What is Flow Athletic?
On a high level we’re a yoga and fitness community. What that looks like on the ground level is a 1,000sqm facility in Paddington, in Sydney, Australia, that has group exercise rooms for yoga, spin, strength and reformer Pilates, plus a personal training studio.
We hold 140 classes a week and have 1,000 active members that come an average of three times a week. We do over 400 PT sessions a week and hold world-class events such as ‘Flow after dark’, yoga silent disco and ‘night club spin’ all over the country.
Our run club does things like take large groups of 50 plus people to run in overseas event, such as the New York Marathon. So, we are lots of things.
How did the idea for Flow Athletic come about?
I owned PT studios in 2010. I was training for an ultramarathon and started doing yoga at a local studio in Bondi to assist my running – I found it really helped me in my athletic pursuits.
I became friends with the awesome yoga teacher Kate Kendall, and she started personal training with me. She found the strength and fitness really helped her yoga and we thought there might be a future in combining yoga, strength and fitness under one roof.
How did you turn the idea into reality?
We spent years refining the business model. We travelled overseas to learn from existing businesses and met and brainstormed with mentors to solidify our values and bring our vision to life.
What’s the Flow Philosophy of 1:1:1?
We advise our Flow Athletes – the name we give to our members – to complete classes at Flow in a ratio of one yoga to one strength to one cardio class. We believe this ratio and combination of classes has a number of very positive effects on their body and mind and provides longevity in their training.
How is Flow helping change perceptions of yoga?
In the late 90s to early 2000s yoga was quite ‘herbal’ in Australia and it was hard to find places to practice.
Today there are many yoga and meditation studios. There’s widespread knowledge now of the physical benefits and yoga tends to be done by a lot more men and also by athletes.
Flow has always tried to get more men to try yoga and when they realise the benefits it has: better sleep, focus, helping with strength training, recovery, balance and on and on, they become hooked.
Tell us about your events
We run world-class events, such as Flow after dark yoga, silent disco and night club spin all over the country – when we’re not under the grip of coronavirus!
We know a lot more people would like to go to Flow Athletic, but because we have only one physical location it’s hard to get to. So we run these large-scale events so people all over Australia get to feel the flow magic.
They’re profitable and we get great PR from them, but we mainly do them because they’re fun for our team to execute and the incredible feedback we get. Our next event is in Bali in October.
How are you dealing with COVID-19?
We started an online streaming business with 65 classes per week across four channels – yoga, strength, cycle and pilates – and thanks to this we’ve managed to keep the majority of our members on at an adjusted rate.
All our personal training has moved to Facetime and Zoom and all our weekly staff meetings are done using Zoom.
We’re a great position – all our full time staff are still employed on full wage.
We’re overcoming this challenging situation and will power out of the dip with the backing of our loyal community.
