A Recipe For Success

Joe Wicks has gone from boot-camp fitness instructor to bestselling entrepreneur almost overnight. The millennial heir to Jamie Oliver tells Gurjit Degun how he became a social media sensation quite by accident.

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Joe Wicks is better known as The Body Coach to his 1.8 million Instagram followers, who usually see him clad in shorts and a tight Tshirt shouting: “That right there is lean in 15.”

When he speaks to Campaign, before rushing off to shoot a TV show, he’s a pared-back version of the loud thirty something who posts 15-second video recipes, exercise routines and body transformations – and calls broccoli “midget trees”. Today, he looks relaxed in jeans and a (slightly less tight) T-shirt, although not without his trademark big curly hair.

“I feel like I’ve accidentally become a social media marketing expert, really not knowing what I was doing,” he says. That “accident” has led to him selling two million books in just 18 months, and in the process becoming author of the fastest-selling weightloss plan ever.

The 31-year-old began his career as a personal trainer running a boot camp at Old Deer Park in Richmond, London. His first social media post was on Twitter. “I created a hashtag called #teamlean2013 and was just putting things out like: ‘Who’s going to the gym today?’ Just little motivational stuff.

“It built up a bit of traction and then I was posting recipes of stuff was eating, just observational stuff on my journey to getting lean. I probably had 10,000 followers.” Today, on Twitter, he has more than 265,000.

Later in 2013, when Instagram launched video, Wicks was encouraged by a friend to use the platform. “I was reluctant to do it because I thought it was just girls posting selfies – I didn’t really understand it,” he explains.

But after looking into it and realising that people were posting video recipes, he decided to give it a go with the hashtag #leanin15 – the number referring to how many seconds the video lasts.