If you have a membership at Blink Fitness you may notice a difference on Monday—the exercise chain has decided to forego mirrors in favor of promoting body wellness as an overall theme when working out. Thinking about fitness different isn’t going to go over well with a lot of people—critics are already saying that it will make people work out less efficiently if they don’t have the correct form, while others think that comparing bodies to others around you is a personal choice and shouldn’t affect everyone.
According to Instyle, their mirror campaign is aimed to encourage guests to feel good about themselves no matter their size, and focus on the emotional, not just the physical. “The goal of the Monday Without Mirrors campaign is to challenge our members to think about how exercise makes them feel, not just how it makes them look,” said Ellen Roggemann, Blink Fitness’s Vice President of Marketing. So by covering mirrors on Mondays, Blink is aiming to show that exercise and feeling good about yourself is so much more than what you see in your reflection—a notable point that you wouldn’t think about unless the privilege of looking at a mirror was taken away.
Roggemann added, “With ‘swimsuit season’ getting into full swing, we want our members to shift their summer fitness goals to feeling healthy and confident versus chasing the perfect ‘summer body.’ We want to change the rhetoric around fitness to focus on the emotional benefits of exercise, and encourage our members to take a break from the mirror and concentrate on working out to feel healthier. We work out for the mood, not just the mirror.” It’s only on Monday’s but you have to admit that it’s cool that gyms are even thinking about ways to include body positivity.