We would like to share with you one of the top 108 capstone projects of Fall 2025 at the HBS major, authored by Azaan Bilal, Rahi Patel and Joshua Thomas.
The digital landscape has become one of the most potent forces shaping identity across populations, impacting the discourse on various topics. This has been relevant in online fitness communities, which are dedicated spaces for promoting health, discipline, and personal growth, and have opened the door to ideological conversations. As the boundaries between biological phenomena, masculinity, testosterone, and politics start to coexist, rather than acting as separate entities, young men find themselves navigating an ecosystem where training the body coexists with training their belief systems.
Over the past decade, social media has catalyzed a shift from traditional to narrative-based online fitness communities. In a traditional sense, these communities had a sole purpose: to promote fitness and healthy habits through tutorials and tips/tricks. Through the amplification of narratives, with influencers such as Andrew Tate, Liver King, Nelk Boys, and Joe Rogan, topics such as hypermasculinity mesh with strong political rhetoric, which creates a spotlight on how feminized society is and needs a revitalization of masculinity. What was once fitness advice has turned into bold claims such as masculinity is under siege, discipline is equivalent to nationalism, and greater feminization leads to a weaker society.
The project is grounded through one driving question: How do online fitness communities transform biological frameworks related to testosterone, masculinity, and discipline into moral and political frameworks that influence young men’s right-wing identity formation? To investigate this nuanced question, we took on the challenge of examining the evolution of the online fitness community through different angles, using our assigned analytical objects, such as masculinity, testosterone, and identity politics. These objects will not only aid in understanding the biological claims circulating in these communities, but also in how these claims are socially reconstructed to serve and support different cultural and political ideologies.
As fitness content has migrated from long-form YouTube tutorials to aesthetic-inspired short-form content, driven by TikTok and X algorithms, the definition of fitness has completely transformed over time. More specifically, the definition dips into political messaging and rhetoric, controversial ideological narratives, and gender discourse. This project focuses on analyzing the fusion of online fitness communities and ideology pushes the “Make Alphas Great Again” mantra and its implications for future generations.
Check full project here
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