In 2025, the prevailing stereotype of the fitness fanatic goes something like this. They’re young, they’re toned and they’re seemingly well-off enough to constantly splash out on the boutique fitness classes, the best trainers, the workout supplements. It’s hard not to absorb the message that getting fit equates to spending money; the more you do of the latter, the more you’ll succeed in the former. It can seem as if there’s only one way to get active, and it comes with a high entry fee.
Throw in a cost of living crisis and the price of exercising having snuck up across the board, luxury gym or not, and it’s no shock that those on lower incomes might feel alienated from the fitness world. New research from This Girl Can, the campaign that encourages women to get active, has shone a light on this sense of exclusion. A study released this week found that almost two in five women (38 per cent) on lower incomes have felt shut out from physical activity, with over half (51 per cent) feeling as if they don’t belong in gyms. The women featured in the report worried that they wouldn’t keep up with younger attendees, that classes often didn’t work with their schedules, and that they just weren’t seeing people like themselves in the world of exercise.
A decade on from its launch, the campaign wanted to ask “who are we not reaching? Who are we not engaging? And who is still finding it harder to be active?” says Kate Dale, director of marketing for This Girl Can. Sport England’s broader data showed that women and men on lower incomes are least likely to be active. When This Girl Can cross-referenced the female stats with other demographic characteristics, looking at exercise among Black communities, Asian Muslim communities, pregnant mothers and older women, this was particularly stark.
The report inevitably raises questions: why is the fitness world failing these groups? Does the industry have a class problem? Other studies have suggested that an exercise gap emerges as early as childhood, and starts to shape health inequalities from then. In 2019, University of Cambridge researchers found that kids from disadvantaged backgrounds and certain ethnic groups did less vigorous physical activity; they also noticed that the time children spent doing so increased in line with household income.
Class and exercise have a knotty relationship going back centuries, and social class has “influenced sports participation throughout the history of sport”, says Dominic Malcolm, professor of sociology of sport at Loughborough University. This used to be more formally delineated “through the division of amateurs and professionals”. The latter, often men from working-class backgrounds, would be remunerated for playing sport, while wealthy gentlemen amateurs took part for jolly good fun. Or, he adds: “It was simply the case that different social classes took part in very different types of events.”
Those rigid divisions have since broken down. But that hasn’t necessarily made things more egalitarian. “In the last 40 years or so, what we’ve seen is that participation in sport and exercise is very much a part of identity,” says Malcolm. “Different social groups seek to distinguish themselves from the other social groups through that participation. It’s largely subconsciously, but the choices we make about the sports we want to do, the activities we want to do, relate to the class background that we have or the social class that we aspire to.” Once, a new business owner might have joined a golf club to mingle with similar types, “because that’s the sport that they think demonstrates where their social identity is now”. Now, they might join the legions of middle-class professionals pouring money into training for and completing gruelling triathlons and Iron Man competitions.
The choices we make about the sports we want to do relate to the class background that we have or the social class that we aspire to
Dominic Malcolm, professor of sociology of sport
The UK’s fitness industry generated £5.4bn between 2022 and 2023. The business opportunities are huge, and “people competing for a chunk of that [profit] are looking to sell their gyms as part of a lifestyle, so marketers are designing sport [and exercise] in that way”, Malcolm says. Just think of the reinvention of pilates as the epitome of luxury fitness. Or how the at-home Peloton bike became a status symbol during lockdown and remains more exclusive than attending a spinning studio. “There’s always another layer of consumption, which pushes people to absorb new goods and new services,” Malcolm notes. And, he adds, it’s not necessarily the activity itself that you’re drawn to – instead, it’s “the ability to distinguish [yourself]from other social groups”.
From this angle, it’s easy to see how we’ve come to associate exercise with consumption. “Some gyms will absolutely be going for the ultimate in aspiration,” Dale says, “and I am not knocking any of those, but we need a mixed economy.” This Girl Can’s research found that cost was the biggest barrier for women on lower incomes, with 49 per cent citing this as an obstacle. If you’re struggling to keep the heating on, apportioning a hefty chunk of your budget to a gym membership just isn’t realistic. It doesn’t help, either, that community leisure centres took a major financial hit during Covid and have been grappling with rising energy costs since. A 2023 estimate suggested that up to 40 per cent of council areas risked losing these facilities or needing to reduce their services.
