Vegan Fitness Gifting Guide

Shopping for a Vegan? Here’s What to Skip (and What to Buy Instead)

This guide covers common non-vegan ingredients/materials and fitness-friendly vegan gift ideas.

Whether you’re a vegan building your holiday wishlist, or somebody shopping for a vegan friend or family member, there are many things to consider that you may not expect when it comes to selecting gifts that are suitable for vegans.

The first year of being fully vegan can bring some awkward conversations as the people in your life adjust to new “rules”, especially if they have known you for a while.

The golden rule here is really, “when in doubt, just ask”. This can be questions about food, clothing, or any other materials or items that may incorporate animal products.

Many of these things are tricky for even long-time vegans to navigate, so it will definitely be easy for people to get tripped up if they aren’t familiar with the details.

Things to Avoid (or Double-Check) When Buying Gifts for Vegans

Food

Some of the more commonly known ingredients that aren’t vegan are dairy, eggs, and butter. You may run into gifts with these ingredients where things like family food traditions or having bakers in the family are concerned.

If your family has been sending each other cookies for years before you were a vegan, they may not even consider that they may have milk in them and might no longer be appropriate.

Likewise, if you have home bakers or confectioners in your family that are used to making a treat to give out as gifts, they may not even stop to think that there are some non-vegan ingredients in them. Then, everybody involved will be sad when they give you something that you can’t eat, and that they worked very hard on.

Another one that shows up a lot around the holidays, especially as stocking stuffers, is store-bought candy. The majority of a standard candy aisle at the grocery store is unfortunately not vegan.

Examples of brands with vegan options:

• Trupo Treats (fully vegan!)
• Unreal
• Reese’s Plant-Based Cups
• Lindt Oat-milk Truffles
• Hershey’s Plant-Based

Sneaky ingredients to watch for:

• Honey
• Gelatin (gummies, jellies, “stretchy candy”)
• Shellac / confectioner’s glaze (Sometimes in shiny candy. Insect-derived and not vegan.)

Clothing

Luckily, most clothing is pretty good about listing their materials. The main materials that are not vegan in clothing are leather, wool, fur, and suede.

Things to double-check:

• Wallets, patches, straps, and belts (these sometimes have leather)
• Shoes: sometimes contain leather structural pieces or animal-derived glues, even if they look vegan based on the materials listed.
• Down feathers (mostly in jackets)

Shoes are tricky. If you can’t find clearly labeled vegan-friendly options, you may need to contact the manufacturer.

Sporting Goods

A lot of sports equipment will normally have leather, so this is the most obvious one to try to avoid.

Double check things like gloves, balls, shoes, bags, and belts. All of these do have vegan-friendly alternatives, you may just need to browse around a little more to find them.

Fun fact: The first synthetic baseball glove used in pro baseball was worn by Brian Gordon, a pitcher for the New York Yankees, in 2011. The glove was made by Scott Carpenter, and he posted a neat Instagram reel where he talks about the experience.

Homemade Gifts

Family members who are into arts and crafts often hand-make gifts to give out to their loved ones. You should be aware of non-vegan materials that could be used for these, like alpaca yarn and wool.

Stick with yarns that are vegan-friendly like acrylic, cotton, or bamboo. Leather should also be avoided here.

Home Goods

This category is short but important around the holidays:

• Candles: beeswax isn’t vegan, but soy candles are common.
• Avoid down and wool in blankets/linens.

Personal Care

Cosmetics and other personal care items are a bit of a minefield for trying to find vegan options. You will want to look for cruelty-free and vegan labeling on these items individually.

Keep in mind that cruelty-free does not necessarily mean vegan, it just means they don’t test on animals. The product itself could still contain animal-derived ingredients.

Cruelty-free ≠ Vegan

Lesser Known Things

Musical instruments sometimes have non-vegan components. For example, some guitar strings are made from animal intestines instead of metals or nylon. Luckily, the “gut strings” have largely been replaced by new technology, so they are actually expensive and difficult to find. You may also need to confirm that equipment like drums do not use leather.

Notebooks, journals, and sometimes even normal books can have leather covers, but those are usually a little easier to spot due to their higher price tag. If you’re getting a fancy premium notebook or journal to track your gym progress or anything else, just make sure it doesn’t use leather.

There is also an online shop called Vegan America that is a marketplace of various vegan brands and products that have been vetted to be 100% vegan. This helps take a lot of the guesswork out of shopping for vegan items. I haven’t actually used this shop since I recently learned about it, but it’s an awesome concept!

