Joey Swoll, #gymcreeps and trolling: inside the TikTok workout wars
Joey Swoll is a self-styled crusader against toxic gym culture, but some of his millions of followers have hounded women – including Nora Love – into deleting their accounts. We spoke to both sides to find out if anyone is really winning in the online gym wars
In late January, Nora Love posted a video on social media that upended her entire life. It was a short clip of an older man in street clothes sitting on a machine in the gym. “He just kept wandering from machine to machine staring at girls while they were working out,” she says in the voiceover. In the time she followed him, she said he didn’t do a single exercise. The 39-year-old mother of three posted it to TikTok with the hashtags #GymTok and #gymcreep, along with thousands of videos by others bearing those tags. A week later, she was hounded off the internet by thousands of people claiming she was the one at fault for filming a man without his consent.
There is an etiquette war raging in our gyms, and it’s no longer to do with sweating on stuff, leaving dumbbells strewn about or hogging equipment for too long while you scroll through Twitter. It’s about cameras. In 2023, gyms double as film sets for social media content, leaving exasperated members tripping over the tripods of #gymfluencer bros doing pull-ups or flexing their gains in the mirror. The Instagram boyfriends we used to see patiently taking #OOTD photos in the street beside millennial pink walls are now holding a phone while their other half does reps on a glute machine. Nowhere feels safe to do a squat in Lycra you don’t trust. But increasingly, the most contentious use of cameras on #GymTok is not people filming themselves, but other people – either to make fun of what they’re doing or, in the case of Love, call out alleged creepy behaviour. The problem has got so bad that some gyms, most recently the chain LA Fitness, have banned filming at their branches entirely under pain of membership cancellation.
Enter Joey Swoll.
Read more at GQ.