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New fitness site is an exercise in diversity

Karen Weintraub
Special for USA TODAY

Walk into an exercise class or turn on a workout video and odds are you’ll see a familiar sight: An instructor who’s young, super-energetic, ultra-thin and white.

Kristin McGee, Deazie Gibson, Liz LeFrois, Gerren Liles and Amanda Young are the face of a new fitness program from AcaciaTV.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. But for some people, it’s hard to feel as if they belong in an exercise class when the instructor looks nothing like them.

Now, an online fitness site, AcaciaTV, is offering a much wider-than-usual range of instructors. Roughly half are Asian or black. A number are over 35. Some grew up eating bacon cheeseburgers and pursuing careers far from the gym.

AcaciaTV had offered exercise videos for most of a decade, but in 2014, its parent company, RLJ Entertainment, decided to transform its offerings into a digital platform. Its sister brand, Acorn TV, earned 150,000 subscribers in its first year, according to RLJ’s CEO, Miguel Penella, who hopes for a similar success with Acacia.

RLJ hired Allison Rand as Acacia’s general manager and told her to find a good use for the company’s library of workout videos. Rand decided to complement the library with a more interactive workout experience: blogs on topics of broad interest, workout tips on Facebook, and training tailored to meet personal needs and goals. Acacia launched its website earlier this month.

Rand also set out to increase the diversity of Acacia’s fitness instructors. RLJ Entertainment was founded by Robert L. Johnson, who also founded Black Entertainment Television, so it fit the company's business model to appeal to a wide audience. And it fit Rand’s desire to help people she says are being left behind by traditional fitness programs.

“This is about saying to the universe that we know it’s not just skinny white women who are working out,” she says.

Rand and her five core trainers — three of whom are non-white — strive to reach people who aren’t gym rats and who may not be comfortable putting on tight clothing and sweating in public.

Most of the videos are aimed at beginners, who are looking for “healthier, joyful lifestyles,” Penella says. The site works on a membership model and costs $6.99 a month for unlimited streaming of fitness videos, as well as support from trainers.

The trainers also have unusual biographies that help them relate to the brand’s target audience.

When Gerren Liles was a kid in Brooklyn, his parents would wake him up in the middle of the night to go to White Castle for burgers and fries. He had been an elementary school teacher for six years when his lifestyle caught up with him. He had early symptoms of the heart disease, diabetes and other chronic illnesses that had plagued his family.

He eventually quit teaching, though he goes back to his old school to lead “fitness days” and raises money for health and fitness programs in the Dominican Republic.

Liles, who now works out three hours a day, says too many fitness instructors care about helping only clients who can benefit them. “We should care about everyone,” he says. “We should work to change as many lives as we can, as opposed to those who can glorify us.”

Deazie Gibson spent more than five years in New York City trying to make it in the world of competitive fitness. But no matter how much she worked out and starved herself, she still had the body she was born with: tall, muscular and with “a little more junk in the trunk” than her competitors. Not the idealized body type the judges were going for.

She gave up competing and became a flight attendant. Talking with her passengers — people outside the rarified world of competitive fitness — Gibson realized how little many of them knew about health and fitness, and how much they needed to know.

Now, she designs her workouts with her passengers in mind.

“I need to think about how to convey this information, making sure something makes sense,” Gibson says. “All the big words we use — your abductors and your lumbar spine — they could care two rams about that. What they want to know is, how can I sit down and stand up without my back hurting?”

Amanda Young discovered in college that by teaching fitness classes, she could marry her love of exercise with her desire to help others.

But teaching fitness was always secondary to her social work, which evolved into a job as a middle school counselor in East Harlem.

Then she was diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia, a severe, chronic pain condition that made it hard to focus on her kids. She quit social work last year and became a full-time fitness instructor and advocate for trigeminal neuralgia research.

Young says she sees her own pain as a way of connecting with consumers who want to get fit despite whatever problems they may have.

“Being a role model to help them figure out how to get there is really what we do,” she says. “We support people in helping them to be a better version of who they are right now.”

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