In March 2018 DAREBEE first launched Girl Power Week. This year I am privileged to be part of the team that is bringing this popular event back to DAREBEE, now with new and expanded content.
“What is Girl Power Week?” you may ask. “What is this ‘DAREBEE’ you write of, Laura?”
DAREBEE is a huge, independent, web-based fitness resource that is 100% ad-free, 100% free of product placement and other forms of corporate sponsorship, and 100% free to use. As of this writing, the DAREBEE resource includes 2670 stand-alone workouts, 92 programs (structured plans of daily workouts that typically run for 30 days each, with a few longer and shorter programs), and 177 challenges (short exercise “snacks” that follow a specific focus for, again, typically 30 days, although some of these are different lengths too). The resource also includes 154 short and easily-digestible written guides on a range of fitness-related topics, all backed up by the latest scientific research, and DAREBEE’s sister site: DAREBEETS, a rapidly-growing nutrition resource which currently features 360 plant-based recipes. All of this content is 100% crowd-funded through DAREBEE’s users. And yet none of it is behind a paywall. Everything is 100% free for anyone to access.
Also free is DAREBEE’s community forum, known as “The Hive”. The Hive is a truly amazing place I have been privileged to be a part of since May 2017.
When I first joined the DAREBEE Hive I was primarily involved in other fitness spaces. But the Hive quickly became my primary fitness community. When another online fitness community I had been actively involved in shut down (so that site’s owners could focus on a new initiative that was 100% behind a paywall), a second community I’d been active in and happy to support financially when it was run by a small, independent company that was responsive to its membership sold out to a large corporation (that immediately switched the site’s access model to a subscription service and then offered me a “lifetime discount” for said subscription if I signed up within 3 weeks and began paying a monthly fee to access content I had already paid for lifetime access to), and the expenses of commuting to participate in a sports league became too much for me to bear, the Hive remained: free, welcoming, and supportive.
During the long years when I lived in a small town (which was a very bad fit for me socio-politically) in which the only fitness-related activities for adults were either uninteresting to me or too expensive for me (or both), and revolved more around drinking beer (which I don’t do) than athleticism, the Hive was both a fitness and a community lifeline for me. The Hive is the reason I was able to remain physically active and fit during years when multiple forces in my life conspired to drive me away from fitness. I have forged real friendships there.
These days I am privileged to live, once again, in a physical community in which I am happy. I have face-to-face conversations almost daily with neighbours who don’t make me want to tear my hair out over how appalling I find their political views. I belong to a fitness club (Aikido) full of wonderful people who I genuinely enjoy being around and training with every week. And yet I am more active in DAREBEE and the Hive now than ever. Which brings us to Girl Power Week.
In addition to the regular workouts, programs, and challenges which one can choose to complete at any time, DAREBEE regularly runs special community events through the Hive in which participants come together to all take on the same challenge at the same time and cheer one another on in these efforts. During the years 2016-18, these events included eight special themed weeks, each of which included one specific workout each day for a week. Community members who completed all seven workouts were able to claim a special digital badge for their Hive profile page.
DAREBEE’s themed weeks were popular events which many DAREBEEs (myself included) loved. Alas, these challenges—along with their associated badges—were lost during a technologically necessary platform migration in 2022. Even so, many DAREBEEs still remember them fondly, and they continue to come up as topics of conversation within the Hive. When I saw one of my DAREBEE friends, Syrius, post recently that she wished the theme week challenges were still available as she would like to do them, I realized there was no reason why she couldn’t. The individual workouts involved in the challenges are still available in DAREBEE’s substantial database.
One of the great things about DAREBEE’s Hive community and the forum that supports it is that community events do not need to be run by the core team that maintains the DAREBEE resource. Any member of the community can organize a community event via the Hive forum. So I messaged Syrius to ask her if she would be interested in doing exactly that. I suggested we could re-run Girl Power Week, as the timing was right to organize our event for the week leading up to and including International Women’s Day on March 8. Syrius immediately jumped on board with the idea.
The impetus behind DAREBEE’s original Girl Power Week was to create a week-long challenge designed to “inspire women of all ages to take a ninja-like approach to fitness and rediscover the warrior within.” It included seven brand new, challenging workouts themed around brave and powerful women. Syrius and I wanted to bring back those original seven workouts but also expand the challenge to make it accessible to more people.
