What is Iron & Beats? (Yes,I am aware that it's a corny name.) Well, it’s a passion project of ours — mine and my colleague’s — to shine more light on a somewhat niche but also extremely popular corner of the internet: a sub-culture obsessed with lifting weights and hitting PRs while bumping Alice in Chains or Future, channeling the ethos of Guts from Berserk or Baki from Baki (obviously).

This new sub-culture didn’t appear from nowhere. It emerged in the late 2000s to early 2010s when jacked dweebs started bringing their love of anime to the gym — blasting anime OSTs or making anime training montages to hype themselves up pre-session. The meme boom of the mid to late 2010s amplified the wave, especially with moments like the "Do It For Him" meme from Hunter x Hunter. Around this time, YouTube also saw a rise in anime-character-themed workout videos.

But since the beginning of the 2020s, this culture has truly exploded, thanks largely to TikTok edits: anime montages synced with heavy rock or phonk became essential gym motivation content. Gym brands joined in, collaborating with anime studios and designing merch that looks more like phonk album covers than fitness apparel — fully embracing the marriage of these three internet subcultures.