WHERE DID THE IDEA FOR LAUNCHING CHOREOGRAPHED FITNESS CLASSES COME FROM?
I was at UCLA when group exercise was just beginning in the United States and around the world. When my parents opened their first gym in 1968, it was with the idea of taking the principles of what they were doing in elite sports to the public, but it was way too intense for people and it didn’t work.
I had a year in the music business, and I wound up making a lot of friends who were dancers, actors, and musicians. When I went home to New Zealand, the idea just started to grow on me, and I said to my dad that we can make exercise a lot more entertaining than it is. He backed me on it, and I hired not just athletes but dancers, actors, and singers—people who had an ability to entertain as well as teach.
HOW IMPORTANT WERE THOSE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY CONNECTIONS IN THE EARLY DAYS?
It was really important. Half of our success has been due to our teacher training system, which was a mix of theater arts and sports coaching— a true mix of entertainment and sports science.
We started a little studio, and we had people lining up 50 meters to come into a small basement studio.
We were charging three bucks a class, which was a lot of money in 1980, and we were paying the teachers a dollar a head, so we had teachers that were getting a hundred people in the class and getting paid a hundred bucks.
Consequently, we had some pretty amazing people who joined the team and helped us to develop our systems.
BESIDES THE ENTERTAINER ASPECT, WHAT MADE YOUR APPROACH DIFFERENT FROM OTHER FITNESS PROGRAMS AT THE TIME?
My family came from a sports background, so we were doing weight-training classes from the very beginning. We were doing dumbbell classes and hard calisthenics classes.
As the leotards and leg warmers era unfolded in the early 1980s, we had 300 people in a class doing weight training and calisthenics.
The other part that was different was the choreographic systems that we developed, which were standardized.
What you find is that when teachers make up their own classes, not many of them create great classes. It takes us three months to make a class, and we will iterate and reiterate it 40 to 50 times to get it just right. In the end, what we are is a quality assurance tool.
WHAT TYPE OF DEMOGRAPHIC DID YOU ATTRACT AT THE BEGINNING?
It was primarily women. There was a hunger among women to do this type of exercise. Also, at the time, it just wasn’t acceptable for men and women to exercise together. We used to run alternate days at the gym for men and women.
We found that most women chose to exercise in the women-only gym rather than in a co-ed gym. We did get a percentage of men in our classes, somewhere between 10%–30%.
HOW DID YOU EXPAND INTO OTHER MODALITIES LIKE YOGA?
We started doing yoga classes to music in 1980, and it failed. And then I got lucky and married my wife, Jackie. She was a national gymnastics representative who I met while she was at university, and she later became an M.D. She played as big a part as I did in the development of what we’ve done over the years. Jackie taught classes from 1980 through medical school and her hospital years. Now, she is our chief creative officer who’s in charge of our choreography.
It wasn’t until Jackie worked with Molly Fox from Molly Fox Studios that we created a successful yoga class.
Molly was a wonderful, charismatic yoga teacher, and she and Jackie developed BodyBalance, which was a new category of yoga fusion—doing yoga to music and mixing it with Pilates and tai chi. And of course, the yoga community at the time said, you can’t do that, but now many of them do it.
HOW DO YOU KEEP THE PROGRAMS FRESH AND RELEVANT ACROSS GENERATIONS?
You have to keep modernizing at least with every generation. With BodyPump, for instance, every 10 years we re-evolve it with new exercises, style of music, new coaching techniques, new marketing—everything. You have to keep changing it for each generation.
We have a heap of Gen Z classes that we’re launching soon.
I credit our kids for a lot of that. If our kids had not been there to move things forward, we probably would’ve aged out. But our kids came back from university and said, “Look, what you’re doing just isn’t cool anymore.”
WHAT ROLE DOES COMMUNITY PLAY IN THE SUCCESS OF GROUP FITNESS?
The key thing is to understand that fitness is half about exercise and half about motivating people to do it. Community is one of the motivating factors, but in classes you also have music and a teacher motivating people. The leader of the community is that teacher.
A single great teacher is going to attract and retain hundreds of members to your club over time. And if you can have a team of great teachers, it’s going to bring thousands of people into your gym. It’s like when you go to a rock concert and you don’t know anybody there, but it still feels like you’re part of a tightknit community.
People can exercise in their living room, they can run around the block, but most people don’t because they lack the motivation you get in a class.
HOW DID YOU OVERCOME THE MAJOR CHALLENGES IN BUILDING A GLOBAL BUSINESS?
Probably half of my career I’ve been on the verge of going out of business.
The other half I’ve been successful and temporarily rich until we have to deal with whatever thing comes along to screw it up.
We went public in 1984, and then mom and dad sold the business a month before the 1987 stock market crash, and the investment companies that had bought it went broke, every single one of them. I wound up having to buy the business back from their liquidators, and my parents and their bankers loaned me the money to do it. We were paying 18% interest. That was five hard years of getting out from under the debt burden, when I would very often be wondering how I was going to pay the wages next week.
HOW HAS LES MILLS BEEN ABLE TO REBOUND FROM THESE CHALLENGES, INCLUDING THE PANDEMIC?
We’ve managed to bounce back through every crisis that we’ve had. We had so many challenges and setbacks.
We tried to launch a personal training system and that failed. We’ve tried other programs that failed. We didn’t make a profit for a decade when we went international in the mid-1990s. You grow resilient and find your way.
