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Three hundred metres of rowing, 10 glute bridges, eight tricep push-ups. Repeat, until the 12-minute circuit is over. There’s nothing gentle about this so-called warm-up set at Strong Pilates, one of Australia’s fastest-growing boutique fitness franchises eyeing a global empire of 300 studios in four years.
There’s also nothing especially girly or feminine about the studio – which is black and white and sleekly backlit by LED lights – nor its founders, Michael Ramsey and Mark Armstrong.
Strong Pilates co-founders Michael Ramsey (left) and Mark Armstrong.
Early adopters of F45, the fitness centre franchises, the duo decided to sell their six thriving, profitable Melbourne studios in 2019, just as the hype around the functional training brand was reaching fever pitch.
“It was highly, highly, highly competitive, and we were like, we don’t want to play in this space any more ... it’s too saturated,” Ramsey said.
Armstrong added: “I remember everyone saying we’re mad for getting out at the peak.”
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But all around them, people were reporting injuries from the high-impact, high-intensity group classes. Ramsey fractured his ankle, Armstrong’s wife did her knee and other clients were reporting back issues. “I do recall many conversations about losing members,” Armstrong said.
Pilates is now, according to subscription service ClassPass, the top fitness genre in the world, and is projected to become a US$520 billion ($795 billion) industry by 2035. Before anyone knew it would become the fitness phenomenon it is today, Ramsey and Armstrong used the proceeds of their F45 studio sales to buy the exclusive rights to a particular type of reformer machine.
They were drawn not so much to Pilates as they were to a low-impact, lower-risk form of exercise that could be done consistently.
Ramsey in a Strong Pilates studio in Byron Bay.Credit: Natalie Grono
“We liked what Pilates was doing for people’s bodies, and we liked the client sentiment around Pilates. But we felt that it needed more,” Ramsey said. “It needed strength training. It needed conditioning.”
“It all clicked when we saw the Rowformer,” Armstrong said. In October 2019, the pair opened their first studio in the Melbourne suburb of Elsternwick.
When COVID shuttered thousands of gyms around the world, people rolled out yoga mats in their living rooms and logged online to join Zoom workouts. The greater focus on mental health, wellbeing and better posture thanks to long hours sitting at home during lockdowns helped the Pilates market swell 40 per cent in five years.
Despite the relatively recent TikTok trend of gym bros and athletes being filmed grimacing and trembling on a reformer, Pilates’ core market is still predominantly women – about half the addressable market of fitness junkies.
Armstrong and Ramsey believe they’re starting to crack this gender stereotype by developing workouts that blend the low-impact nature of Pilates with high-heartbeats per minute cardiovascular and strength training to achieve the satisfactory sweat factor.
“One big emphasis for us has been getting men in there, getting men to do Pilates. I think we’ve almost doubled our male audience since we opened,” Ramsey said. Where women comprise roughly 95 per cent of a typical Pilates studio, the founders claim that about one in four or five of Strong Pilates’ members are men.
Strong Pilates has been intentionally designed to be gender neutral.
They even developed a scent that has notes of cognac in it, a nod to the Jay-Z they used to play often. For cardio training, there are dimmed lights and faster tempo music; strength training and Pilates are sound-tracked by rap and R&B. “The whole fit-out, the look, the feel, it’s gender-neutral, it’s cool, it’s clean,” Ramsey said.
Running successful F45 studios gave Ramsey and Armstrong the experience they needed to get the right infrastructure in place, across tech systems, training instructors, marketing and pre-sales. The familiarity of weights, rowing and the recently introduced bike add-on has helped convince men trialling a class to become members, as did hoisted screens demonstrating exactly how an exercise should be executed.
“A lot of the men coming through the doors had never been on a reformer. This is just a great visual guide,” Ramsey said. “We got crucified from the traditional Pilates studios for doing it, but it’s been a game changer for us.”
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Strong Pilates notched $50 million in network revenue last financial year, with the average revenue per studio rising 15 per cent over the past 12 months.
Expanding quickly would be crucial to brand awareness; but too much too soon could, as the downfall of the F45 bubble illustrated in excruciating detail, have the opposite effect. There are about 70 Strong Pilates studios across Australia today, with 150 set to open in the US and 50 in the UK. There are also studios in New Zealand, Ireland, Singapore, Canada, the Philippines, Japan, Dubai, Indonesia, Bahrain, South Korea and Malaysia.
Armstrong and Ramsey have relocated to Florida and Austin, respectively, as they focus on international expansion. Much of the global interest, Armstrong said, hd come organically from people who have tried a class and want to become a franchisee.
But at $70 to $75 a week, access doesn’t come cheap: the pair acknowledge price was the biggest barrier in encouraging sign-ups.
It hasn’t dented their ambition. “We want people that don’t train. We want people who run. We want people who go to the regular gyms,” Ramsey said.
“If you said where’s the perfect location for a Strong studio, it’s literally wherever the largest market segmentation is. If there was nutritional Pilates and a CrossFit and a recovery studio, just hit us right in the middle, and we’re away.”
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