The Body Coach TV

Joe Wicks is Britain’s fitness coach — The Body Coach whose 15-second recipe videos, Lean in 15 cookbooks, and irrepressible Essex optimism made him the UK’s most beloved personal trainer. Then came the spring of 2020, and a lockdown idea that became a cultural phenomenon: PE with Joe, the daily 9 a.m. YouTube workout that turned millions of living rooms into gyms, set a Guinness World Record with more than 950,000 concurrent viewers, and earned Wicks an MBE. Kindness, it turns out, scales.

The origin story is pure social-media-era hustle. Born Joseph Trevor Wicks on September 21, 1985, in Epsom, Surrey, he trained as a personal trainer and nutrition coach, then started posting 15-second recipe videos on Instagram back in 2013 — quick, joyful cooking clips that treated healthy food like something to celebrate rather than endure. The audience found him fast. In 2015 he published Lean in 15, the cookbook built on a simple, radical premise: healthy meals that take fifteen minutes. It became one of the UK’s bestselling cookbooks, the first of a series — The Shift Plan, The Shape Plan, and more — that would eventually sell over five million copies. The philosophy was the product as much as the recipes: no shame, no starvation, no misery. Food first, diet second.

The Body Coach brand grew the way the best ones do — as an extension of a person people trusted. The 90-Day Plan, the HIIT workouts, the app launched in 2020 that became one of the UK’s leading fitness platforms: all of it rested on a relationship with millions of followers who felt personally coached. Wicks wasn’t selling punishment; he was selling the idea that moving your body and eating well could feel good. In a fitness industry built on guilt, that was the disruptive idea.

PE with Joe deserves its own chapter, because it was one of the defining cultural moments of the pandemic. When schools closed in March 2020, Wicks started streaming free daily workouts for kids at 9 a.m. every weekday morning — “PE with Joe” — from his living room. The second stream, on March 24, drew more than 950,000 concurrent viewers and set the Guinness World Record for most viewers of a fitness workout live stream on YouTube. For four months, millions of families did star jumps together before the school day that wasn’t happening. Parents wrote in by the thousands: the workouts were the structure, the joy, the thing the kids looked forward to. Wicks donated the advertising revenue to the NHS, and later that year he took on a 24-hour workout challenge that raised more than £2 million for Children in Need — earning him a Gold Blue Peter Badge along the way. In the Queen’s 2020 Birthday Honours he was appointed MBE for services to fitness and charity. He was 35.

What the audience loves is the authenticity, and it has never wavered. The Essex energy, the family-man warmth — married to Rosie since 2019, their kids often appearing in the background of shoots — the genuine belief that fitness should feel good. Wicks has been open about his own mental health, including the comedown after the lockdown high faded, and that honesty is part of the trust. He doesn’t perform invulnerability; he performs effort, and invites everyone along.

The evolution shows a creator growing up in public. The Health or Hype series — Joe as guinea pig, drastically cutting his sleep to test the science with researcher Dr. Sophie Bostock — brought evidence to wellness and showed the entertainer becoming an investigator. The Body Coach Foundation channels the philanthropy; Activate, his animated children’s fitness series, carries the PE with Joe mission into new formats. Honorary doctorates followed — St Mary’s University in 2022, Loughborough in 2024 — and in 2026 he signed with Hollywood agency WME to expand into television and acting. The kid who filmed recipes in fifteen seconds is building an empire.

The national-treasure status is earned, not granted. The MBE, the lockdown heroics, the millions of families who moved together — Wicks became part of Britain’s furniture because he showed up every morning when the world stopped and made people feel better. The throughline of everything he makes is the same sentence: move your body, eat well, bring everyone along. In the fitness industry’s sea of punishment, Joe Wicks built an empire on joy — and the audience, all 2.9 million YouTube subscribers of it, keeps showing up for their coach.

Previously covers The Body Coach TV because PE with Joe was one of the great live-streaming moments of the decade — and because joy turns out to be a business model. For more creators who move the culture, see Joe Rogan.