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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. Swoll, 37, is a bodybuilder and fitness influencer whose greatest reach is on TikTok, where he has 6.5 million followers. Swoll says his mission is to change toxic gym culture, which he does by calling out videos where people have filmed others without their consent – one of which was Nora Love’s #gymcreep video. His signature look is a backward baseball cap and a look of stern disapproval. Many of the videos Swoll condemns are of someone doing something weird with the equipment, in a sort of “get a load of this guy” way. In his very first reaction video, posted in January 2022, Swoll defended an unknown man by explaining he was doing an old bodybuilder exercise called a “drag curl”, and suggested the poster with the camera should mind her own business.
Up until then, Swoll’s videos were standard fitness influencer stuff – “here’s what I buy at the grocery store,” “here’s why you should never skip the cable flies on chest day” – with views mostly around the 500–900k mark. But that first #MYOB video took off: currently, it’s at 22.2 million views. Having stumbled over his niche as judge and jury of gym etiquette, Swoll doubled down. About a hundred more videos followed, covering gym crimes that range from being rude to the janitor to influencers getting mad at people for walking past and ruining their shot.
On Zoom, Swoll fills the screen with mostly bicep and seems generally fed up with what’s happening in gyms and on social media. “I grew up in the gym,” he says. “Late 90s, early 2000s, when I started as a teenager, I just had such great experiences with so many men and women in the community. The best part about the gym is the bonds that you create. It’s the head nods from the people who see you working,” he says. (I can confirm there is nothing quite like the buzz you get from a head nod off a bodybuilder who has noticed you’re a regular). “This atmosphere that social media has created – ‘don’t talk to me, I’m better than you are, you can’t do that’ – it takes away from the whole gym experience.”
