Contemporary fitness culture has become deeply embedded in everyday life, particularly through digital platforms and social media. Workout apps, fitness influencers, wearable technologies, and online challenges constantly circulate messages about discipline, optimisation, productivity, and self-improvement. For many women, these messages are framed as empowering, healthy, and even feminist, encouraging strength, confidence, and care for the self.

At the same time, growing research suggests that digital fitness cultures can have complex and sometimes contradictory effects on women’s bodies and wellbeing. Social media often promotes narrow body ideals, constant comparison, and the idea that a “good” or “successful” body must be continuously worked on, measured, and displayed. These expectations may shape how women see their bodies, why they exercise, and how they evaluate their self-worth.

For some women, engaging with fitness supports enjoyment, motivation, and psychological wellbeing. Yet, for some, it can also contribute to pressure, guilt, anxiety, body dissatisfaction, or feelings of failure when goals are not met. Behaviourally, this may influence exercise patterns, rest, eating practices, and everyday relationships with the body. Importantly, these experiences do not occur in isolation. They are shaped by wider cultural values, gender norms, and social inequalities, and may differ across countries and cultural contexts.

We are conducting this research because women’s fitness experiences cannot be understood without considering broader issues of gender inequality, power, and health. While fitness is often presented as a matter of personal choice, motivation, or willpower, women’s bodies are regulated by powerful social expectations about appearance, discipline, productivity, and success. These expectations are not equally distributed and are shaped by gender, culture, and social position.

By studying fitness culture across different regions and contexts, this research aims to reveal how achievement pressures and body ideals are produced, normalised, and internalised, often in ways that place responsibility on individual women while obscuring deeper power relations. Understanding these dynamics is essential for promoting health and wellbeing that goes beyond appearance, performance, or constant self-optimisation.

Ultimately, this project seeks to contribute to more caring, inclusive, and socially just approaches to fitness and health. By centring women’s lived experiences, the research aims to support forms of movement and embodiment that foster genuine wellbeing, autonomy, and the possibility of a more meaningful liberation of women’s bodies from restrictive norms and expectations.