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It is borderline absurd to describe anything Apple does as small. This is a company with the world’s largest market cap at $2.6 trillion, it sells more smartwatches than the entire Swiss watch industry combined and has a Cupertino office called ‘the spaceship’ with a circumference of just under a mile. Compared to a building that’s so large that it rests on 700 enormous stainless steel saucers instead of the planet’s surface, Apple’s Fitness+ HQ is a deliberately anonymous fixture of Santa Monica’s coastline – just another artful blend of glass, exposed brickwork and electric car parking spaces.
To most people, Fitness+ is the iPhone maker’s other streaming service: the one that hasn’t won an Oscar and won’t play the new Fontaines DC record in full, but makes up for these shortcomings with an abundance of perfectly-formed pectorals. To those leading Apple, the workout app is a fundamental part of their legacy. In 2019, the company’s CEO Tim Cook said, “I believe, if you zoom out into the future, and you look back, and you ask the question, 'What was Apple's greatest contribution to mankind?', it will be about health.” That’s a lofty sentiment which is echoed by Apple’s chief operating officer Jeff Williams. “We not only have an opportunity, but maybe even a moral responsibility to help people be more active and help them with their health,” he says to us on yet another pristine, blue-skied day in LA.
If you want an idea of where Williams ranks in the Apple hierarchy then you should know that his predecessor in the role was Cook, who has been in charge of the company since 2011. As for where Williams ranks in terms of the Fitness+ hierarchy? He’s the guy wearing mid-wash blue jeans in a room that’s uniformly decked from head-to-toe in the latest Nike gym wear. We meet him and the entire Fitness+ diaspora at a pivotal moment for the platform and the 23,000 square foot building it is based out of.
Much like the Jony Ive-designed Apple Park, no expense has been spared in this studio’s construction so that every part of the production process - from writing to engineering and, of course, the workouts themselves - can be done from one location. Every tutorial is shot in the same giant room with a wooden sprung floor and a ceiling that is truly packed to the rafters with aerial camera rails and lighting rigs. There are grow lights for the succulents that sit behind the yoga set, iPhone-shaped cutouts on the camera screens to ensure everything is perfectly in frame and robots, so many robots. With one press of a button, they all kick into automated gear ready to shoot the next HIIT class in the same fidelity as a Ted Lasso episode.
“We knew from the very beginning, that we wanted the content that we were creating to be as beautiful as any content has ever been created,” says Jay Blahnik, vice-president of fitness technologies for Apple. “And we thought this was especially important in fitness and well being because that's typically the place where a lot of corners are cut.”
More than anyone else here, Blahnik knows that Fitness+ is far from the only workout service going. A celebrity trainer long before Instagram transformed his profession overnight, he helped launch the Nike+ Run Club app and created the Nike Training Club app that launched in 2013. It took the best part of a decade and a global pandemic for the idea of at-home fitness to catch on in a truly major way, but now the world is in a very different place again. Take a short walk down Santa Monica boulevard to what used to be Muscle Beach and you’ll see the app’s real competition. Gymnasts swirl over hoops, bros with snapback caps pulled on backwards traipse over slacklines above the sand and, five minutes away in the distance, Santa Monica Pier’s Ferris wheel is packed with tourists sharing candyfloss, giant mugs of soda and god knows what else all in giddy proximity. Normality has returned, for better and worse.
Fitness is a trends-driven business at the best of times, but many of the companies that boomed during the lockdowns of the past few years have suffered a particularly brutal 2022. Peloton is the most notable having had to pause production of its bikes and seen its share price drop to $17 from a 52-week high of $130, but the likes of Nike, Adidas and Lululemon have all felt the post-pandemic effect on their businesses. Elsewhere, research from Kantar Worldpanel found that the number of UK homes that have at least one paid-for subscription streaming service fell by 215,000 in 2022’s first quarter – ending a decade-long surge in growth for Netflix, Disney+ and their competitors.
As both a streaming service and a wellness brand, how will Fitness+ weather the same storms? “People are returning from home to work and the gym, but we created Fitness+ well before there was any notion of a pandemic,” says Williams. “One of the things we're most excited about is that we can meet the user anywhere, anytime – we see this as an opportunity as opposed to a challenge.”
Of course, this is exactly what you would expect any exec to say in response to these circumstances, but there’s good reason to believe that Fitness+ is here for the long run. Not simply out of high-minded principle but because its potential far outweighs its nimble size. If the defining story of Apple after Steve Jobs’ leadership has been the growth of its services-related revenue - the company recently set an all-time record of $19.8 billion in the March quarter - then Fitness+ occupies a purposely unique space amongst the likes of Apple Music, Apple TV+ and the App Store.
“We had always been thinking about what a service like this would look like if it was built around Apple Watch at the centre,” says Blahnik. “And so we kept leaning into many of the things we've learned with Apple Watch, which is that people want it to be unintimidating. It needs to be friendly. It needs to be motivating.”
