The trees are bare and snowflakes start falling. Waking up in the icy cold mornings means it’s time to get a peppermint mocha from starbucks. After your coffee run, you build a snowman, eventually going to curl up in front of the fireplace with fluffy green and red socks. Students are on a break from school and relaxing. Life is good, but TikTok’s hyper-masculine army has other plans.
It’s time to lock in. The alarm is set for 5:30 am. It’s time to get up and get to work, no excuses. Get ready to hit the gym for a three hour workout while simultaneously avoiding women like the plague. The breakfast, lunch, and dinner menu consists of chicken and rice that was meal prepped at the start of the week. From Nov. 1 to Jan. 1 you might see guys doing all this as a part of their “Winter Arc,” a trend originating on TikTok, where guys face the mental and physical challenges of winter. What those are? I’m not entirely sure.
Normally people focus on setting goals after New Years to combat seasonal depression after the holidays. But the Winter Arc leaves no time for this. During this time guys try to basically live inside the gym.
“The difference from Winter Arc and New Year’s resolutions is that you take it more seriously,” said Noah (noahLifts5), a fitness influencer on TikTok.
A commitment men make when they start their Winter Arc is not talking to women. These same guys complain year-round how they “can’t find the right women in this day in age,” so I guess not talking to them for a few months shouldn’t be a problem.
“During the Winter Arc you set goals for the winter and do everything to complete them, so that means getting rid of all distractions,” Said Noah Lifts.
The Winter Arc “rules” do raise the question if this is healthy for people socially. A lot of these guys complain about how they already have trouble talking to women, so it doesn’t make much sense how their winter journey benefits them in this field, but to each their own, I guess.
If you click a Winter Arc hashtag you are sure to find gym bros making self-indulgent edits of themselves. The audios consist of intense Patrick Bateman or Anakin Skywalker soliloquies over some Brazilian Phonk music. The clips they add of themselves look like they’re setting up for a set, however you never actually see them lift anything. I may, however, be wrong, as it’s hard to see through dark and edgy filters clouding over their gym-session clips.
Like many trends on TikTok, people already seem to be poking fun at it after only being around for a few years.
Kate Cheng with Women’s Health Mag found one user saying “’mfs who unironically say “Winter Arc”‘ [are] ‘cornballs #cringe,’” adding that “other creators have been contemptuously mocking the fad.”
This sums up most of what the content making fun of the Winter Arc conveys. There are surely a lot of creators who take this trend far too seriously, yet I can’t watch one of their videos without giggling. It is a funny picture to imagine grown men recording themselves at the gym and simultaneously adding their favorite CapCut preset filter to make them look “alpha.”
The Winter Arc was a good idea in theory. It motivates people to work out and eat right because everyone blindly follows the trend train. But now that it’s been taken to the extreme it’s all some guys can talk about. Next year it might be better to chill out by the fire during the winter, have some hot coco and just make a New Year’s resolutions list instead.
