Margaret Cirino

I'm seeing more and more lefty gym content here and there.

And here's one really interesting thing I heard.

So that's from the Instagram of Angel Gonzalez.

They're an activist, content creator, and a self-described member of the swoletariat.

Yeah.

Swoletariat.

I called Angel up and they said they first saw this term on a niche Reddit page called r slash Swoletariat.

Yeah, totally.

And I was curious to learn more, so I started looking into explicitly leftist fitness.

And I found something interesting.

There's apparently a history behind getting yoked for the revolution.

That's Devin Thomas O'Shea.

He's a freelance writer who wrote an article for Jacobin, a socialist magazine, about the history of the Turners.

The Turners were Germans who started these nationalist gymnastics clubs in the early 1800s.

Yes, Brittany, this is what we could be doing instead of going to Planet Fitness.

So anyway, these guys, the Turners, were founded by a guy called Friedrich Ludwig Jahn.

So Jan, he's essentially the father of gymnastics.

But his halls weren't just about strengthening the body.

They were also about strengthening the mind and the community, too.

The 1848 revolutions, these were uprisings all across Germany calling for liberal reforms like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, representative government.