Communicating Extremity: Fitness Efficacy and Standards Relate to Using Extreme Imagery and Messaging to Create Fitness-Related Media

ABSTRACT

Health-related social media increasingly competes with other forms of health communication for public attention. To advance understanding of the genesis of health-related social media communicating extreme fitness standards, we investigated women’s creation of fitspiration, social-media content combining fitness images with effortful messages. In a pre-registered study, we hypothesized that creating extreme fitspiration content would relate positively to fitness fantasizing and to exercise self-efficacy, fitness perfectionism, physical activity, thin- and muscular-ideal internalizations, and self-objectification. Undergraduate women (N = 277) created their own fitspiration content by selecting from fitness images and messages that varied in extremity. Fitness fantasizing related positively to creating more extreme fitspiration. When controlling statistically for all other individual-difference variables, exercise self-efficacy and perfectionistic strivings emerged as key variables associated with creating extreme fitspiration content. Results suggest that women who are confident and strive toward challenging goals may create fitspiration content that communicates extreme standards. This work has implications for understanding a potential disconnect between fitspiration creators and consumers, which may illuminate ways to promote healthy fitness communications online.

Acknowledgments

We thank Marci Lobel, Daniel Klein, and Allison Sweeney for helpful comments on this project and Steven Honovic and Jenna Petrik for valuable research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The SPSS data and syntax files, along with a data codebook, for this study can be found on OSF at osf.io/v7xyd.

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2023.2199517.

Notes

1. Most participants were between the ages of 18 and 22, but a small number of them reported ages above 30 (i.e., 31, 35, 39, 57). Although our university undergraduates are primarily younger adults aged 18 to 24, it is not unusual for us to have a few older participants in some samples (e.g., in other studies, our participants’ ages have ranged up to 43 or 47). Therefore, we assumed the participant who reported being 57 years old entered their age correctly and we considered their data accordingly. Additionally, whether including or excluding two age outliers (i.e., 39 and 57 years old), age is unrelated to any of the outcome variables of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by a W. Burghardt Turner Graduate Fellowship awarded to Ashley Araiza by the Center for Inclusive Education at Stony Brook University. Data collection was funded in part by a Turner Academic Year Research Grant awarded to Ashley Araiza during Spring 2021 by the Center for Inclusive Education at Stony Brook University.