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There’s this one specific indignity that almost all lifters eventually experience. A gym rat who does all the right things—lifts heavy, gets enough protein, wears correct-inseam athletic shorts—might, after a while, break a plateau and squat their PR. They feel good. Then they’ll turn around and see, one squat rack over, some guy in jeans warming up with their max weight.
It’s confounding. Why would a strong lifter favor denim, which isn’t designed for workouts and can inhibit movement? Why is this mythical figure—similar to the kid who wears shorts all through winter—omnipresent at every gym? And why, in an era when we have so many optimized activewear options, are guys even lifting in jeans in the first place?
The practice has long been frowned upon in most facilities and could get you kicked out of some mid-workout. (The reasoning was that rivets could tear bench upholstery and loops may get caught in machines.) Still, if you hit the gym regularly you’ll dependably spot either an older guy on a cardio machine in a baggy light wash, not really breaking a sweat, or a construction worker covered in dust moving serious weight. Though there for very different reasons, neither ever seem fazed by the prospect of getting kicked out, since they’re either old and self-actualized enough for this not to matter—or are strong enough that they just don’t care.
Recently, though, we’ve been confronted with some high-profile examples of gym jeans in the public sphere. Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who spent his short presidential campaign working out shirtless, and, more recently, leg pressing at a DC Equinox in a similar unconventional getup, is the most well-known: He’s pretty much always wearing slim-cut straight-leg jeans. Lenny Kravitz had a viral moment in 2024 when he posted a video of himself wearing leather pants in the weight room, but real heads know that he also posted a video of himself doing a rings workout in low-rise flares. Historically, wrestling and living legend Stone Cold Steve Austin gave us his most memorable moments all while wearing jeans.
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Still, these caught our attention because they felt like curious exceptions. In my two-decades-plus of working out in mid-level commercial gyms, I’ve seen more instances of Rick Owens trousers near the weights. And, until this past fall, I had rarely seen jeans on anyone who was relatively young. I’ve personally only exercised in jeans in a couple of rushed instances—say, on the way home from work or straight from the airport after a trip—and felt self-conscious and restricted the entire time. (Am I really doing this landmine workout in old 501s? And, more importantly, do I lift heavy enough weight to earn the right to wear jeans?) But in the few months I’ve been hosting park workouts for my nutrition newsletter, Super Health, it’s the younger folks who have been nonchalantly showing up in hard pants, from jeans to Carhartts. I know one trainer who only lifts in Dickies, while another designer friend does his home calisthenics workouts in assorted nonstretch pants. Lifting in jeans is barely demon activity anymore.
In part, gym jeans have enjoyed increased visibility thanks to a new crop of fitness influencers. Truett Hanes, a world record holder for pull-ups—10,001 in 24 hours—ran the Austin and New York marathons wearing jeans and often works out in a distressed pair of blues. (“Jeans adds 30 reps,” reads one comment on a video.) Daniel Strauss, a boxy strong grip specialist in London who goes by Raspberry Ape, lifts 100-plus-pound shackles and prefers lighter-color cuts or incredibly short jorts. Most famous in this sphere is a trainer who goes by the moniker Atlas Power Shrugged and does what he calls “old school” lifts—pre-1950s, with a wild range of motion, like the Zercher deadlift—in his apartment complex parking lot wearing Vibrams and jeans.
For Atlas, the decision is half convenient, half idiosyncratic. After years of regular workouts at gyms, in standard gym clothes, the pandemic forced him to set up a home gym—and his young children forced him to get in quick workouts whenever he could. “During my kids’ nap, I’d run out and do a workout,” Atlas says, “and I happened to be wearing jeans during the nap.”
As Atlas increased the weight and taped more workout videos, he kept the jeans both on and offscreen, switching over to a pair specially designed for lifters by Barbell Apparel with a gusseted inseam and extra roomy thighs after the brand sponsored him. And there turned out to be an additional benefit to the jeans, especially for someone trying to grow their online audience. “If I post a cool lift in jeans, there’ll be five people asking why I did it in jeans,” Atlas says, “which is engagement.”
Then there are the ordinary offline lifters among us who choose this denim-clad path. Jeremy Anderegg, a South Carolina archivist, has been exercising in jeans for years, often at home and occasionally in a gym. “I’ll rip off 100 kettlebell swings every day and do complexes,” he says, preferring to do so in Carhartt B11 single-knee jeans because “the double knees are too restrictive.”
Anderegg settled on the Carhartts when he was living in Brooklyn, partly out of an adherence to minimalism. “I’m not an equipment guy,” he explains, and at the time he bought his B11s, they were only his fourth pair of pants, period. “I’d bartend in them and then clear brush, and then would go out to dinner, changing my shirt as a low-key way to get the workouts in throughout the day.”
Which fits in with an accurate, if antiquated, conception of gym clothes—very simply, whatever clothes people owned and which they also wore to the gym. A century ago, in the Zercher era, lifters sweated in what they could find. Those traditional outfits, while more formal and rarely designed for maximal movement, were produced from natural fabrics like cotton or merino wool. (Polyester did not come into use until, by some estimates, the 1950s.) While it’s counterintuitive now to think that baseball players wore wool cardigans to the ballpark, or that strongmen donned merino pants to lift weights, there’s something to be said about the exercise coming first.
As spartan workouts, like kettlebell swings, have increased in popularity, so have clothes with simpler materials than a five-ingredient blend. “Modern workout gear is supposed to be formfitting or tighter,” says Brandon Martinez, an artist in New Jersey, who has been doing what he calls maintenance workouts—bodyweight bench presses, ab work, and light cardio—exclusively in jeans, at the gym, for about a decade. “There’s nothing more comfortable to me than working out in pants that I would wear everyday,” says Martinez, who otherwise does manual labor and makes art in a pair of Carpet Company jeans. In the summer, he wears them to play baseball.
“At most gyms,” Martinez adds, “the coolest people are the postmen and plumbers getting it in on their lunch breaks.”
For some gym-goers, it’s also about not overthinking it. Jack Bensinger, a Brooklyn writer who works out with dumbbells at a gym, tends to do so in jean shorts, or full-length jeans and Clark's dress shoes, partly because he’s used to moving around constantly in whatever he wears. “I grew up being physical in button-ups and jeans,” says Bensinger, wearing them either while delivering mulch or skateboarding, and, later, going running in Manhattan during his office-job lunch breaks.
Plus, it lowers the buy-in. “People make working out such a big deal,” says Bensinger, “but God gave you the limbs to get this stuff done, so just get in there.”
Ultimately, it’s worth coming back to Rick Owens. In an old interview, he once said that the philosophy behind his uniform look is that it takes him “to the gym, to work in the studio, and then to dinner with a mink coat over it.” It’s a useful framework. It might even be a welcome challenge. After all, anyone can get in a good workout while wearing clothes explicitly designed for that purpose. But not everyone can hit a personal best in pants that might get them kicked out of the gym.
