“Now we’re going back to up and downs.”

Almost half of teenage girls in America have probably heard this during quarantine. I know my friends and I have. 

  As day 50 of quarantine approaches, teenagers like me are starting to go insane. One way we’re keeping occupied is by exercising. Chloe Ting’s 2 Week Ab Shred Challenge has reached over 64 million views with the majority of them being in the past 2 months. This video was posted 8 months ago, so why is it only blowing up now?

  Lately, The Groupchat hasn’t had much to share since we’re all stuck at home, so we’ve been talking about our daily workouts. Let me repeat that – daily workouts. Before quarantine, I rarely worked out because I had dance practice at least 4 times a week, and that’s where I got my exercise in.

Between dance and school, there was no time for me to budget in an extra workout. I didn’t see a reason to. This goes for most of my friends too – we got our exercise in during our extracurricular activities and deemed that enough. So why does it now seem that every teenage girl in America is doing Chloe Ting’s at home workouts?

  Naturally, I turned to my friends to investigate. Sophomore Yusra Khan said she works out to “make the most of my time” and “get away from my family.” The latter she was just kidding, slightly. 

  “I’ve been working out for a while but I found myself more motivated during quarantine because I’m not tired and I have more time,” Amber Zeitz wrote. Remote school days start later than normal school, allowing students to get an extra hour or two of sleep in the morning. For some reason, this extra hour makes all the difference. The school days also end earlier and give students the entire afternoon to themselves. 

  With all this extra time on our hands, what sparked the movement of working out? Why didn’t it lead to other things, like baking or making your own hand sanitizer? It didn’t hit me until I started scrolling back through our messages in The Groupchat, and I realized we send a lot of Tik Toks.

Like, a lot.

The majority of these Tik Toks were other girls showing their workout routines and results. The wave of exercise all goes back to society’s standards of what women should look like; quarantine just gives us more time to think about it.

  All of the Tik Tok workout videos we sent in The Groupchat were posted by girls with “perfect” bodies and looked like they belonged on the Victoria’s Secret Runway. The comments under these videos read, “I wasn’t hungry anyways” and “Imagine looking like this.”  I asked my friends if seeing these videos motivated them to start working out, and I got a mixed response. 

  “No,” Amber wrote, “It made me feel insecure.”

  “I say you feel insecure at first, but then the fact that they look like that makes me feel more motivated to work towards that goal,” Jaclyn Nyce wrote, to which Ava Natale emphasized. 

  I’d say what motivates me the most is my friends. We share our workouts and results with each other most days and encourage each other when we don’t feel up to exercising. Although I only made it through 3 days of Chloe Ting’s 2 Week Ab Shred Challenge before I got bored of doing the same workout everyday, at least I tried it and continue to do my own workouts. 

  As the quarantine continues, I encourage everyone to take just a few minutes out of your day to exercise for YOU, not for society’s unreasonable standards.