Courtesy of Hope Zuckerbrow.
"REMINDER: exercise doesn't have to be done in a cold sterile environment," reads part of a caption on one of Hope Zuckerbrow's TikTok videos, posted on September 15.
The video shows 25-year-old Zuckerbrow, who is based in Texas, exercising on a walking pad while watching TV in a darkened room with dim, colorful lighting.
It's one of the many clips she has posted about "cozy cardio," a term she coined in November 2022 to broadly describe exercising in a non-intense manner and in a way that is comfortable for the participant.
"Cozy cardio is really just supposed to redefine what exercise and movement means to you," Zuckerbrow told Business Insider, adding that while she previously thought of exercise as a punishment, "cozy cardio" is meant to "bring back enjoyment to movement."
Zuckerbrow has posted many videos demonstrating her cozy cardio routines in the past year. While no individual one appears to have gone particularly viral, the concept quickly began to spread and has become something of a buzzword as other creators began to use the term in their own lowkey workout videos, and it was dubbed a new trend by multiple media outlets.
Zuckerbrow told BI she tries not to be strict about defining the trend, and said that "everybody's cozy cardio is going to look a little bit different."
For her, it means exercising in ambient lighting, wearing slippers and pajamas, she said. "It means having my favorite protein coffee, and my favorite movie, and hopping on my walking pad."
For others, the activity might involve "making their apartment super comfortable and doing a little 20-, 30-minute YouTube workout or maybe hopping on their bicycle that they have at home," she said.
The trend has resulted in a lot of attention for Zuckerbrow, who currently has over 973,000 TikTok followers. Her "cozy cardio" videos have received a relatively high number of views on her account, and she told BI she is trying to get the term trademarked.
Along with the outward success, the story of how "cozy cardio" blew up online has also come hand in hand with personal development for the creator, who told BI the activity has helped to heal her own strained relationship with exercise.
Zuckerbrow said that she is not against people using "cozy cardio" for weight loss — she even uses the hashtag #weightloss in some of her cozy cardio videos — but that's not what it was created for.
Before she was known for her "cozy cardio," Zuckerbrow's TikTok content was primarily focused on weight loss. She told BI she previously lost around 100 pounds from 2020 to 2022, and she has shared multiple TikTok videos about her weight loss with her audience.
However, towards the end of 2022, Zuckerbrow said she had gained an estimated half of the weight she lost back, adding that this caused her to reconsider what she was posting about on her account.
"You can't be a weight loss account on social media while gaining weight, you know what I'm saying? And so that really forced me to look in the mirror and decide what I wanted my page to be about. If weight loss really truly was what I stood on and what I wanted everybody to learn from me on, and that just really wasn't it," she told BI.
Zuckerbrow said that after she gained weight back, she noticed that people began to treat her less favorably, and she began to consider the question, "Who am I without my weight loss?"
"That is what kind of sparked it all for me. I really had to learn to grow outside of what my body looked like," she told BI.
Zuckerbrow said she began making content focused on what health and wellness meant to her outside of weight loss, which is when she discovered cozy cardio.
Zuckerbrow told BI that since she's started focusing on "cozy cardio," her attitude towards exercise has changed.
"It didn't feel like a punishment. It didn't feel like a super intense workout that I had been telling myself I had to do if I wanted to be healthier," she said.
Zuckerbrow now experiences enjoyment in exercising multiple times a week and told BI it has also helped her to gain the confidence to start going to the gym.
Though her TikTok content was once focused on weight loss, Zuckerbrow says she now considers herself to be a health, wellness, and lifestyle content creator with a focus on self-love.
"I think the beginning of my journey on social media, the weight loss content, it's not something that I'm super proud of now because I don't think that I think weight loss should be in the center of anybody's world like it was for me, but I'm super happy to have grown the way that I have from it," she told BI.
