Apple Fitness+ Might Be The Most Inclusive Workout Service On The Market
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Opening the heavy-duty doors to the Apple Fitness+ studio in Santa Monica is an otherworldly experience that only Apple could orchestrate. Trainers outfitted in a rainbow of Nike activewear greet you warmly with a mix of English and American Sign Language and megawatt smiles. Rows of stationary bikes and racks of dumbbells divide each section of the filming space into the most well-kept gym you’ve ever seen. Every light is arranged just so, each of the 14 robotic cameras—the largest installation of its kind in the world—pointed exactly where they need to be, from the ceiling to the floor. It almost doesn’t seem real, like the fitness version of Greta Gerwig’s Barbieland.
But everything in the Fitness+ studio is, in fact, mind-blowingly real, a feat that feels even more impressive when you consider that the content created here is meant to be consumed through a screen. The greenery peeking out from the wood-paneled background in a yoga class is very much alive. The peg wall behind the high-intensity interval training workouts is not only the biggest on the planet, but it’s fully climbable, too, if you wanted it to be.
The Fitness+ studio is also a veritable home away from home for the service’s trainers—28 diverse and uniquely talented humans who are as dedicated to supporting each other as they are to the workouts they create and the users who sweat alongside them. “When you watch the workouts, you can feel that there's a lot of love and care that's gone into it,” kickboxing trainer Nez Dally tells Women’s Health. “Maybe you can't pinpoint what it is, but you can definitely feel it.”
Well, I can certainly try to pinpoint it: The Fitness+ studio may be a 23,000-square-foot, three-story home workout utopia with a global reach, but the real magic is in the tiny behind-the-scenes details that, when working together in harmony, strive to make everyone who interacts with the service feel a little less alone.
Fitness+ has a mission to be more inclusive than other platforms, and that can make you more likely to stick with a routine.
Apple Fitness+
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Fitness+ launched in December 2020 with a library of close to 200 five- to 45-minute workouts. Today, there are more than 5,000 pieces of content across 12 modalities including strength training, rowing, Pilates, and dance, and 30 are added weekly. Workouts can be streamed to your iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV, with or without an Apple Watch (though the watch’s activity tracking features are a key motivator throughout the classes).
By the end of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had already changed the fitness landscape forever. Home workouts were the norm, and streaming platforms like Peloton and Tonal thrived. It’s easy to assume that Fitness+ was merely a reactionary measure by Apple, but it had already been long in development.
The initial 22 trainers arrived in Santa Monica that February to begin working on the app, and many soon found themselves quarantined in temporary housing until July. “We did all the rehearsals on video conferencing,” says Jay Blahnik, Apple’s vice president of fitness technologies and a longtime industry veteran who developed apps at Nike in the mid-2000s. “It was also a big team-building exercise, doing that.”
Becoming a Fitness+ trainer means being the ultimate team player, and that’s not always easy to find.
It takes a special kind of trainer to be recruited for Fitness+, Blahnik says. In many ways, it’s a team sport. While each trainer specializes in a modality, they tend to appear in the background of more workouts than they lead. So a yoga teacher must be willing to represent themselves by, say, demonstrating modifications in a HIIT workout—and put just as much effort into those moments. “There are a lot of trainers who are experts at their craft, but their heart is not for that person that's trying something new,” Blahnik explains.
The Apple team has been known to observe potential new hires in the wild, whether that’s on their social media pages or by attending a class they’re teaching, to see if they represent the platform’s core values when no one is watching. Fitness+ isn’t just for someone who’s brand new to fitness, it’s for anybody willing to try something they’ve never done before. That means a trainer needs to check their ego at the studio’s tall, wood-paneled doors and embrace sweating outside their comfort zone in the same way the platform encourages its users to. “Not every trainer feels that way about what they do. They want to be front and center,” Blahnik says. “For us, teamwork is a really important part of it, and understanding that your value is much, much broader than just your expertise.”