Twenty-three-year-old new mum Tamiah, from Walsall, Birmingham, is one of the women featured in This Girl Can’s campaign. While she’s recovering from a caesarean section and dealing with joint pain, she needs to work one-on-one with instructors to make sure she doesn’t aggravate this. “Because of the extra care I need, the classes are expensive so I’m not able to do them as much as I want to and can’t afford to do any other type of exercise either,” she says.
Price hikes aren’t necessarily a marketing strategy, though: in recent years, they’ve become unavoidable for some studios. “When I first started teaching, we could charge £5 a class and it was very affordable, but now you really do have to charge £8, £9, £10 per person to be able to pay for the electricity and the rent,” says Helen Fenton, who has been running Orange Bloom yoga studio in Stockport for seven years. “One of my aims when I started my own studio was [that] I wanted everybody to be welcome, I didn’t want any barriers,” she says.
Since the pandemic, “making a profit to pay myself was becoming increasingly harder, but what I didn’t want to do is increase class prices”, she says. So she’s decided to reopen as a community interest company, or CIC, “so that we can apply for funding to keep the classes cheaper, and our aims are to offer some very low or hopefully free yoga, fitness and wellbeing classes”.
If you don’t feel like you belong, not having the right kit to fit in has a bigger effect
Kate Dale, This Girl Can
It’s not just about the price of the session, either. Concerns about sportswear might sound trivial, but they can exacerbate that sense of feeling shut out. “If you don’t feel like you belong, not having the right kit to fit in has a bigger effect,” says Dale. And there’s also the potential sense of guilt, of “can you justify it, if you’ve got to choose between [exercise] and something for families?”
Childcare is inevitably an issue too. Niki Woods is currently running midlife health projects through her CIC across economically deprived areas in Leeds and West Yorkshire, tackling nutrition, fitness and menopause management. For her participants, “especially women, they might only be able to do some fitness while their kids are asleep, or in the other room”. And it tends to only be higher-end gyms that offer facilities such as creches, she notes. “If you can afford to go to David Lloyd,” she says, “you pop the kids in the creche or kids’ club, and you do your thing while your kids are getting looked after. That’s not the case for someone who’s on universal credit or who’s in a minimum wage job”.
Even if affordable facilities technically exist, they might not necessarily be particularly accessible, either. In one of the areas where Woods is running a project, “there’s a leisure centre there, but it’s barely on a bus route, so people would have to walk through an industrial estate for quite a long way, in the dark [in the evenings] to get there”.
Opportunity, or the external factors that make something possible, is a big factor in behaviour change, says Dr Martin Turner, reader in psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University. “If it means catching two buses or a train to actually go to a place where I can exercise, then that’s a barrier to me doing that,” he explains. “Or when the facilities are set up, are they well maintained, are they safe?” When free, ostensibly accessible facilities are put in place, they don’t always work for everyone. “Some communities have put equipment in public parks, but the thing is, once you’re in the winter months, is a woman going to feel safe working out [there]?” he asks.
Of course, exercising doesn’t necessarily require external facilities or a long trek to a venue. YouTube, Instagram and other social media platforms are bursting with free workout plans that, in theory, you can do in your room with minimal equipment. Woods’s projects emphasise “how you can do quite a bit at home, with not a lot of spend”; she reckons that once it’s over, most of the participants will probably continue working out at home, rather than the gym, to keep the costs down.
But it’s not necessarily a catch-all solution: you might lack the space, or worry about annoying the neighbours. Research has repeatedly found that group exercisers are more motivated and more likely to stick to a routine. In one 2017 study, group exercisers reported a 26 per cent reduction in their stress levels, while those who’d gone solo said they noticed no real difference.
What else can be done to make the fitness world more inclusive? Professor Malcolm, meanwhile, suggests that our policies around exercise need to start demonstrating “a desire to tackle inequalities rather than a desire to encourage everybody to do more”. If these policies keep failing to recognise the social barriers, “they’re actually just going to extend those differences between the healthiest and the least healthy”.
And on a more short-term basis? Dale says the sector needs to get better at “understanding the barriers” that lower-income exercisers are facing. That might mean changing the imagery so that “it’s not everyone in the same matching, high-end kit” and setting up more women-only hours or sessions to better meet the needs of different cultural groups. Or, it could be as simple as instructors improving understanding and empathy around “what it’s like to walk through a [gym] door for the very first time, or the first time after a long gap”. One of her “favourite phrases that’s come out of the research”, she recalls, “is a woman who said, ‘I thought I wasn’t made for exercise, but exercise wasn’t made for me’. And I think that sums it all up: what are the changes that [the industry] can make?”
