A screen shot of the Yoga app "Wake".
EXERCISE ONLINE
The fitness fad coincides with the growth of mobile Internet and a boom in entrepreneurship.
Xiong Mingjun started running a yoga app in September 2015. The experienced Internet CEO named his product "Wake".
Xiong has never practiced yoga, "but I know it is in great demand."
His confidence grew with the news that Premier Li Keqiang and Indian counterpart Narendra Modi had attended a cultural activity featuring taiji and yoga in Beijing last year.
Xiong made a slogan: "Yoga changes life." He thought yoga's physical and mental practices would satisfy the urge of middle class people to disengage from work, relax and slow down.
In a year, the app has gathered 2 million followers, mainly from Beijing and Shanghai, who can try yoga anytime anywhere through free videos on their mobile phones.
An estimated 1,700 Chinese sports and fitness apps have come online over the past two years. Most of them are startups aimed at beginners.
Companies offline are also competing for a share. Smartphone makers constantly release fitness tracking bracelets; restaurants offer expensive low-calorie dishes; real estate developers sponsor customers to run marathon races abroad.
Fitness instructors are also in demand.
Lin Shuo, 28, born in Shantou, Guangdong Province, has gained online celebrity riding the fitness wave. The professional athlete-turned-fitness guru started blogging on Weibo and WeChat in 2014, sharing his expertise and his gym experience.
"I never expected that my blogs would become an instant success," says Lin, who has 640,000 followers.
He resigned his post at a private company to launch a WeChat account called "Body Philosophy".
"Articles about how to chisel away body fat through exercise always receive thousands of hits," he says.
However, other experts urge caution in following online workouts.
