed lift, or a changed body without treating it as a personal failure?
Pay attention to the answers.
Train hard when hard training makes sense. Pursue strength, muscle, performance, or competition if you genuinely value them. Film a lift when the footage has a job to do. Respect other people’s space and privacy. Follow sensible medical guidance when you’re injured.
Build an identity large enough to survive a changed program.
You are allowed to be strong without proving it every day. You are allowed to exercise differently as your life changes. You are allowed to enjoy what your body can do without turning every performance into public evidence of your worth.
The camera my friend brought into the gym seemed absurd in 2012. Today, the absurd part is how normal it has become.
Exercise was always capable of giving us something valuable.
We should be careful about how much of ourselves we give it in return.