DAREBEE has always advocated for inclusivity within fitness spaces. Indeed, DAREBEE’s insistence on maintaining all aspects of the resource as freely accessible and free from commercial agendas is because DAREBEE believes fitness belongs to everyone, and everyone should have access to quality fitness resources, regardless of their financial means. DAREBEE is also a place where everyone belongs, regardless of their age, their size, their gender, or their current level of physical fitness and ability.
The original Girl Power Week workouts include challenging calisthenics activities such as single-leg squats, full push-ups, and jumping lunges, because DAREBEE knows these exercises are just as accessible to girls and women as to anyone else. Additionally, because DAREBEE workouts are designed for people at all different stages in their individual fitness journeys, it is perfectly acceptable for an individual exerciser to modify any exercises in a DAREBEE workout to make them accessible to their own current level of physical ability on any given day. (Indeed, I often did difficulty level 3 workouts—with modifications—with my octogenarian mother when I was serving as her personal trainer during pandemic lockdowns.) However, it’s not always obvious to a new exerciser how they can modify exercises not currently within their reach to make them accessible. Additionally, current physical ability is not the only constraint on would-be exercisers. With these thoughts in mind, we decided to expand Girl Power Week to include four different tracks:
- The original Girl Power Week workouts, suitable for anyone currently able to safely execute high-impact calisthenics exercises and/or folks who know how to modify these exercises to make them safely accessible.
- A low-impact, standing exercises only track, suitable for newer exercisers and anyone else not currently practising high impact exercises for any reason.
- A track featuring all workouts which can be completed in 10 minutes or less. Because sometimes the biggest constraint on one’s ability to complete a workout is finding the time to fit it into one’s busy day.
- A yoga-based track. Because sometimes the best way we can nurture our bodies is to slow down.
With these initial ideas in mind, Syrius and I shared our plan with the team who runs the DAREBEE resource, to ensure planning an event for the March 2-8 week would not conflict with any larger community events they had planned.
The response from the DAREBEE Team was both swift and wonderful: not only was there no conflict with what we wanted to do, but the team offered to help us with the project, including through creating original content, including a challenge badge and, potentially, new workouts!
Saying, “Yes, please!” to the profile badge was a no-brainer. DAREBEEs love our badges! But the offer to help with the creation of new workouts really set my head spinning. I am a long-time yoga practitioner and a certified instructor. The opportunity to create a series of yoga workouts for DAREBEE, all tied to our Girl Power Week theme, was a dream come true! I immediately set to work on the task. Meanwhile, Syrius got to work combing through DAREBEE’s extensive database of existing workouts to curate the perfect collections for our low-impact and 10-minutes-or-less tracks.
Syrius writes:
“Darebee was there when I was in college and struggled to go to the gym. Darebee was there when I was unemployed and looking for my first job, giving me a modicum of control over my life. Darebee was there for me through the pandemic, giving me an outlet for all my worry and stress. Through my ups and downs, the community has been amazingly supportive, and there is always an exercise to fit how I am feeling each day.
“When Laura approached me about Girl Power Week, I loved the idea from the start! Darebee has been such a big part of my life, and this felt like a great way to give back. Low-impact work is near and dear to me as it is sometimes all I can do, and I feel the pressure of time so keenly some days, so I was thrilled to be able to take the time and curate these collections that will fit the needs of all our participants.”
Now the work is complete, and Girl Power Week 2026 is ready to launch. In addition to the four workout tracks detailed above, our event will include one more special treat—which will be revealed on the final day of the event—created with the help of seven additional DAREBEEs and friends. All in all, Girl Power Week 2026 is a joint effort created by a team of 10+ people (the + equals members of the core DAREBEE Team who prefer to work behind the scenes) who currently reside in seven different countries. Fully half of us are immigrants to our current homes from someplace else. Given the state of the world we all live in these days, I think this is a wonderful testament to the power of cooperation and inclusivity!
Girl Power Week begins on March 2 and runs for seven consecutive days. The first day’s workouts will drop by 4:00 PM UTC on March 1. If you’d like to join us for this special event—we’d love to have you!—you can find all of the details on participating at http://darebee.com .
Important note: while this special themed week highlights the power of girls and women, as with all things on DAREBEE, people of all genders are most welcome to join us. Fitness is for everyone!
Laura Rainbow Dragon is the author of the “Get Fit for the Zombie Apocalypse” choose-your-own-workout stories as well as the novelettes “Chimera Junction” and “Anne & Mary on the Hyperspace Seas”. She lives joyfully in Wortley Village, London, Ontario with her canine master, Shelby, who takes her on hiking adventures every day to visit all of their neighbours who stock dog treats.