Good Things to Buy for a Vegan (Including Yourself)

As a vegan interested in fitness and nutrition, there are many things, big and small, that can save time, improve results, and generally improve your quality of life.

Kitchen Equipment

Blending, Chopping, and Grinding

Since we will be working with countless vegetables in the kitchen for vegan meals, you will save a lot of time by using some of these tools to prepare those ingredients. I recommend at least having a food processor, a blender, and a good set of knives.

For the blender, you can go with less expensive options, but I really think spending the extra money on a Vitamix is worth it if you can swing it. I always assumed they were just marketing hype, but they really do make a difference in the smoothness and texture of some ingredients after they are blended.

One good example is when trying to blend cashews for cashew queso. Most blenders end up with it being a little gritty, but the Vitamix makes it very smooth like normal queso.

Another common example is that you can make hummus from canned chickpeas without peeling them if you’re using a high-powered enough blender, which can save a lot of peeling time.

A couple of other bonus options in this category are an immersion blender, a vegetable grater or slap-chop style tool, and a spice grinder. The immersion blender is a nice quick tool for things like sauces and dressings so you don’t have to pull out a whole blender and then have to clean it too.

A wooden cutting board can also be a great option. Some non-vegans tend to shy away from wooden cutting boards because they worry about raw meat contamination. If you’re not prepping raw meat, that specific concern is reduced.

With a wooden board, you can avoid using plastic boards that may embed some plastic in your food. There are also glass cutting boards, but those can be awkward and slippery if you aren’t used to them.

Baking

You may have seen the high-protein vegan baked goodies that Protein Deficient Vegan makes. She has a lot of recipes for muffins, cookies, and bread that are protein packed alternatives for the more traditional version of these baked goods. If you’re making something like these recipes, then it may be helpful to have some standard baking equipment handy in your kitchen.

Some tools that can be useful for baking are a stand mixer, an air fryer, a Dutch oven. KitchenAid makes great stand mixers, and they are extremely reliable and robust. You could also use a hand mixer, which is much cheaper, but if you do a lot of mixing you will probably wish you had a stand mixer.

A Dutch oven can be expensive, but there are also more affordable options. We’ve only baked bread in ours, and it turned out the same in an expensive one and a cheaper one, so I’m not sure if there is any real benefit to spending more on these.

Specialty

One newer product that has been growing in popularity is the Ninja Creami. This is a home ice cream maker, but it has also been discussed a lot in online fitness communities because people have been using them to make protein ice cream!

I don’t have any specific recipes to recommend, but we have tried some things on our own with our Creami that turned out pretty well! As long as you follow the “rules” in the instruction manual, you can experiment pretty freely with additions and mix-ins in your ice cream, including protein powder.

Something else that is pretty cool is a home herb growing stand like an Aerogarden. If you can actually use the herbs as fast as they grow here, you will save a lot of money over the long run, and you’ll always have fresh herbs.

Small but useful gifts for fitness buffs (<$30)

• Shaker bottle
• Food scale
• Meal prep containers

Gym Equipment and Accessories

Lifting Support

My favorite gym accessory is Versa Gripps. They are a form of lifting strap that is easy to attach and release, and also happen to be fully vegan! Straps are useful for pretty much any heavy back exercise movement, since your back will always be stronger than your grip.

At some point in your lifting, you may also want a lifting belt for extra support on some heavy lifts. There are countless belts that are made of leather, but alternative materials have become much more common in recent years. Here is an example of a 100% nylon lifting belt that is popular and well reviewed.

If you plan to compete in powerlifting, the only vegan belts I know of that are approved by the International Powerlifting Federation are the synthetic leather ones from StrengthShop.

Another support piece that you may want to pick up for lifting is a pair of shoes. Lifting in your normal tennis shoes or cross trainers is not typically a good idea because they are not very stable. One extremely popular option for the gym that is also vegan is the Converse All-Star, also known as “Chuck Taylors”.

These are good for lifting because they are wide, flat, and don’t have much cushion, which makes them very stable. I lifted in chucks for several years, and I think they are a great option. However, if you do squats or olympic lifts, you may want another shoe option that has some heel raise to get better leverages for those lifts.

That type of shoe is known as a weightlifting shoe, and there are various options from a lot of different brands. Finding out whether the shoes are vegan or not can be a little tricky because occasionally, they use leather support pieces and non-vegan glues that aren’t necessarily mentioned in their product details.