Yoga trainer Molly Fox has worked in fitness for more than 40 years but says the experience at Fitness+ is “more team-oriented than anything I've ever done.” Fox, who recently turned 70 years old, says the bonds extend from the trainer team to the editors and producers on the other side of the service. “I'm talking to people in their 30s and in their 40s and getting different perspectives,” she says. “We have a lot of respect for each other. We work really well together. We listen well. We collaborate really well.”
One way the trainers bond is through taking ASL classes together weekly. Sign is incorporated into the beginning and end of each workout, with more added all the time. While it’s not required to come in with a grasp of the language, it certainly helps—take HIIT trainer Brian Cochrane, a more recent hire who impressed Blahnik by signing in his audition. “Those kinds of things showcase that we share the same values,” Blahnik says, which goes much farther than something like a large social media following. None of that matters if they don’t support the Fitness+ North Star mission, which is to be, as Blahnik puts it, “the most welcoming and inclusive platform on the planet.”
Each Fitness+ workout is filmed with a high level of precision, which means they never overuse moves.
Turning a Fitness+ workout from an assignment into a consumable product on an Apple device is typically a four-week process. Each trainer team—designated by specialty, like strength or yoga—talks through the workouts they’re leading to ensure they’re not overusing moves. They also take each other’s advice on everything from modifications to the Apple Music playlist they use. (Apple does not share the number of Fitness+ subscribers or daily users externally, but trainers do receive top-level data on popular workouts and modalities.)
Trainers come into the office five days a week, and the level of collaboration and comfort between them is palpable in every corner of the studio. It’s common to see pods of three or four sitting with their MacBooks at the long wooden table in the rehearsal room or perched on fluffy couches in the coffee bar area. (Some team members took barista lessons so they could make each other coffee; rowing trainer Josh Crosby even demonstrated his latte-making skills for WH, topped with a not-unimpressive bit of foam art.)
Before working at Apple, “I would just teach my class and then go off and sit in the cafe, lonely. I’m making invoices and then go teach the next class,” says yoga trainer Jonelle Lewis. “But here, it's being surrounded by a team of incredible folks that care so much. I never knew that that was missing until I had it.”
It takes several days to rehearse each routine so that a workout can be filmed in as close to one take as possible. Since trainers are actually performing every move, often panting and perspiring along with the audience, it would be near impossible to reshoot any aspect of a workout without also recreating the exact sweat marks on clothing, so that only happens when it’s necessary for accuracy. Little imperfections are part of what makes Fitness+ relatable, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to get every detail right. And there are a lot of details.
In rehearsals, a workout’s background trainers will provide instant feedback for the lead trainer. They communicate whether something feels uncomfortable in their body and what prompts might help them achieve the desired result. “That's so key for us, because if they're not getting it in the studio, how are they going to get it at home?” says HIIT trainer Kim Ngo. “That constant loop of feedback helps us really take our workouts to the next level.”
No detail is too small when it comes to making users feel welcome on the Fitness+ platform.
It's also important to come up with cues that truly work for folks of all abilities. The rehearsal room is split in half by a floor-to-ceiling curtain so that a trainer can roll it out and practice a workout behind it. Trainers on the other side listen to determine whether the instructions are easy to follow for someone who may have low or no vision. “It's always about, how can we invite more people in?” Blahnik says.
In many cases, the most impactful Fitness+ cues are the ones you may not even notice on first watch. Trainers call the audience “family” or “team” rather than the more colloquial (and much less politically correct) “you guys.” Body parts are “yours,” rather than “those” legs or arms. And trainers teach backwards, instructing you to move your right leg as they move their left, so a user can mirror their movements. “It took some time to get used to switching from left to right and was a humbling experience,” Dally says of teaching kickboxing combos in a new way. “[But] changing how left/rights are coached was a no brainer as I realized how much it would help users on their journey.”
Whether a workout is five minutes or 45 minutes, it takes a behind-the-scenes production team of more than 20 people at least two weeks to take it across the finish line from stage to screen. The workout is recorded from multiple angles at once, and a logger in the control room notes everything said on camera in order to trigger the timer and other on-screen features. “To see the detail that goes into it, all the hands that touch that one 10-minute workout, was just mind blowing to me,” Dally says.
