Green juice, Flyknits and Lululemon: The rise of the boutique gym girl

Ever since fitness became a social thing, the socially ambitious realised there were more than just health benefits to being a fitness freak, and the London gym girl was born.

The first thing you’ll spot is her skin – it glows. You think it’s because she’s been sunning herself on Bali beaches, but really she’s been slathering coats of Bali Body on herself in her Clapham two-bed.

She’ll definitely be wearing something from lululemon, worn with a pair of box-fresh neon Nike Flyknits. She replaces them regularly. If she’s required to smarten up, she’ll still wear something which shows off her enviable midriff.

Her hair is always tangled, but she gets away with it in a sort of just-rolled-off-my-yoga-mat way. In reality she’s waking up 15 minutes early every morning to wash it in birch water and spritz it with argon oil.

During the day she works in PR, where she spends the majority of her time sending “bubbly” emails about pop-up launches or her clients’ revolutionary new brand of cold-pressed juice. In her spare time, she blogs – not because she enjoys it, but because it’s the best way to get invites to all the new classes.

She works hard but prefers to work out: the most valuable time of her day is the hour before work and the languid sunset hour after. She is in her element at a boutique studio: out east she’s doing Vinyasa Flow at Frame, Primal Movement at new Clapton studio Blok, or Calisthenics at BaseFIT. While west she’ll do a TRX class at Heartcore, head to Core Collective for HIIT, or to KX for a spot of Barre.

The fact is, she’d much rather be spotted getting pumped than getting pissed – that’s why she forks out £79 a month for a ClassPass. While other girls would be content getting papped by a club photographer, the dream for the gym girl is getting featured on the @fitnessgirlsmotivation Instagram, which is why she seems to spend every waking moment posting pictures of her impossibly-toned tum or the latest concoction she whipped up in her Nutribullet.

She’s obsessed with Kayla Itsines, Alexis Ren, Tash Oakley, and anyone else who bares their steely buns on Australian beaches. The fact is, she’s in the same shape as most of these girls: she tells herself it’s only the grey London weather that stops her having her own cult following. She doesn’t even need to work out – the gym is just her natural habitat.

Everyone has to cut loose, though. If she does fancy a tipple, you’ll find her in the sort of members’ clubs where attractive people with tanned skin and white smiles tend to congregate, or maybe a hotel bar, like the Hoxton. She’d go on a date to the Rev W. J. Simpson on Goodge Street. She’ll go out with her friends and her boyfriend’s friends – he’s 6’2″, with his own health food delivery start-up and abs of stainless steel.

While she seems to hibernate during the winter, the warmer months are her time to shine – all those hours in the gym aren’t for nothing. She’s booked off pretty much every Friday and Monday between June and September, where she’ll be alternating weekends between niche Cotswolds festivals and London daytime terrace parties.

Music-wise, she really wants you to think she knows about house – that’s why she learnt names like Bodhi and Wayward in case you catch her off guard. Regardless, you both know that when the running headphones are on her playlist is 75 per cent Kygo. No-one else nails her tropical vibe quite as well.

In the day it’s all goji berries this, matcha tea that – whatever food trend you’re reading about, you can bet she’s already been incorporating it into her macrobowls for a month. She called quinoa way before it become big, and now hasn’t stopped going on about teff since she read about it in Grazia.

It’s only when you take her out to dinner that she really shows her true colours – she’ll order the pomegranate-and-pear salad because she’s decided to go gluten free for April, but you can bet if you floated the idea of a cheesy garlic bread she’d write it off as a cheat meal in a heartbeat.