The only current brand that I know for sure has vegan weightlifting shoes is Inov8 Fastlift because they specifically label them as vegan. I am trying to reach out to other manufacturers to compile an article on confirmed vegan weightlifting shoes, so if I get any additional information, I will update this section.

When in doubt, if you can’t confirm the shoe you are looking at as a gift is vegan, maybe go for a gift card instead or ask for exact model links.

Equipment

You really only need two pieces of equipment to have a solid start at a home gym. An adjustable bench and a pair of adjustable dumbbells.

Adjustable dumbbells allow you to have one set of dumbbells that can be set to a wide range of weights. This saves both space and money, and is definitely the way to go for a home gym. There’s just no good reason to have a full rack of dumbbells at home where you are the only person using the gym.

There are some small downsides of adjustable dumbbells, but they aren’t really a big deal. The main one is that most brands do not do well with being dropped. You really shouldn’t be dropping them most of the time anyway, so hopefully this isn’t too much of a problem.

The other downside is that a lot of adjustable dumbbells can be awkwardly big, even when set to lower weights. This isn’t an issue with the Powerblock dumbbells that I currently use, but I had a set of Bowflex ones in the past that were always full size, and it was not ideal. They felt like I was curling a small microwave even at light weights.

For the bench, a nice adjustable bench could be the only bench you ever need. I really like REP Fitness Benches for a good balance between price point and quality. If you prefer something made in the USA or just very over-engineered and built like a tank, Rogue benches are also a suitable option, but you will pay more for them.

These typically adjust from flat to upright, with a lot of set points in between. That makes them great for a wide variety of exercises. Some of the more expensive options have extra features like decline angles and “zero-gap” benches, so there isn’t an awkward gap where your hips/glutes sit when you’re using it as a flat bench.

Miscellaneous

A gym bag is also nice to have if you go to a public gym so that you can carry a change of clothes and some shoes. I also like to keep some small accessories in my gym bag like a fabric rope cable attachment and fractional plates so that I can use them at the gym if they don’t have them.

Just make sure you avoid any leather bags or bags with leather straps. Most of them won’t have these, and I think this is one item that you can go pretty cheap on. It just needs to be big enough to hold the things you’ll regularly take, and doesn’t need any fancy pockets or other features unless you really have a need for them.

Something else that can be useful is a nice, durable water bottle. I prefer stainless-steel bottles so that I’m not drinking out of plastic more than necessary, and also so that I can drop it and beat it up without having to worry about it. The one I have been using lately is an Owala bottle.

If you’re having trouble getting in as much water as you should every day, you could try a smart water bottle that tracks your water with an app and reminds you to drink throughout the day.

The smart bottle I have used extensively in the past is the Hidrate Spark. I found that the software was getting a little less reliable over time in the last few months I used it, but it had been solid for years before that. It looks like they have a new bottle version out now, so that may be more reliable. Even with the issues, though, I would still go back to using this if I needed to track my water intake again.

If you want to splurge a bit, you could get something like a Theragun massage gun. That brand is the one I have used, but honestly, I think any of the cheaper knock-offs would perform pretty much the same since it’s such a simple concept. I will say the battery life on the Theragun is insane. We only have to charge ours every couple of months.

The massage guns may help with temporary relief or tightness and perceived soreness. You won’t want to use it on a bruise or an actual injury, but they are nice for general use.

Another big ticket item that can be fun is a video game system like a Meta Quest VR headset (formerly known as Oculus) or a Nintendo Switch. These play into the fitness theme because they both offer exercise games, and you can get a very solid cardio workout from those games.

This is a great option for people who hate long duration standard cardio like the elliptical or treadmill. It’s engaging and entertaining, while also getting your heart rate up.

Finally, if you’re getting a gift for someone else, it’s hard to go wrong with a gift card. You could get a gift card to a spa if your friend or family member enjoys spas, or you could get one to a supplement store like GNC or Vitamin Shoppe. Almost everybody who regularly goes to the gym is using at least one supplement, even if it’s just protein powder.

Wrapping It Up

Whether you are shopping for a somebody else or grabbing deals for yourself, there are plenty of vegan-friendly options for fitness enthusiasts.

You may need to check some materials or find brands that are more vegan friendly and more clearly labeled. Hopefully this guide helps you navigate some of those options and lets you know what you should be on the lookout for.