People have been trying to come up with different and unique ways to spend their time in lockdown, ever since the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic. One elderly woman in Germany found excitement in the social media platform TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, where she has become a minor celebrity.
Erika Rischko, who is now 81 years young, posted her first 12-second video on TikTok, which is a video-sharing social media platform that allows users to post videos between 15 seconds and one minute in length, in which she danced the popular Cha-Cha Slide line dance with her husband last spring when Germany went into lockdown.
Since then, Rischko has uploaded more than 100 videos of herself doing exercises like planks and pull-ups, as well as dancing, to encourage others to remain active during the lockdown.
"Move and do something! Don't just sit in a corner and mope. That's just the worst," Rischko told Reuters.
She has amassed around 125,000 followers and more than 2 million likes on the TikTok app, which has over 2-billion mobile downloads worldwide, is hugely popular among teenagers and is best known for dance and lip-syncing routines and viral challenges.
In some of her clips, which her daughter shoots for her, she trains by herself and takes on fitness challenges set by people who are decades younger than her.
In others, she and her husband, whom she met in a dancing event years ago, do synchronized dance routines.
Rischko said she was especially encouraged by the comments that young people post in the app, cheering her on.
"I'm really happy. I've never been as self-confident as I am now," she said.
