Fitness For All: How Black Fitness Brands Are Reclaiming Wellness
Fitness spaces have too often been designed around Black bodies or excluded them entirely. However, now Black-led brands are reversing that trend. With culturally rooted energy, they’re transforming fitness into a community of healing and belonging. Black-led trainers and wellness collectives are creating movements through health and wellness.
Tai Beauchamp, the owner and operator behind the wellness brand, Morning Mindset with Tai, told BET exclusively, “One of the barriers I noticed early on was that if you didn’t identify with ‘working out,’ you were somehow seen as not being well. But what I realized through Morning Mindset with Tai is that Black and Brown women experience wellness differently.”
She continued, “There are eight forms of wellness—spiritual, emotional, physical, social, intellectual, environmental, financial, and occupational—and we tap into them all.” Beauchamp’s approach to wellness is inclusive and all-encompassing in many ways, which seems to be a common theme among fitness for people of color. It’s always about more than just fitness; it’s about community; it’s about living well. She shakes hike and mindfulness experiences with strangers who turn into community. Her next hike is in Los Angeles on Nov. 15.
According to the CDC, 30.0% of non-Hispanic Black adults reported no leisure-time physical activity outside of work. This is higher than the national average of 25.3%
Across the country, Black-owned studios and trainers are flipping the script on grind culture, expanding the movement to feel joyful, inclusive, and liberating, just like Beauchamp. There are many that stand out, including TrapHaus in NYC, a Black-owned and led studio that fuses pilates and strength training with trap and house beats, and where fitness and culture collide. Getting to celebrate your culture, or at least feel it’s welcome in spaces that have typically leaned away from us, but still capitalize on us, is invigorating.
And that is the name of the game for Black-owned fitness and wellness spaces. There’s often an intersectionality of two or more intentions beyond just physical fitness, and a lot of the time, it’s community-building. And where there’s community, there’s support, there’s permission, there’s joy.
“Wellness isn’t new to us, it’s ancestral,” Tai Beauchamp explained.
“Through Morning Mindset, we affirm, we move, we connect, and we reset. People who came for the workout found so much more—they found joy and connection.”
“We make wellness communal,” Etienne Maurice said. Maurice is the founder of WalkGood LA, a family-led community wellness organization that provides spaces for healing through community yoga classes, hikes, run clubs, healing circles, and numerous other activations throughout Los Angeles. “For so long, our communities were excluded from wellness spaces that were never designed with us in mind,” Maurice said. “WalkGood was born to remind our people that healing belongs to us too. It’s not a luxury. It’s our birthright.”
Black people deserve to be healthy and well. “[Sometimes] in our community, a lot of people don’t take their health seriously, but it’s good to see that changing,” strength and conditioning coach and powerlifter Spinner Almighty told BET.
Data shows that (in 2018), Black adults over 18 were only 83% as likely to meet both aerobic activity and muscle strengthening guidelines, and 19% were more likely to meet neither guideline.
Black fitness visibility is long overdue. Spinner continued, “It’s always amazing to see us doing different things besides just a random sport, like football or basketball,” he told BET exclusively. “A lot of us go to school for this. I went to school to be a strength and conditioning coach. Now you see more Black strength coaches and trainers taking over the field and putting us in a better space for health.”
Gone are the days of burning calories at all costs. Black fitness/wellness brand owners are shifting the world with their inclusive, community-building access and approaches. They are reminding Black wellness seekers that our bodies deserve movement and movements designed for us, by us.
If you’re searching for movement that moves you and that is grounded in community, check out these Black-owned wellness/fitness brands/trainers.
