Kayla Itsines, personal trainer and founder of Sweat, on promoting strength over slimness, why women work out, and her break-up with Tobi Pearce
In fact, when I remind Itsines that we met about 10 years ago, she wants to know, quite earnestly, if I think she’s changed. I can genuinely say no. OK, maybe she’s had a little face work done. But she is still the same woman, in black jeans and a denim jacket. The watch might have had an upgrade. But by and large, Kayla Itsines is still Kayla Itsines.
But back to saying “f— it”. Itsines is insistent that most women come to the gym, or to her Sweat app (a reported 30 million downloads and counting), because they’ve experienced trauma of some kind. The good news: “It won’t be forever. Eventually, you will get to the point where you exercise because it makes you feel good. But usually, for most women, the thing that brings them to the gym is that they feel like shit.”
But that’s not how Itsines got there. She is among the lucky 1 per cent of people who just happen to love exercise. She planned to be a PE teacher after a somewhat unsuccessful high school career.
“I went to a public primary school and high school, and then I moved to a private school later,” she says, between bites of an anchovy snack she says is one of the reasons she’s chosen this restaurant. “I have a bit of an ADHD brain; too much stimulus makes me lose focus. I would tell the teacher I was going to the bathroom and then I’d just never go back to class. My parents were paying so much money for this school and when Mum found out I was wagging, she was furious.
“And then I turned around and said, I want to be a personal trainer. She was not happy. My backup was to be a PE teacher, which I did start studying for at university. But then I started training and I loved it.”
Itsines has copped flak over the years for aiming her training squarely at women; she brushes this off. It was a deliberate choice, partly because she likes training women and partly due to a bad experience she had when she was an 18-year-old trainer, fresh out of high school at her first job, training people in their homes.
“I rocked up to this guy’s house and he opened the door, wearing normal clothes, not exercise clothes,” she says. “Alarm bells, immediately. I was going through the consent form and he was staring at me. It was very scary.” Itsines said she needed to retrieve something from her car; she never went back inside. From then on, it was only female clients.
What Itsines lacked in experience, she made up for in sheer chutzpah. She worked at a women’s-only gym for a spell, gathering enough clients that when she left, she started training them in the backyard of her family home. “My dad built a cover so that we could work out when it was raining,” she says.
For $1 a minute, minimum 30 minutes, you could sweat with Kayla under her parents’ washing line. Actually, you could even split the cost if you wanted – bring a friend and it’s $15. She trained everyone from her sister’s netball team to an 84-year-old nonna.
Then she met Tobi Pearce.
Mixing work and romance
Itsines’ split from Pearce in August 2020 made headlines. She stayed characteristically mum on the situation; for all her social media presence, she reveals remarkably little about her interior life. But she is candid, today, about her relationship with Pearce, who was CEO of Sweat with Itsines and with whom she shares a four-year-old daughter, Arna.
Pearce was a trainer when they met. When Itsines was flooded with requests for her workouts, it was his idea to sell a guide.
“I said, ‘Who would want that?’ I really didn’t think anyone would pay for it.”
An app followed and then a subscription-based model. In 2021, Sweat was sold to US fitness tech company iFIT for a reported $400 million.
Would she ever work with a romantic partner again, I ask.
“That depends,” she says.
On what?
“On the person, the business, the nature of it.” She pauses and lays down her knife and fork (we’ve just shared grilled calamari for our entree).
“I really don’t think, stepping back and looking at my years with Tobi, that we were anything alike. I’m a fixer. I want to make your day is the best day possible. I want to make sure if you are in my house, you feel warm and comfortable and loved. That’s me. Tobi came to me with no family, no sense of that. I thought, ‘I can fix you.’ He told me, ‘We’re dating. Now we’re starting a business. Now we’re doing this.’”
She felt, at times, like she was simply being taken along on Tobi’s ride.
“Tobi and I very much went like that” – she places her hands like parallel tracks – “and he took the business side and I was the face. I was creative, I was there for people. Tobi was money-driven, business-minded. He was a trainer but for him, it was a means to an end. He was also studying commerce and law, so training wasn’t his thing. It was my thing.”
The money poured in – in 2016, Itsines and Pearce debuted on the Young Rich List with a combined wealth of $46 million. At 24 and 25 respectively, they were the youngest on the list at the time. Itsines paid off her parents’ house but insists that for her, money was not a significant motivator.
“I grew up with so much love that I didn’t care about money. A lot of people who don’t grow up with love want money because they want to impress people, they want that validation. Success insulates them.”
Now, she wonders how she and Pearce became a couple at all. “We are the polar opposite of one another. I look back and think, ‘I have no idea how that all happened.’ I couldn’t have done it without him and he couldn’t have done it without me, but … I still have no idea how it all happened.”
Money as freedom
At the height of her popularity, Itsines was touring the world, training thousands of women at a time at outdoor events. (She recalls a time in Perth when the audience capacity was 4000 and her team estimated that 6000 women turned up.)
That must have been overwhelming to have that level of attention at such a young age, I muse.
“No,” she says. “I never stepped out of my zone. I never started being someone I wasn’t. I was still doing what I loved: training, exercising. It was about community and fun.”
Itsines, who does not drink (she doesn’t like the taste), turned down offers she thought would sexualise her and refused to promote products she did not own or have a stake in. “I am the same person I was when I started out. I am not super sexy. I don’t drink. I am a family girl from Adelaide. I train women only. I stuck to those things and it kept me, me.”
