Argentine Cycling Instructor Camila Ramón is Empowering Latinxs in the Fitness Space
I had been taking Peloton class for a few weeks already when I finally discovered cycling instructor, Camila Ramón
Image via Peloton
I had been taking Peloton class for a few weeks already when I finally discovered cycling instructor, Camila Ramón. It was the music that got me. The right music always motivates me and makes me keep moving even when I don’t want to. But the more of her reggaetón and dembow and merengue classes I took, the more I came to realize that my new favorite Peloton instructor was speaking to my soul. Ramón brings Latinx authenticity to the camera during every single class she teaches whether she’s teaching in Spanish or English, whether it’s to a playlist of Latin hits or American pop and hip hop. Her pride in her culture and community shine through and she always shows up with joy and authenticity.
Every time she teaches, she proves that we can wear our Latinidad on our sleeves, that we don’t have to water ourselves down, and that we too can have a space to feel safe and seen in the world of fitness and wellness. That representation is so needed and absolutely invaluable, especially considering the way so many Latinas were raised and the complex and often problematic relationships we often have with food and the lack of experience and exposure so many of us had with exercise growing up.
Back in the fall of 2021, Ramón officially became the first Peloton instructor to teach cycling classes in both English and Spanish (she now also teaches Tread classes in both languages), and while the fitness company does employ other proudly Latinx instructors including Robin Arzón, Rad Lopez, and Mariana Fernandez, Ramón brought with her a completely different vibe.
Image via Peloton
“I’m so grateful every single day that we get to provide this for our community. For me, it’s always been a dream to serve the Latino/Latine/Latina community, so being able to do this at such a large scale is honestly a dream for me,” she tells HipLatina.
“I worked really hard to be able to serve this community and once I felt like I was set up in a professional capacity to be able to work at a place like Peloton and I was given the opportunity to join this amazing team of superheroes … to be the first on the bike and the tread in Spanish and English … I feel such an important value add to Spanish-speaking people all over the world.”
Born in Argentina and raised in Miami starting at the age of 7, Ramón exudes Latina joy in her work. It makes Latinxs at varying fitness levels feel welcome and seen. She’s so popular that she’s inspired her own hashtag on the platform’s “leaderboard,” which is where members who are taking any given class are identified. The #MilaMafia runs deep, and includes many members of the Pelatinos Facebook group where thousands of Latinxs come together to inspire each other, a group that shows up for Ramón and the other Latinx instructors at Peloton again and again.
“I’m so proud of the work that we’re doing at Peloton. We are having Spanish-language classes live with members and the energy is so amazing and so spectacular and everybody is so excited to be in the studio,” Ramón says. “We’re also having regular Spanish member events in the studio, and this is just the beginning for us. The Latine community is a huge priority for us and for Peloton.”
Ramón grew up a dancer and runner, but found her first career in international public relations and her fitness routine fell off. Three years later she started exercising again and quickly realized that she had a “terrible relationship” with her body and her focus shifted from working out for aesthetics to working out for both physical and mental health.
A military wife, after graduating college, Ramón moved around a bit, spending time in Miami and Los Angeles before moving back to Miami when her husband decided to leave the military. After three years doing PR, she eventually decided to become a trainer and worked tirelessly to establish herself.
Ramón spent the better part of five years getting certified, teaching in-person classes in both English and Spanish and later — during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 — she started posting workouts on Instagram and TikTok, along with writing training programs and building her own now-defunct fitness app. It was then that she really began to make some headway in the broader fitness space, since so many people had started working out from home.
The timing ended up being perfect. In 2021, she decided to take her shot. “My husband decided to get out of the military … two weeks after we moved back to Miami, I reached out to Peloton. I wrote an email and I heard back from the casting director the same day, which was extremely wild because I just sent the email on a whim.” She didn’t know it at the time, but Peloton had already been on the hunt for an instructor that could teach in both English and Spanish and hadn’t been able to find the right person.
