![]() Squat and lunge heavy legs and glutes, upper body (with dumbbells), arms and core (no dumbbells), sweaty full body HIIT, and of course, plank-happy abs workouts: I became intimate with them all, learned the difference between a glute bridge reduction and a frog pump, and had my belief that burpees were the worst cheerfully reinforced. The workouts themselves were quite good Chloe Ting and her YouTube compadres structure a video as a series of timed exercises for the user to follow along with, with each episode targeting a different muscle group or workout technique. So, eventually, I caved, and soon found myself in the ring-lit world of YouTube fitness, in which Chloe Ting leads one down a rabbit hole of smiling exercise gurus, all promising to make the most of your ten minutes, or twenty, or thirty, or ninety, if you’re so inclined. Pride, too, was also at play: I’d surely done tougher workouts than these ten minute videos, and I couldn’t stand the thought of not trying it out. Nevertheless, I soon found myself wondering about giving the challenge a whirl myself it’s only two weeks, and besides, I’d been looking for some sort of exercise schedule. Contrary to the clickbait video titles (“ABS in TWO WEEKS,” “Do This Workout Every Day To Lose Weight,”) I knew from the outset that a two-week fitness of moderate difficulty wouldn’t give a person with an average physique a sculpted six-pack, and some quick Google searches confirmed my suspicion. I, however, wasn’t drawn into the initial hype. With its short length and accessibility (the entire schedule is available for free, and it’s all bodyweight exercises), it’s no surprise that the challenge quickly found a target audience. You couldn’t escape her and the countless Tik Tok videos showing the participants - most of whom were young women - taking on plank jacks and reverse crunches, hollow holds and hip-dips, all in pursuit of the elusive “flat stomach” or “six-pack” - and proudly showing off the before and after. Her shred challenge - a two-week time frame during which participants did selected workout videos from the Australian fitness guru’s YouTube channel - became sort of synecdoche for any sort of self-improvement project taken up during pandemic-induced lockdowns. ![]() Ubiquitous on Tik Tok and Instagram, she’d become something of a pandemic meme. ![]() ![]() I’d known about Chloe Ting long before I’d ever tried one of her workouts. ![]()
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