What Joy In Movement (J.I.M) Can Teach Gym Owners About Challenging Industry Norms

The fitness industry has never been short on opinions. You need a large facility. You need more equipment. Every class needs an instructor standing at the front of the room. Bigger memberships equal a better business. More coaches create a better member experience.

Spend enough time in the industry and these ideas begin to feel like facts. The problem is that many of them are not facts at all. They are simply conventions that have been repeated so often that few people ever stop to question them.

That was one of the biggest takeaways from my conversation with Jarad Hobbs, founder of Joy In Movement. Rather than asking how to build another successful gym, Jarad asked a far more interesting question. What if we started from scratch and only kept the things that genuinely improve the member experience? The result is one of Australia’s fastest-growing boutique fitness concepts and a business that deliberately breaks many of the rules the industry takes for granted.

The fitness industry has a habit of adding. More classes, more equipment, more services, more complexity. Joy In Movement went in the opposite direction. The studios are intentionally compact, typically around 50 to 70 square metres, and rather than maximising floor space with endless equipment, the business focuses on delivering an exceptional experience inside a footprint that many operators would dismiss as far too small.

That is a fascinating challenge to conventional thinking. For years, operators have assumed that bigger facilities automatically create bigger opportunities. Jarad proved that if the experience is designed well enough, size becomes far less important than value. It is a reminder that competitive advantage rarely comes from doing more. More often it comes from having the discipline to do fewer things exceptionally well.

Perhaps the boldest decision Joy In Movement made was removing the live instructor from the room. At first glance that sounds almost counterintuitive, given that the industry has spent decades telling itself that coaching is what creates the experience. Jarad was clear that this decision had very little to do with labour costs and everything to do with psychology.

Many first-time exercisers feel genuinely exposed in a traditional gym environment. Bright lights, mirrors, an instructor demonstrating movements perfectly, and the quiet but persistent fear that everyone else knows exactly what they are doing. For someone already nervous about walking through the door, that environment can reinforce every insecurity they are carrying. Rather than asking how to coach harder, Jarad asked how to reduce anxiety. That subtle shift changes everything. The experience becomes calmer, less intimidating and more welcoming, not because coaching was removed, but because unnecessary barriers to movement were.

One of the biggest mistakes many fitness businesses make is unconsciously designing for themselves. We love hard training. We enjoy technical lifts. We understand gym culture. Most of our members do not, and Jarad’s thinking consistently came back to empathy as the starting point for every decision.

How does someone feel before they walk through the door? What thoughts are running through their head? What might stop them from coming back? These questions influenced everything from the programming and lighting through to the layout of the room and the overall customer journey. That level of intentionality is something every gym owner can learn from. Too often we ask what workout we should deliver. The better question is what experience we want people to have.

While the concept itself is genuinely innovative, another lesson from this conversation stood out just as clearly. Innovation without systems rarely scales. Joy In Movement was not built around one charismatic coach delivering incredible classes. It was built around a repeatable member experience, and that is a very different mindset entirely.

When the experience depends on one person’s personality, expansion becomes difficult. Every new location requires another exceptional coach who can recreate exactly the same magic. Systems change that equation. They create consistency, protect quality and make growth possible. It is easy to look at successful brands and focus on the visible parts, the branding, the studios, the marketing. Usually, their real competitive advantage sits underneath all of that, in the systems members never even notice.

This was probably my biggest takeaway from the entire conversation. The fitness industry spends far too much time copying itself. Someone launches a new model, everyone else follows, and eventually those ideas become accepted wisdom. But customers rarely care about industry traditions. They care about solving their problem.

Jarad challenged assumptions that many of us had simply accepted without question. Does every class really need an instructor? Does a boutique studio need hundreds of square metres? Do beginners actually want the same experience as experienced gym-goers? Could simplifying the environment actually improve results? These are not just operational questions. They are strategic ones. The businesses that continue to grow over the next decade will not necessarily be those with the biggest budgets. They will be the ones willing to question assumptions that everybody else takes for granted.

It is easy to admire innovation after it has proven successful. It is much harder to appreciate what it takes before anyone knows whether it will work. When Joy In Movement launched, many of these ideas challenged accepted thinking. Small studios, automated classes, no live instructor, a completely different customer experience. None of those decisions would have looked safe at the time, and that is often the nature of genuine innovation.

If everybody agrees with your idea from day one, it probably is not very innovative. The businesses that shape industries rarely begin by following best practice. They begin by questioning whether today’s best practice is actually best at all.

One thing I genuinely love about speaking with founders like Jarad is that the conversation always extends well beyond fitness. At its core it is really about entrepreneurship. The willingness to stay curious, the discipline to keep asking better questions, and the courage to build something different when everyone else is building variations of the same thing.

As gym owners, we can become trapped by the industry’s unwritten rules without even realising it. This conversation was a powerful reminder that those rules only exist until someone proves otherwise. The best question you can ask is not how to build a better version of someone else’s business. It is whether the assumptions you are working from are even true. That is where genuine innovation begins.

• Challenge assumptions instead of copying industry norms.
• Design experiences around reducing friction rather than increasing complexity.
• Build your business around customer psychology, particularly for beginners.
• Systems create scalability far more effectively than relying on exceptional individuals.
• Innovation often comes from removing unnecessary elements rather than adding new ones.
• The businesses that lead tomorrow are usually the ones willing to question what everyone else accepts today.