The body coach: fitstagrammer Joe Wicks

After graduating with a sports science degree from Twickenham’s St Mary’s University, Wicks wanted to be a PE teacher but somehow it didn’t happen. Instead he ended up running boot camps for men and women in Richmond and Surbiton, near where he lives. Business was good but running around for six hours a day wasn’t a sustainable long-term strategy. He didn’t know a great deal about social media other than that his friends were on it, and he followed nutritionists and personal trainers he liked, but he went on Twitter and started posting motivational mantras as well as diet and fitness tips. It turned out he was good at it. Within a few months he had 13,000 followers, mostly men and women wanting to lose weight, but that only amounted to a few extra recruits to his boot camps. There was, he began to think, a missing link.

One of the main charges levelled at social media is that it doesn’t equate to money. Yes, you could get a book deal off the back of having a million Twitter followers or score a beauty campaign by having your own vlog, but it’s rare. Wicks knew one thing: he had a captive audience, mainly comprised of that most lucrative of markets: the Sisyphean dieter. The diet industry is worth £2 billion in the UK; internationally, it’s about ten times that figure. He could go on giving free tips and advice for years — he tells me he posted 20,000 tweets before he saw a single penny — but what he really needed was a product.

So he came up with The 90 Day SSS plan (that’s ‘Shift, Shape and Sustain’), a three-month nutrition and exercise regime that costs £147. And judging by the hundreds of transformation pictures on his social media platforms, it works. Since January he’s sold over 2,000 plans, to people as far afield as Doha and Australia. That’s an approximate turnover of £600,000 in his first year, with supermarket recipe ingredients his only outgoings. The Dragons in the Den can only dream of these kinds of numbers. ‘I’ve got whole families on it,’ he says proudly. He’s now an international business, something that takes most companies years to achieve. And he’s done it in just under a year. ‘If it wasn’t for social media,’ he says, ‘I’d have probably stayed put and been a PT in Surbiton.’

It’s Instagram that really put him on the map. Over the past five years the social media app has made stars of numerous health and fitness nuts: New Yorker Jen Slater posts pictures of her backside while doing yoga around the city, has 2.4 million followers (twice as many as Madonna) and just signed a lucrative deal with a chain of gyms. With its emphasis on the visual, and the ability to post videos, it’s the ideal environment in which to motivate.

Joe went there because, ‘Twitter was slowing down... and I liked the idea of Instagram because it’s about pictures,’ he says. He started by posting pictures of his transformations but he wanted to do more. His clients were always complaining about not having enough time to cook. ‘I’m short on time but I cook and eat healthily,’ he thought. ‘What about if I just filmed myself making my meals and then posted them to everyone?’ If people liked what they saw they could either follow him, like him or, crucially, buy his 90 Day SSS plan.

So he started. He would stumble out of bed, whip up some breakfast — anything from an egg bagel to blueberry pancakes — and film himself doing it. Then, before his first mouthful, he’d upload it. He did it at lunch and dinner, too, uploading his clients’ transformation pictures between meals. At first he wasn’t in the videos that much. All you can hear is his falsetto voice as he boils rice, fries mince and then… ‘BOSH! That’s Leanin15!’ It’s a catchphrase now. He shouts it out of his window. ‘Hey girls,’ he says in one video. ‘You heard about Leanin15?’ Last week he took his selfie stick and pranked unsuspecting diners queuing up for KFC near his home. Often he films himself singing out of his window, usually a song with some reference to Leanin15. So there’s been Jo-lean, Sexual Lean-ing... you get the idea.

‘That’s what so great about doing this on Instagram,’ he says. ‘I can bang out four or five of these videos and there’s no editing. I do it on this app I’ve got. With Instagram I’m cooking it, I’m eating it, I’m sharing it. It’s instant.’

He gets around 1,000 new Instagram followers a week. He can post a video of a cashew curry and have over 1,500 likes in minutes. The brands he’s used since day one, mainly Lucy Bee coconut oil and Total Greek yoghurt, now work alongside him. He has created special recipes for Total and is paid a small endorsement fee by Lucy Bee, but he wouldn’t use it if he didn’t genuinely love it. He is coy about money and claims there have been no big endorsement deals as yet, but he won’t rule it out in the future. As for the money he makes? He’s saving up to get a new kitchen in which to film his Leanin15 videos.

As I walk back to my office I see that the KFC trailer has gone. What, I wonder, has Joe done? The next morning I see a video he posted. Turns out he walked into KFC in Leicester Square instead. ‘Stop! Don’t eat those burgers! They’re not Leanin15!’ he shouts at bewildered tourists. For now, at least, that catchphrase means nothing — but I have a feeling that in a few months Colonel Sanders might well have something to worry about.

Farrah Storr is the editor of Women’s Health