Pandemic fitness assemblages: The sociomaterialities and affective dimensions of exercising at home during the COVID-19 crisis

Abstract

The implementation of physical distancing measures and lockdowns across the globe to control the spread of COVID-19 has led to the home becoming a focal point of exercise and fitness activities for many people. A plethora of digital tools were hastily assembled to help people workout at home or in spaces close to home: including apps with workout suggestions, online videos and livestreamed fitness classes. In this article, we draw on our empirical material collected through semi-structured interviews and virtual ethnographic home tours with Australian adults to explore the ‘pandemic fitness assemblages’ generated with and through their improvised pandemic fitness practices inside and outside their homes. These materials illustrate how bodies, digital and non-digital technologies, and place and space came together and help to surface the affects, sensations and embodiments that emerged. We describe how people’s re-imagined fitness practices contributed to daily routines, transformed the atmospheres of the home and yielded affective experiences of escape. To do so, we think with sociospatial and feminist materialism theoretical frameworks that emphasise the generative relationships emerging between human and more-than-human forces and entities. Our analysis further illuminates the situatedness and relationality of these heterogeneous forces and considers how they come to matter within the broader sociomaterial context of COVID-19.

‘Friendly’ and ‘noisy surveillance’ through MapMyRun during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Alice’s experience offers an example of Clark and Lupton’s (2021) assertion that individuals were forced to change their fitness practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. Alice also notes how running became a social activity when her and her tennis friends could no longer meet to play tennis together, running became a source of digital social connection, ‘something to talk about’.…”

“…During the COVID-19 pandemic, downloads of health and fitness apps increased by 65% in the UK in the first week of lockdown alone ( Spreckley, 2020 ), whilst 74% of Americans used one or more fitness apps during the pandemic ( Rizzo, 2021 ). This mirrored a broader move to digital communication, as a means to interact with people outside of the home ( Nguyen et al, 2021 ), along with the need to change fitness practices ( Clark and Lupton, 2021 ), as gyms and sports centres closed. As such, the COVID-19 pandemic saw a rapid increase in the digitisation of both social and fitness practices, and increased popular discussion of self-tracking.…”

Socio-spatialities and affective atmospheres of COVID-19: A visual essay

“…These caveats notwithstanding, this essay is a small contribution to the growing body of insights into others’ experiences in both Australia and other countries. This literature has begun to show how everyday experiences during the continuing COVID crisis were suffused with multisensory and affective feelings as human bodies came together with other humans, things, place and space and rhythms of time, and embodiment and habit were subjected to constant disruption (Lupton and Lewis, 2022; Sigley, 2020; Elswit, 2021; Thorpe et al, 2021; Mosteanu, 2021; Clark and Lupton, 2021; Thompson et al, 2020; Young, 2021; Moretti and Maturo, 2021).…”

Reconceptualizing Women's Wellbeing During the Pandemic: Sport, Fitness and More-Than-Human Connection

“…Over the past two years, a growing body of feminist scholarship has shown the potential of new materialist approaches to explore health, wellbeing, embodiment and recovery beyond humanist notions of experience as an individual phenomenon. Emerging in response to concerns that the linguistic and cultural turn were “inadequate for thinking about matter, materiality, and politics” ( Coole & Frost, 2010 , p. 6), new materialisms works to unsettle the prioritizing of the social and discursive in the production of meaning, and to acknowledge the agentic capacities of human and nonhuman matter (e.g., bodies, environments, technologies and objects) ( Alaimo & Hekman, 2008 ; Braidotti, 2022 ; Coole & Frost, 2011). By exploring the material-discursive formation of experience, feminist materialisms orient thinking towards questions concerning how the phenomenon of wellbeing comes to “shape and be shaped by the elements of the world that women are entangled with” (Hickey-Moody & Collin, 2020; Coffey, 2021 ; McLeod, 2017 ; Smith & Reid, 2017 ).…”

“…It is beyond the scope of this paper to provide an overview of all that is similar and different between feminist materialisms and other ontological and epistemological approaches (see Thorpe et al, 2020; Coole & Frost, 2010 ). The range of new materialist approaches to re-imagining non/human relations during pandemic are vast and complex, further, we recognize the importance of contributing to this line of inquiry to understanding women's embodied experiences of the pandemic as a continually evolving phenomena.…”