It was a lengthy interview and audition process that took several months of interviews and conducting on-camera mock classes and it was completely surreal for Ramón. “The amount of velitas … I lit one and when it would run out and I would light another one throughout my entire interview process. It was like months … my husband was like, ‘you cannot leave the velas on,’ and I was like, ‘sir, if you turn off the velas, I will like literally die.'”
Whether it was the velitas or all Ramón and her stand-out personality, skills and dedication, she made an impact on the folks at Peloton and in the fall of 2021, she and her husband moved to New York and she officially started as a Peloton Cycle instructor. About a year later, in October 2022, she also started teaching Peloton Tread classes in both English and Spanish, making her the first instructor on the Tread to teach in both languages as well.
In just a couple of years, she’s become well known on the platform for her positivity and strength, and for promoting mental wellness, self-care and confidence in a way that feels authentic and approachable.
“I think that navigating the space of fitness as a Latina is very tricky because there’s so many distractions in our community. There’s so much pressure to always look a certain way and there’s not a lot of trainers that don’t,” she says.
“When I chose to do this it was because I didn’t see any trainer talking about fitness to feel good, fitness for mental health, fitness for physical health other than aesthetic reasons,” she adds, recalling that Arzón who is of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent and Peloton trainer Alex Toussaint, inspired her long before she got the job.
She often mentions the “tia tóxica”, a character that represents the tias in our lives that often perpetuate negative and unhealthy stereotypes of thinness. She uses her in classes to combat the belief that participating in fitness is solely to attain unrealistic physiques like those seen on TV. “The figures that I saw on TV and that I still see on like Latino news, there’s not really ones that look like regular people,” she says.
She reminds people that it’s about healthy habits and that we can’t let that tia tóxica let us stray from the healthy mental and physical habits that we’re building when they make comments about our bodies or the food on our plates.
“I feel like I was meant to talk about this. That is one of my main missions,” she tells us. “I’m not scared to talk about it. At the end of the day, I know my words are reaching the people that need to hear it and I’m speaking from a place of experience. I’m speaking from a place of absolutely and completely hating my body and hating myself and training to punish myself for what I ate and doing everything in my power to change the way that I looked and feeling completely defeated, even at my leanest, and turning the table to be the light on the other side and being able to say, ‘hey, I feel amazing in my body no matter what I look like.'”
Ramón wants the same for everyone else and it’s why she does what she does and plans to do it for as long as possible. She wants everyone to feel the type of confidence that she does: a confidence that is not rooted in how she looks, but how she feels and one that endures no matter what anyone else says or thinks about her.
“I hope that this is just the beginning in terms of like the conversations that we’re having, not only in the fitness space, but also in the entertainment space, in the media space,” she says. “When we train for life and we train to feel good, that’s when we train forever and that’s super-important for us.”
And through it all, she still manages not to take herself too seriously. Ramón’s authenticity extended itself to social media earlier this year when she launched her own telenovela series, Amistad & Decepción, starring none other than her fellow Peloton trainers, reminding all of her fans that they really are just like the rest of us. And in doing so, highlighted Latin culture even further and made droves of people come back looking for more of the type of overly dramatic entertainment so many of us grew up with thanks to telenovelas.
“At the end of the day, I do not take myself seriously at all. I’m a very silly human being because I don’t think that life is meant to be taken so seriously and we’re meant to be happy with what we’re given so that’s kind of how I approach everything, with a lot of levity, with a lot of light, and with a lot of love,” she says.
And it’s that approach that’s exactly why in less than two years, she’s become one of the most beloved instructors and a trailblazer on the Peloton platform. With a playlist that features a variety of Latin music from artists including Tego Calderón, Shakira, Bad Bunny, and Don Omar, plus her Spanglish-infused banter and motivational asides, it’s truly a celebration of la cultura.
“I absolutely love what I do and I truly believe that Peloton is the best fitness platform in the world and that I was meant to do this my entire life,” she says. “I hope to continue to inspire people at a larger scale and at a large capacity. I think the more time we have together in this space, the more time that we have to voice the things that are important and to grow the community and change the narrative.”
