Hot Girl Walks From TikTok Have Helped Rebrand Walking

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The new fad exercise on TikTok is: walking. Rebranded as the Hot Girl Walk,the hashtag has gotten over 451 million views. Videos are going viral of people claiming they’ve lost weight after simply strolling around for a long time.

A Hot Girl Walk means five-hour excursions around your neighborhood, paired with cute accessories and a matching outfit for passersby to see.

Social media has long turned various kinds of health trends into viral phenomena simply by making it look really nice. There were the Chloe Ting YouTube workouts at the beginning of quarantine. The 12/3/30 treadmill workout was popularized by YouTuber Lauren Giraldo. Searches for “reformer pilates” exploded this summer after several celebrities revealed that it was part of their workouts.

Hot Girl Walks have come on the heels of self-care videos and “clean girl TikTok,” envisioning the imaginary woman who is so wealthy that she has hours of spare time to walk around in expensive clothing. And the rebranding of walking as a valid and desirable form of fitness has been a fun reintroduction of the activity, even if attaching it to weight loss and online diet culture has its own unique downside. Selling the physical results and the aspirational aesthetic is what has made Hot Girl Walks as popular as the activity itself.