Exercise addiction

The story of a Kiwi firm that dominates group exercise classes in gyms worldwide

Les Mills, the former Kiwi Olympian discus and shot put athlete who founded a company in Auckland that has become one of the world’s preeminent multinational fitness brands, might have been expected to start the story of his company by speaking about his return from the US to New Zealand in the 1960s. The company, named Les Mills after him, devises fitness classes set to music that are used under licence in 100 countries including the US, France, Brazil and India in some 18,000 gyms. But, the 82 year-old took the story back a hundred years. He reached for a family history on the bookshelf of his living room in Point Chevalier, a neighbourhood in suburban Auckland by the sea. In the book was a photograph of an ancestor named Norman Kerr, also an athlete, who looked like he could have auditioned for the lead role in the early Tarzan films. Mills animatedly recalled that Kerr ran a small gym in New Zealand with “chest expanders” and “colonic irrigation” in 1910. Mills’ was self-deprecatingly making the point that combining aerobic and weight training exercise with music happened long before his company made such a success of the formula. Starting from the 18th century, it long predated Jane Fonda’s 1970s exercise videos.  “A woman would play the piano and women would exercise to that,” Mills said. “I have a painting of men exercising in a dumb-bell class to music in 1780.”

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We were sitting in a living room with views of kauri trees, which looked like they may have been a prehistoric attempt at building the scaffolding for a skyscraper; the species dates back to the Jurassic period. Mills credited his time in California between 1962 and 1964, studying at the University of Southern California and training for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics at the Los Angeles Athletic Club for the genesis of the idea that gyms were a business for the future. When he returned to New Zealand, he first ran a retailing business in home appliances that he didn’t enjoy. Strength training and building gyms seemed a natural extension of his practice for the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games as well as his early experience in property development. Then, almost by accident, an opportunity to own a gym presented itself. An Australian entrepreneur who had sold scores of memberships with no intention of running the gyms declared the business bankrupt. Mills snapped up the chance to buy one in Auckland. “I thought this might be a good business to dive into,” he said.

Jackie Mills (far right) with two instructors leads a Body Balance class

The first gym opened in 1968, but the first classes followed several years later. By then, Mills was coaching the New Zealand Olympic track and field team and had developed a detailed system of training. His son, Phillip, who had an interest in choreography and music and had returned from studying in the US, took the idea of group exercise classes with music to another level. Today, the company typically chooses from 200 songs to pick 20 tracks for each class and is the largest employer of musicians in New Zealand. Phillip, 61, took the company international in the late 1990s. (Les went on to become mayor of Auckland for eight years.) The company’s globe-girdling popularity must be almost unique for a business from this country of 4.5 million people. Les Mills’ classes started with Body Step, but Body Pump, using weights and barbells, was the first one to be distributed internationally and was a hit with both men and women. More than five million people take Les Mills classes every week. Body Pump’s 100th new iteration is being rolled out worldwide on January 14, including in New Delhi, Bengaluru and Mumbai. 

Later that afternoon, I accompanied Phillip to a Body Balance class at one of the company’s Auckland gyms. There was vivid evidence of just how international the brand had become. A couple from China rushed over to Phillip to ask for a selfie. His wife, Jackie, who had led the class, was asked for one as well. An international band of instructors, including a Slovenian, a Japanese and a Malaysian then came on to teach Body Combat, a multicultural medley consisting of routines drawn from Thai kick boxing, judo and boxing against an imaginary opponent. As I watched, I bumped into a Les Mills devotee who has come straight from the airport after a long flight from Tokyo to participate in an extreme aerobics class that evening. He hugged another traveller from Tokyo with the girth of a sumo wrestler, given to hooting with delight in the midst of the exercise class. 

The typical Les Mills exercise session is a long way from the drudgery most people associate with gyms. Phillip Mills recalls that one of his early assignments in the gym his father bought was to “give people magazines to read on the bikes. It was a terribly boring place.” Today, one of the most popular offerings is “The Trip”, an immersive cycling class in a studio that simulates being outdoors. It was developed by Les Mills Jr, grandson of the founder, who has also introduced high-intensity interval training, a half-hour group workout especially popular with millennials.  “People say we’re in the exercise business. I say, ‘We’re in the motivation business’,” says Phillip. It’s a big mission: Exercising in gyms is not only the biggest sport in the world today, but gyms must also play the social role that a neighbourhood bar does, he says. 

