Gold’s Gym as a “home”: exploring the tensions between traditional bodybuilders and fitness influencers in a commercially branded space

Bodybuilding “mecca” Gold’s Gym Venice is a popular hotspot for athletes, celebrities, and their fans. Traditional and new media celebrities inhabit the space together and use it for a variety of purposes. Online fitness personalities often congregate within the walls of Gold’s Gym, using the commercial space to film, host meet-ups with fans, and socialize with other social media stars. Recently, Gold’s Gym Venice has placed restrictions on when, where, and how the stars can film.

This thesis looks at fitness personalities’ interactions within Gold’s Gym Venice and how they describe those relationships to their online audience. Part one looks at the rules and regulations placed on the fitness personalities, how they interact with the brand of Gold’s Gym, and the space of the Venice location. Exploring how the fitness personalities interact with management, other bodybuilders, and personal trainers, provides insight into how new digital workers navigate their surroundings. The final two sections analyze how work is defined in bodybuilding culture and how fitness personalities construct authenticity in an online space through describing their offline relationships to their audience. Fitness personalities have often been studied separately from their surroundings, and this thesis analyzes these bodies in connection with their surroundings in order to understand how new digital workers navigate creative work in a traditional commercial space.