Animalistic fitness trend has humans exercising on all fours

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Call it animal instinct.

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A strange yet increasingly popular fitness trend has people mimicking animal-like moves by walking, running and jumping on all fours as a form of movement known as “quadrobics.”

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The unconventional exercise style is gaining in popularity on social media with devotees showing off their bear crawls and cat leaps, sometimes while wearing furry masks and tails.

One TikToker who was interviewed exclusively by the New York Post and asked to remain anonymous started doing quadrobics a year ago. The fitness guru was led to quadrobics after learning about therians, a group of people who identify as non-human animals (not furries, who engage with and dress up as anthropomorphic animals.)

The fitness activity isn’t exclusive to therians.

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“It’s definitely a full-body workout,” the person known only as Soleil told the Post. “I’ve actually lost a lot of weight since I started doing it, and I really see the definition in my body. I started getting a six-pack.”

The therian content creator said that she is “still not very good” at quadrobics despite having done the workout for a year. She said it’s “very, very complicated” and added “try it for five minutes and you will be out of breath.”

Soleil spends hours hiking in southern Germany and Austria in search of ideal backdrops for her TikTok videos.

She wears identity-concealing cat masks that she sells on Etsy.

It “definitely makes you feel like an animalistic spirit,” she told the Post.

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Some of the quadrobics movements actually feature similar movements that a regular gym-goer might make.

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Jarrod Nobbe, a personal trainer and USAW national coach, told the Post that quadrobics “overlaps heavily” with what is known in the fitness world as primal movement (natural human movement patterns) or quadrupedal movement training (movement on all fours).

“Primal movement, animal flow and similar practices are gaining traction because people are craving more functional, holistic and playful ways to move,” he said.

Soleil said that she has found the therian community to be “very supportive,” but she has also received backlash from viewers who don’t understand what she is doing or why.

“Many people who have never seen this before, they might think it’s something sexual … ‘Oh, you look like an animal? Are you … attracted to animals?’ Everyone in the community is always like, ‘No, no, that’s not it at all. Why would you assume that?’” she said.

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