Like multitudes of middle-class American suburbanites have in recent months, Kim Holderness looked out her window in Raleigh, North Carolina, earlier this year and chuckled at what she saw: “Just a parade of middle-aged men and women wearing weighted vests walking by. Almost like an army,” Holderness, 49, remembers. “I was like, ‘Holy s---. It’s not just me.’”
Unlike all those multitudes, she promptly sat down with her husband, Penn Holderness, and got to work writing and choreographing a song and dance number about it to the tune of the Beauty and the Beast set piece “Be Our Guest.”
Two months later, the “Weighted Vest” video by the Holderness Family — enthusiastically performed by Penn, the couple’s neighbors and Kim’s friends from a recreational adult dance class — has been viewed more than 6 million times. “It took us less than two hours to gather these people,” Penn says, “because, literally, they said, ‘Well, if I wasn’t here, I would be walking around in my weighted vest.’”
For the Holdernesses, both full-time content creators, their weighted vest videos garnered what they describe as “above-average” engagement (another video hit 12 million views). It doesn’t take much to grasp why they resonated. Searching for “weighted vest” on TikTok or Instagram summons an avalanche of reviews, tutorials, testimonials, and memes. Leading weighted-vest brands have reported substantial sales increases: The Texas-based brand Hyperwear reported a 60 percent bump in sales of its popular weighted vests from 2024 and a nearly 140 percent increase since 2023. The Portland-based, Nike-alum-founded Omorpho has seen sales of its G-Vest model double every year since it launched in 2021.
In the workout world, it has undoubtedly been the year of the weighted vest. These once-specialized devices have taken a long, strange journey — from military boot camps to actors’ superhero movie training regimens to mall-walking moms and grandmas in the suburbs. As so many once-specialized things do in the social media age, they’ve escaped the containment of their original context.
It would be tough to say when exactly humans started strapping weight to their torsos for exercise; the practice of doing so predates the concept of exercise itself. “We got carrying devices from mothers who got creative millions of years ago and needed to figure out a way to carry their kids. Because before you’d have to hand-carry a kid,” says Michael Easter, a health journalist and the author of the 2021 book The Comfort Crisis, about the health benefits of defining and then exceeding your so-called comfort zone. “From there, we were obviously like, ‘Well, turns out we could carry other stuff in these things.’”
