The Company That Franchised the Fitness Class
How a family gym in Auckland packaged the group workout, shipped it to 20,000 gyms, and taught the world to lift to the beat.
Walk into a gym in Berlin, Bogota or Bangkok and there is a decent chance the Tuesday-night strength class was written in Auckland, New Zealand. The barbell moves, the count, the song it is set to, and the way the instructor calls it - all of that arrives on a schedule from Les Mills International, a company most of the people sweating through it have never heard of. That is the quiet trick at the center of the business. Les Mills does not run the gyms. It runs what happens inside them.
Les Mills International is a licensing company dressed up as a fitness brand. It designs pre-choreographed, music-driven group workouts - BODYPUMP, BODYCOMBAT, RPM, BODYBALANCE and around twenty others - trains and certifies the instructors who teach them, and licenses the whole package to health clubs. The programs are refreshed roughly every three months with new choreography, new music and new marketing. Gyms keep paying to stay current, and members keep coming back because the class is never quite the same twice.
A gym, an Olympian, and an idea
The story starts before the company. In 1968, Les Mills Snr - a four-time Olympian for New Zealand - opened a gym in Auckland. His son Phillip grew up in it. In the early 1980s, Phillip began building choreographed exercise-to-music routines and licensing instructors to lead them, and in 1990 the family launched BODYPUMP, a high-energy barbell class that became the template for everything that followed. In 1997, Phillip spun the licensing side into a separate company: Les Mills International.
The insight was almost boringly practical. A single great gym is a local business. A single great class, packaged so anyone can teach it, is an export. Instead of opening gyms around the world, Les Mills decided to supply them - and let every gym on earth become a customer rather than a competitor.
The 90-day release cycle
The part that makes Les Mills unusual is the cadence. Most gym programming is static - the same circuits, the same routines, until someone gets bored. Les Mills treats a workout more like a media property. Every quarter, a new "release" ships to licensed clubs: fresh choreography, a new soundtrack, updated coaching cues, marketing assets and instructor training to match. It is closer to how a streaming service drops a new season than how a gym plans a timetable.
That rhythm does two things at once. For members, it keeps a familiar format from going stale - the moves change, the music changes, the format stays. For gyms, it turns a one-off purchase into a subscription: to keep offering a "current" Les Mills class, you keep licensing the new releases and keep certifying your instructors.
What it actually sells
Strip away the branding and Les Mills sells three things: programs, people and, increasingly, a platform.
Programs are the catalog - BODYPUMP for barbell strength, BODYCOMBAT for martial-arts cardio, RPM and THE TRIP for indoor cycling (THE TRIP wraps the ride in cinema-scale visuals), BODYBALANCE/BODYFLOW for yoga-Pilates blends, and LES MILLS GRIT for high-intensity interval training, among others. People are the instructor network - roughly 140,000 accredited teachers who are trained, certified and re-certified on each release. Platform is Les Mills+, the subscription app that carries 1,000-plus on-demand workouts, finds live classes nearby, and tracks a member's training. It replaced the earlier Les Mills On Demand service.
The money underneath
The business model is licensing plus subscriptions. Gyms pay ongoing fees to license the programs and to train their staff. Consumers pay for Les Mills+ directly. And a shared-income streaming model lets clubs offer Les Mills content to their own members. The revenue is recurring by design, because the product is never "finished" - there is always another release, another certification, another quarter.
Exact figures are not public - Les Mills is privately held - and outside estimates of its revenue vary widely by source and method, from around US$155 million to figures approaching a billion dollars. What is not in dispute is the shape of the thing: a globally distributed, quarterly-renewing content business that happens to be built on barbells and beats.
Illustrative of the model's structure, not disclosed financials.
Who it is for, and who it is up against
The primary customer is the operator: gyms, boutiques and chains that want a proven group-fitness product without building it in-house. The end user is the member on the studio floor - an estimated seven million of them a week. And through Les Mills+, the customer is also the person on a mat in their living room.
That puts Les Mills in an unusual middle position. On the equipment-and-streaming side it brushes up against Peloton, Apple Fitness+ and iFit. On the branded-class side it sits near Zumba, CrossFit, Orangetheory and F45. But most of those either sell hardware or run their own studios. Les Mills' distinctive bet is that it can be the supplier to everyone's gym at once - which is why a chain that would never franchise a rival will happily license a Les Mills timetable.
The digital pivot
When home fitness surged, Les Mills had an advantage many rivals did not: a deep catalog already built and choreographed. Moving it onto a screen was a distribution problem, not a creation problem. Les Mills On Demand grew into Les Mills+, an omnichannel app that blends on-demand workouts with live class finding, so the digital product points people back toward the physical one rather than replacing it.
In 2024 the company pushed distribution further, partnering with Bango to sell Les Mills+ subscriptions through its Digital Vending Machine - the plumbing that lets telcos and other resellers bundle the app into their own offers. The same year, founder Phillip Mills stepped back into day-to-day leadership as Group Managing Director following the departure of Group CEO Clive Ormerod, with James Graham named CEO of Global Markets.
Where it fits
Les Mills occupies a spot most fitness companies never reach: it is infrastructure. It is not the loudest brand in any single market, and plenty of its participants could not name it. But the format it standardized - a choreographed, music-driven, instructor-led class that updates on a schedule - became one of the default shapes of group fitness worldwide. The mission the company repeats, "a fitter planet," is broad by design. The business under it is narrow and precise: make the class, train the teacher, ship the update, and let 20,000 gyms do the rest.