June 20, 2019
Thom Carroll/PhillyVoice
The TITLE Boxing Club of Philadelphia at 21st and Market Streets.
For vegans, the group fitness class realm can be kind of tricky to navigate while sticking to their lifestyle of avoiding all animal byproducts — a principle that extends beyond food to everything from beauty products to clothes and accessories.
Group fitness classes, and gyms as a whole, are filled with leather-covered objects from benches to mats. In boxing classes, basically everything one touches is leather, including the heavy bag itself and the boxing gloves and mitts.
Title Boxing Club Philadelphia – the first of the boutique boxing gyms to land in the City of Brotherly Love in the recent boxing boom — recognized their gym wasn’t all that inviting to vegans with all that leather being pounded and decided to make changes. Especially since more and more people are deciding to switch to the lifestyle.
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Title announced on Wednesday that they will be replacing an entire row of heavy bags with new, vegan-friendly synthetic heavy bags. “This means no leather, and all material on the inside will be 100% pieces of recycled cotton and metal material,” their Instagram announcement reads.
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This new development will likely be popping up at Title very soon according to the announcement, which is more of a teaser, informing participants to “stay tuned for the official date.” (The bags should land in about 10 days, a rep told PhillyVoice.)
Title said the initiative came after some local vegans reached out to Title to ask if they might incorporate vegan-friendly bags, as they would not work out on non-vegan bags.
“It has been an incredible educational experience on our end and we’ve been super excited to become more inclusive in that manner,” a Title spokesperson told PhillyVoice.
