Back in mid-March, on the day the government announced that schools would be closed until further notice, Joe Wicks lay in bed unable to sleep. Just after midnight, three words popped into his head: “PE. With. Joe.” The 35-year-old fitness instructor from Surrey texted them to Nikki, his older brother and creative director at their company, The Body Coach. The next day, they pitched the idea on social media and emailed their database of 25,000 schools. The first live, daily 20-minute exercise session would be at 9am on Monday 23 March on YouTube, coincidentally the first morning after Boris Johnson’s directive that we all must stay at home.
Wicks, who has Saint Sebastian curls and a penchant for sockless trainers, says he never gets nervous before recording a workout, but on that day he did find his heart beating unusually fast. He relaxed soon enough in front of a camera set up in his almost pathologically tidy living room in Richmond, London: Nikki told him, through an earpiece, that more than 700,000 households were joining him, doing burpees, duck walks and various other hellish exercises with cutesy names. The next day, the live audience peaked at 954,000, making it the most popular streamed workout ever. Wicks decided that any proceeds from the sessions would go to NHS charities; ultimately he raised £580,000.
“It was on the second day that I realised just how big this was going to be,” says Wicks in his kitchen, his fingers laced around a mug of salted caramel and clementine hot chocolate, trying to warm up after the Observer’s photoshoot. “Even before I started PE With Joe, my aim was to engage young people in fitness and encourage families to do it together and at school. I just thought it was going to take me 10 years and it would have been me doing campaigns, going to the government, doing TV shows for Channel 4, documentaries, but it just went: Bang! There you go. PE With Joe – that’s my gift to the world. And I made the impact that I needed to.”
Wicks began the first workout by saying he wanted to be “the PE teacher for the nation” but, over 18 weeks, he became much more than that for many of us. He became the person, outside our nuclear family, who was most present in our lives during lockdown. We outsourced to “Captain Serotonin” our physical and even mental wellbeing. We got to know his wife, Rosie, who became the substitute teacher when Wicks’s wrist packed in, and their children, Indie and Marley. We could see his delight when he learned that someone was tuning in from somewhere far-flung, like Guam, or that Louis Theroux had done every session except one. We felt his pain on “Fancy Dress Fridays” when he sweated through his workouts dressed in a polyester Spider-Man suit or as Scooby-Doo. And we could tell the rare days when Wicks himself was flat, perhaps exhausted by the restrictions of Covid, or having two children under three, or maybe just because he was doing a ridiculous amount of exercise.
So it wasn’t a total surprise when Wicks told us in mid-July that he was wrapping up PE With Joe. “Near the end of it, I was tired,” he says. “I wasn’t physically tired, more emotionally I just felt like it was Groundhog Day. It was emotional, but it was a relief, because in the end I was running out of ideas. And I’d run out of fancy-dress outfits.”
As much as we might have felt that we knew Wicks, most of us didn’t really. On Desert Island Discs in June, he spoke of his chaotic upbringing in Epsom, with his mother on benefits and his father a heroin addict. He left school aged 15, and only built up a following as a personal trainer after years of handing out flyers and doing bootcamps in south-west London. “If you just follow me now,” he says, “you might be: ‘Oh, he’s got books and he’s got this big house and he’s got this amazing life.’ But I grew up in a council estate and my dad was a drug addict. I like to share that story because it means that we all have a choice in life, we can all make our own path.”
As lockdown sensations go, Wicks looks set to have more longevity than most. The week of our interview, he had just completed a 24-hour workout for Children in Need, raising £2.5m (“My back was so tight, cor, it was horrible”). He had launched a new app that will offer live workouts and new recipes, and a book, his 10th, 30 Day Kick Start Plan. He had also filmed appearances on the Jonathan Ross Show and a Christmas special of Friday Night Feast with Jamie Oliver and Jimmy Doherty. “Got to entertain,” says Wicks. “People want shows around Christmas time, so we’ve got to keep doing our job.”
During the second lockdown, Wicks returned with Wake up With Joe, shorter, 15-minute workouts released three times a week on YouTube. “Obviously, I’ve got books, and I’ve got a business behind that, but the forefront of what I do is free content and giving as much as I can,” he says. “I believe when you give, give, give, the world ends up giving you stuff back. It’s a lovely cycle of positive energy, I suppose.”
Like everyone else, Wicks has had unsettling moments in 2020. He moved from Richmond to Surrey, after local attention became overwhelming. In September, after Covid restrictions were tightened again, he posted a video saying that he was “finding it hard to be optimistic”. But he’s determined to keep the mental health and fitness of young people on the agenda.
“Now it’s: ‘How can I keep that going?’” says Wicks. “So for me, it has been an amazing year. I’ve had my low points, where I’ve felt very disconnected from my family and friends. But in terms of my mission and my purpose and my career, I’ve had the best year of my life.”