That process, which began with the Watch five years ago - before working its way through a small army of software engineers, workout experts and designers - is etched into the fabric of the Fitness+ studio itself. You can see it in the three concentric rings that are daubed across many a spare wall in the complex. Having initially struggled to justify its existence as a luxury jewellery item, the Watch found its purpose in those rings, which track a user’s daily movement, exercise and time spent standing via the totemic Activity app. By the end of 2022, it’s predicted that more people will own a Watch than an Apple Mac with the wearable having sold well over 100 million units to date.
As compelling as Fitness+ is as a value proposition for Watch owners - for £9.99 per month you get access to a library of over 2,500 classes - it’s the more than 20 trainers across its 11 workout types that really bring the service to life. Putting the ‘A’ in Type A personality, they sprawl across the studio’s innards from its white-tabled coffee bar to the roof terrace overlooking LA’s urban clutter to a practice studio that’s strewn with spare treadmills, mirrors, yoga mats and the like. Each workout is ideated and rehearsed for up to three weeks before it’s shot live and edited on-site to roll out to users on a Monday morning.
Until you see the trainers in action, the skillset involved is difficult to fathom. Getting in ludicrously good shape is the easy part, it’s presenting the workouts on time and with perfect form according to an emoji-laden autocue script where the real challenge lies. As part of our tour, we watch former Londoner Kim Ngo record a preview video for one of her HIIT workouts. She nails the original clip and its safety backup in 17 seconds exactly for both shots while gesturing the same details in American Sign Language – something the entire team learned together after joining the service. Although Fitness+ launched in December 2020 with a pristine level of polish, the pandemic had a bruising impact behind the scenes. Especially for those who’d chosen to upend their lives to another continent.
“Moving to LA has been tough,” says Ngo. “I was separated from my then fiance, now husband. But a lot of this team are like family now. I'm not going to cry...”
If there’s one intangible metric that defines the success of any workout app, it’s a sense of intimacy. There are four overlapping sets in the Fitness+ studio because it is designed to feel familiar. The trainers intermingle between classes because you are supposed to get to know all of them. Although everything is filmed from LA, the sense of place is universal. Having been bound to their work by the pandemic for over a year, it took a long time for some trainers to know if they were connecting with subscribers. Eventually, they began to meet them on flights, at events and in their Instagram comments. When strength trainer Betina Gozo caught the pandemic baby bug, she helped create a post-partum workout program for new mums. “People are like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have a nine-month-old too.’ And some of them had their baby the same day that I did.”
Before any of that could happen, the team had to get to know each other first. To cut through any initial awkwardness, every trainer went through a drill where they’d teach a class on the other side of a curtain, with the programming team watching the trainers who were following them on the other side. If the instructions were out of time or not clear enough to follow, the class would have to be rewritten until it worked. Cementing this state of initial chaos was Fitness+’s insistence that trainers should appear in each other’s classes, both to better forge a team dynamic and represent users onscreen who might be trying a workout for the first time. “I'd never even seen a rower before I got here,” says cycling coach Tyrell Désean. “So I was like, ‘What is this thing?’”
The whole vibe of the studio is like that of a never-ending summer camp with Blahnik acting as the lead counsellor whose relentless positivity (and occasional hints of exasperation) all help to pull a diverse cast together in the same direction. One of their first team bonding exercises was a treasure hunt across Santa Monica, while several of the trainers recently took a trip to Coachella together. Getting in sync required a bit of radical honesty along the way though. “Ty and I had this moment where he got off the bike, I was on the bike and we were like smashing heads and having this energy bond,” says rowing coach Josh Crosby.
As the trainers find themselves becoming more and more recognised, they’ve been joined on Fitness+ by a slate of bona fide celebrities. From Stephen Fry and Prince William on mental health to Dolly Parton on… being Dolly Parton, each episode of the Time To Walk podcast series is recorded on location and points to a future for Fitness+ outside of the confines of its Santa Monica home. With a slate of wellness-focused features - including blood oxygen monitoring - having long been rumoured for the next edition of the best-selling AirPods Pro, audio feels as though it’ll be an increasingly pivotal part of the service. Especially since Time To Walk has already been joined by guided meditations and a separate Time To Run podcast.
Although Blahnik is tight-lipped on any future changes, he’s eager to move things forwards. “Time To Walk, guided meditations and releasing collections were all things that were on our radar from the beginning, so we were thrilled to safely be able to bring all of them to market,” he says. “We don't think that pace is going to slow down – as long as we have great ideas to motivate people we will keep pushing on.”
For now, Fitness+ seems well-placed to ride out the same pitfalls that its rivals have suffered from this year. Partly because the Watch is such a popular and affordable means to lure in new users, but mainly because the will to make this service work stretches right to the very top of Apple. It’s a tight-knit creation with the support of an absolute behemoth behind it. If you believe in the company’s leadership, a big chunk of its legacy rests on the success of a ragtag group of trainers convincing people to close their rings. It’s not bad work for those who can get it, even if LA takes a bit of getting used to for the Brits amongst them.
“I was baffled for the first year,” says Ngo. “I was like, ‘Oh, it's only rained twice.’ But sometimes you miss the rain, so when it happens you go, ‘Woah!’”
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