The Tyranny of Spin Class

survival of the fittest, really? in 2025?

D Fitness hogs a basement unit on the corner of Moorgate, obscured by rows of pristine office buildings stacking on each other like acrylic storage boxes. Years ago, I used to walk past this spot on my way to school every morning, not knowing that the construction sites around me were about to litter highrises, and glass could spread like a virus.

I open the glassy door, descend a set of glassy stairs and check into my 17:45 “Cycle Ride” class. As a new member, I am entitled to a free Energy Shake that would be ready for me when the class is done. I get changed and waddle into the studio wearing my studded spin shoes.

The room is uncomfortably dim, save for the neon light strips around the ceiling as if this is a nightclub. Three LED screens blare violently by contrast. It displays every attendee’s full name, arranged into a neat table yet to be populated with our cycling statistics. Gusts of sterile air rush forward from every direction, a coolness I will later go on to appreciate. Well-groomed people, mostly men, appear blurrily in various mental states of idleness and fixations, already pedaling away and straining to look at ease, as if they belong.

Already feeling intimidated and overwhelmed, I find my bike towards the end of the room and hop on. The door locks and the class jolts to a start, and I get assaulted by screens and sounds and artificial lights from the get-go. We cycle to an ever-flowing stream of EDM tracks, slowly upping the gear of our bikes on a journey through imaginary hills. We also have the choice——the FREEDOM——to “stay where we are” and do “what’s most comfortable”. On the screen, there are animations of our digitised selves clad in spandex, competing against each other on a computer-generated motorway. Our bike number flashes on top of our faceless avatars——I pedal harder to see if it’s actually real-time——and the avatar with my number lurches forward in tune to my hard work. A fleeting moment of triumph.

My legs start to burn, but I am told to try even harder. I’ve always wondered why they keep these places so dim. To focus more on the “grind”? To create communality? To hide our grimaces? To “respect” our differences in capabilities and, simultaneously, absolutely shaming and blaming those who struggle? The screen flips onto the next page, which is filled with our bike numbers in boxes that are colour-coded by our real-time speed. The instructor chants “YELLOW” and we escalate on cue to hit the target RPM range. A dollop of yellow diffuses across the screen, and the ones who didn’t meet the target become eyesores. Then, a fierce red, then back to green and grey as the music relaxes, the colours of weakness, passivity, laziness, incompetency.

It’s very much like an underground rave, but the painful kind, every second of it hypnotising and dehumanising in equal measure. We grunt under immense physical exertion for our names to move up and down on a screen. The third page is our performance summary, a real-time ranking of everyone’s “miles travelled” and “maximum RPM”. I pedal harder to see the numbers jump up, but I still need a lot more mileage to overtake the person above me. An active fault line lies between us, if you will. I stop trying.

I lose all sensations in my lower body as I enter writer mode and draft this piece out in my head. I now know why the demographic of D Fitness drastically differs from my previous spin class titled Taylor Swift Sunday. I had been acclimatised then to a room of sweaty Swifties spinning away while screaming “fuck the patriarchy” at the top of our lungs.

Here, D Fitness is playing into the hands of the affirmation-seeking finance bros. The Alpha males who are trying to become Sigma males, in their Rab down puffers, Patagonia vests, Ralph Lauren suits and Huel-fueled bodies. The target demographic is those who believe in numbers that hold all possible answers and the invisible hand that will right all wrong. The victim and beneficiary of meritocracy whose life’s worth has always been quantified and not experienced. People who have been ranked all their lives and told they should ascend at all costs.

I have accidentally stumbled into this stock market of theirs, except we are ourselves the livestocks that are being priced, dissected, exposed and judged, ascending towards a hollow goal with our flesh and bones. Fuck the actual grind: you’re supposed to be distracted by the numbers on the screen and excel through it. Fuck communality: this is a winner-takes-all world and people who waddle gets eliminated. Fuck inclusivity: didn’t you hear me the first time when I said the winner takes all? And fuck pain: you’re supposed to enjoy this. You’re en route to your dream body, dream lifestyle, dream class and dream status.

I later found out that more intermediate classes feature timed “challenges” that translate into points, which then accumulate to form your overall “level” at D Fitness. They have their own championship league, and people eat it up. The place is popular, the after-work hour classes often sell out. Statistics are addictive, and if I were a decade younger with an ego ten times more fragile, it would have worked on me. I would be showing up here every week, just driven by pure spite and determination, because even though I tried my best I was still ranked No.48 in the class. There are 50 bikes in total. Now I just laugh and write a spiteful essay on it.

I sip my horrendously-tasting Energy Shake on my way out. My thigh and calves are particularly numb, but the endorphins cloud my consciousness like butter smearing on a hot pan. If I ranked any higher, I would probably find myself conflating the biological high from a workout with the psychological high from winning, and then winning with a statistical outperformance. Maybe that was their trick so you’d keep coming back, but it is dangerous all the same. You’d equate joy with victory, and attribute that victory to better data. My numbers are me and they mean everything.

This is a parable of fandom too. Success doesn’t mean anything nowadays if there are no numbers to prove it. You constantly see fans of younger idol groups saying that G-Dragon has flopped because his Spotify streams didn’t surpass however million in the first 24 hours. People get addicted to numbers as a shorthand of gratification. Big data platforms like “云合” are cited in neiyu fan wars now to prove a celebrity’s popularity. Fans make up metrics to secure a win that wasn’t there to be won in the first place. Then, they associate the win with their labour and societal value.

Places like D Fitness feed on this trend and this mentality. It makes you feel like the “Cycle Rhythm” (No Data) class next door is for losers, oldies or worse: women. Data craze in fanquan fuels endless chart-beating, overconsumption and waste, comments controlling, inauthentic reviews and more. I heard that fans of Bai Jingting and Zhang Ruonan flipped at the PR team of “难哄” because they mistakenly posted a Douyin reel with the official account and not the actors’. This had directed “traffic” to the wrong place because it could’ve boosted their follower count. Fans are becoming self-taught data analysts and marketing specialists, because data means victory, and victory is joy and self-worth.

The manipulation comes down to them knowing you want to feel better about yourself, and you need to feel real shitty first to have the room to “bounce back” up. You are coerced, even bullied, into self-loathe and then self-betterment. You need to manufacture failure before you manufacture relational success.

My friend and I come out of the class laughing and cursing at the tyranny of it all. She told me she once tried to use the “accessible lift” because her legs were giving out after the class, but it was “out of service”. She peeked in, and the lift is actually used as towel storage. We laugh and curse a bit more. We are going to get malatang, and then milk tea. Just to feel better about ourselves.