Body pump

A wayward gym goer who made rounds of weight machines in the manner of someone sentenced to a medieval torture chamber, I became addicted to Les Mills’ group exercise about five years ago in Hong Kong. My first experience was Body Attack. The music was so loud that it seemed to combine the dynamics of a nightclub and an endurance test, where you ran on the spot, and mixed things up with countless lunges and side-stepping routines. I have sometimes ended the interval training of a sequence of 50 push-ups towards the end of the session face down on the floor. The hour-long class I took five years ago was already popular, in large part because of a charismatic Kiwi instructor named Brad Wharakura. Today, the chance to reserve one of 60 spots at his class at Pure Fitness’  gym in a financial tower in Hong Kong is gone within ten minutes —  48 hours before the 10 am Saturday morning class begins. 

Body Attack is an all-in-one exercise routine, building strength, stamina and core stability. Many of its coordination and agility drills seem tailor-made footwork training for tennis and squash, both sports I have played since I was a child in Kolkata. As I entered my mid-forties, however, I found myself no longer fit enough to play either, especially tennis, at a level that made them enjoyable. Like all too many people in the factories of the information age, years of conscription to a computer had shortened my hamstrings and exacerbated hip problems from a tailbone fracture on a speedboat more than a decade ago. Today’s space-age rackets make tennis a phenomenally physical sport because of the exaggerated top-spin needed to keep the ball in court. To complicate matters, five years ago, a Kiwi coach convinced me to abandon my old-fashioned grip that allowed only a sliced backhand in favour of attempting a single-handed top-spin backhand. Seduced by visions of Stan Wawrinka and Roger Federer effortlessly hitting the most balletic stroke in sport, I did backhand drills for 40 minutes at a time only to realise that I lacked both the thigh strength and the lower back flexibility required to be consistent. But, this hopeless quest had become a narcotic, the rare and exhilarating highs creating a constant need for rehab. Body Attack went some way to addressing the first problem; Pilates classes and an ace physio named Jatin Dawar at Vardan in New Delhi the second. Last year, I started Body Balance, another winning Les Mills innovation, and found the graceful sequencing from Taichi to yoga to Pilates more engaging than yoga.

Somewhere along this uphill journey battling middle-age and erratic coordination, I have come to love the home work and been inspired by the people I met along the way. In different ways, they are role models. Dawar packs into an hour what most physios do in four and follows up with emails of complex remedial exercises. My Pilates teacher, Beth Narain, studied at London’s Royal Ballet School. Last year, after a brief holiday to celebrate her 70th birthday, the South African returned to her patented take on Pilates an even harder taskmaster. Wharakura, a Les Mills alumni, is paradoxically punctilious about exercising safely while being an irrepressible comedian. Meech Aspden, group fitness director at Pure Fitness, the chain I go to in Hong Kong, was the former CEO of Philips New Zealand and trained in classical piano before working for Les Mills. She once insisted I do an entire Pilates session on stage with her, despite my being the clumsiest student in the class. When I complained I was too old for the latest version of Body Attack, she replied that “age was just a number.” I have taken that as my mantra for 2017. I unwisely plan to start playing squash regularly, after recently becoming an obsessive fan of the injury-prone former world number one Ramy Ashour. 

Last Saturday in Bengaluru, a childhood friend, who lives in Birmingham and has become a devotee of Les Mills exercise there, accompanied me as we dropped by a gym chain called Chisel, which is just launching Les Mills classes in Bengaluru and in Mumbai. Excited, we enquired about the possibility of monthly memberships when we next visited. I recalled meeting an American gym manager in Auckland who reported that people who attended Les Mills classes used gyms two to three times as often as people who didn’t and almost always renewed their annual memberships. Marketing gurus would characterise this as excellent customer retention, but as the friend and I checked out an exercise studio in a city where neither of us lives, I wondered if we had unwittingly become members of a cult.