NOT YOUR AVERAGE JOE
SUCCESS EXACTS A PRICE. For Joe Wicks, that price is pain. “Today I’m getting some treatment because I’m just so sore,” he says on a breakfast call from his London home. “I train so much that I just don’t get enough recovery.” Shortly, he’s expecting a knock on the door from a guy trained in acupuncture and osteopathy. “Because, yeah, I’m smashing my body six or seven days a week, you know?”
Well, we could have guessed. Wicks isn’t so much an obsessive trainer as an overworked one. Though he was already thriving prepandemic as The Body Coach – an online fitness and nutrition expert whose 90 Day Plan had gone gangbusters alongside eight bestselling cookbooks – it was a masterstroke born of a late-night epiphany that sent his celebrity (and training load) to the next level.
As Wicks tells it, he was lying in bed on March 20 last year, ruminating on the just-announced UK-wide, COVID-forced closure of schools, when three words flashed before him: PE With Joe. Within seconds, the details followed: workouts led by Wicks from his home every weekday at 9am, livestreamed on YouTube.
Word spread like juicy gossip. Three days later, when Wicks filmed his first PE With Joe workout, he had 806,000 live streams. On day two, 955,000 – a world record. After 10 days, the videos had been viewed 28 million times. For a battler who’d grown up with little money and limited prospects, life had just
