Online exercise: If your gym instructor is an iPad, what is lost – and gained?

I have never attended the same gym as Eric Drinkwater, a sports scientist at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. In fact, we live over 1000 kilometres apart. But as soon as we start talking on the phone, we discover that we share the same gym instructors, located on the other side of the world in Los Angeles.

We are just two members of a growing cohort training online with coaches they have never met, uncoupled from timetables and venues. This is a phenomenon that was waiting to erupt since the advent of the internet and smart devices, and the covid-19 pandemic provided the impetus for it to explode.

In 2016, fitness apps were downloaded just over 200 million times. In 2022, in the wake of the pandemic, the figure was nearly 900 million, with the number only dropping slightly in 2023. A great deal of gyms were forced to temporarily close as the coronavirus swept the world, but when they reopened, many people’s exercise regimes had changed and some, like me, never went back.

But does it make a difference if you exercise alone at home rather than with a group or in a busy gym? After all, there are many well-documented benefits of working out alongside other people. “The social aspect of fitness training is important to many,” says Drinkwater. For instance, a…