Indeed, she is such a family girl that the whole Itsines gang pretty much lives on top of one another: her parents, her sister and her family, her grandparents and her new partner Jae Woodroffe’s family all live on the same block in the Adelaide suburbs. She refers to her family as her “best friends”. “The other day Jae and I sat on the couch and he said, ‘This is the first time we’ve sat on this couch by ourselves.’”
Money is freedom, she says. “I love being able to do little things and not have to think about it. Like my grandparents have this coffee table that they have cable-tied the legs on to because it’s falling apart. They would never buy a new one. I bought them a new one from Amart for $220. It’s little things like that.”
When you have money with the wrong person, she says, “everything feels wrong. It made my life no better. When you have the right person, it lets you create memories. It gives you more.” Woodroffe (with whom Itsines has a baby boy, Jax, born in January) works for a company that houses people with acquired brain injuries; he repairs cars as a hobby.
Itsines is now Sweat’s “head trainer”, a role that she is nominally on maternity leave from. These days, she admits to “twiddling my thumbs” compared with the relentless pace at which she worked in the app’s early days. She still trains three to four times a week, and walks most days, but admits that she has fallen out of this routine recently due to illness and being post-partum. “I do miss it, because it’s my time to just be me,” she says. “I can blast my music and go for it. But it’s not the end of the world.”
Strength over skinniness
Over the years, Itsines has heard her fair share of criticism. She’s been accused of promoting one body ideal, which annoys her. “We shouldn’t have called it the Bikini Body Guide,” she says, “but that was the culture at the time. And when women wanted us to change it, we did.”
She says the way she spoke about fitness, promoting strength over skinniness, is not simply a new way to promote this body ideal.
“No,” she says emphatically. “You want to live your best life forever? You need strength, you need muscle. We are not about building a booty at Sweat. It’s about doing a squat, doing a lunge. Running 24/7, cardio 24/7 does not help you pick your toddler off the floor.”
That 84-year-old client she used to train in her parents’ backyard is a great example. “She came to me because she didn’t want to fall. I would get her to walk, lie down and get off the floor. At first, I helped her up, and then she did it herself. And for her, that was her fitness. That’s what matters to her. That is not diet culture.”
What really gets her is negativity online. “People can say what they want about my body,” she says. “I have developed a thick skin. I hate it when people said awful things about other people’s bodies, that they looked better in their before photos, things like that. My team would have to take my phone away from me, I would respond and get in trouble.”
Have we moved on from diet culture? She thought we had until recently, when she heard about Ozempic, the diabetes drug now known for being used off-script for rapid weight loss (it suppresses appetite).
“I was devastated. I felt like I’d gone 10 years backwards.” She stops. “But who am I to speak about this, honestly? I am a small person, I have never had weight issues. So for me to speak about something like this … I don’t have a leg to stand on.”
When it comes to body image, she says she does feel a responsibility to her followers, but tries to lead by example rather than make statements.
“I don’t drink, I don’t take drugs, I don’t smoke.”
Then she surprises me. “It’s not to say I wouldn’t consider implants. Some things don’t look like they used to.”
I am not sure what to make of this left turn from a woman who has defined her personal brand with wholesomeness, but Itsines fills in the blanks for me, moving on to her endometriosis, something she hid for years before revealing it after the birth of her daughter.
She has undergone two surgeries to treat the symptoms. They were the most painful experiences of her life, she tells me. “I would rather have another caesarean. It’s so painful. It’s not normal. Your whole body hurts in the strangest way. And the surgery is only a temporary relief.”
She was in pain while on stage at many points, exercising in front of thousands-strong crowds. “I didn’t speak about it before because I didn’t want to frighten people. I wanted to have a baby and then speak about it,” she says, explaining the link between endometriosis and infertility.
On the one hand, yes, Itsines is transparent. But she’s also a good actor. She disguised her physical pain, and she certainly never let slip any cracks in her relationship with Pearce. “I never let it show. It’s not who I am. I am known as a friend, someone who is positive and upbeat,” she says. “But nothing about my previous relationship was easy. It was always hard. It was always a battle.”
We finish our mains – Itsines has had the crab pasta, I’ve gone for garfish, we split a leaf salad – and Itsines wants to know my plans. She is training the Sweat team tomorrow and wants to know if I’m staying another day. “You could have trained with us,” she says. “That would have been so fun.” I agree, and I mean it.
Unlike some other entrepreneurs, Itsines is not the CEO of her company; it has never interested her.
“The number of times people in my team have tried to give me a position in the company where people report to me … ” she laughs. “It’s not me. I should be reporting to them! I don’t know anything about analytics. I can’t code. I’m not a finance person. I can’t claim that I have built this business alone. I am not the person who goes on a tour saying how much money I’ve earned building this business. I have a team of people who are smarter than me. They have worked with me, not for me.”
She understands that other women – other people, actually – want to lead, and take credit. “We want to be able to say we are capable, that we’re proud of ourselves. And we should be. That’s fair enough. But the other side of that is accepting that you have had help.
“I could never have done this alone. But yes, I did show up. I did do the boot camps, I did the training, I did the interviews, I was the face. I never woke up and said, ‘I want to make a million dollars’. I would be happy, genuinely very happy, if I was a personal trainer at a gym forever.”
Kayla Itsines will be a guest speaker at the Financial Review Entrepreneur Summit 2023 in Sydney on Tuesday, June 20.
The bill
Fugazzi Bar & Dining Room, Adelaide
Anchovy with red lettuce, $22
Wood grilled calamari with cannellini bean and caper gremolata, $32
Taglierini with blue swimmer crab, chilli, garlic and salmon roe, $46
Chinotto, $6
Grilled market fish with curry leaf butter and caper sauce, $49
Leaf salad, $13
Two espressos, $10
Total $178
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