That ethos extends into the workouts themselves: You’ll never catch the Fitness+ trainer team say that a workout is “only” 10 minutes or insinuate that you chose it because you couldn’t fit in anything longer. Instead, they remind you how awesome it is that you showed up and gave it your all.
“We hear all the time that the all-or-nothing approach actually is not that successful for most people,” Blahnik says. “It turns out that they find themselves progressing more than they ever have when they don't feel as much pressure to be all-in or nothing. They can fit it in and feel good about it. It changes their whole mentality.”
Mom-of-one Ngo recalls a fellow parent once approaching her on the playground to tell her that the service’s 10-minute workouts changed her life. “Time is of the essence,” says Ngo. “She said to me [that] she is the fittest she's ever been, and that's after her second child.” It also helps that seeing a badass mom like Ngo, who led classes on Fitness+ both in pregnancy and now postpartum, can inspire women like her to get moving.
Representation is at the forefront of every piece of content Fitness+ produces, whether it’s workouts themed around inclusive moments such as Pride Month or Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, or simply the presence of trainers of different races, backgrounds, ages, body types, and life experiences. Apple wants to make sure everyone can see themselves reflected here. “[That’s] what’s really special about having three, sometimes four, trainers in each workout,” Lewis says. “These workouts will show up differently in everyone’s bodies, so we give our user permission to come as they are.”
While Fox does lead a program on the service specifically for older adults, she says she’s heard from people of all ages who take her classes. “We have a lot of younger users that go, ‘Oh my gosh, I want to be like you when I grow up. I want to go there with you,’” she says. “I'm very grateful that I got this job when I was 68. Like, how many 60-year-old fitness people get to work at this level?”
Dally, who wears a hijab, has received countless kind messages from users who say her workouts sparked meaningful conversations at home. “Quite a lot of them share their experiences with their children, who are seeing somebody like me for the first time on the screen and asking questions about the way I present myself,” she says. “[I’m] having some really honest, candid, beautiful conversations with people about who I am.”
Apple still has plenty of tricks up its sleeve for Fitness+, many of which began rolling out at the beginning of 2024.
Users can stack multiple workouts back to back in one session or combine workouts of different lengths and modalities into a custom, month-long plan. A new Strength, Core, and Yoga for Golfers program with 20-year-old pro Rose Zhang just dropped, and so did science-backed sound meditations.
Audio has always been a keystone of the workouts, with nine styles to filter through in the app, from “Chill Vibes” to “Upbeat Anthems.” The ongoing Artist Spotlight series features only one artist in an entire selection of workouts, with playlists that can be saved to Apple Music. Recent participants include Usher, Britney Spears, U2, and Rihanna. (It’s the first time Rihanna has lent her music to a fitness service, and her team was hyper-engaged to help curate the vibe, from lighting to outfits). Never one to leave anyone out, those who prefer to hear the trainers more than the hits can also toggle the volume of each through a new Audio Focus feature.
When someone is able to expand the possibilities of a typical movement practice, the benefits go far beyond the workouts. “Most of our users, when they comment on the impact the service has had, they almost always talk through the lens of being healthier, feeling better, feeling less lonely, trying something new,” Blahnik says. Apple has certainly heard its share of weight loss stories from folks who used the app, but it almost always goes deeper than that. “It's great if there's a transformation, but internal transformation, health transformation, is even more important to us.”
Blahnik says the “common denominator” of working at Fitness+ is that each person has a user-first mindset, wondering how they can push the platform to the next level of inclusivity. “This isn't a place you want to be if you're comfortable just kind of settling,” he explains. The work “will be never ending. We think there's only opportunity in front of us, and we're just getting started.”
As the doors closed on WH’s visit to Santa Monica, both figuratively and literally, it was impossible to shut the smiles off or ignore the warm, fuzzy feeling that radiated out into the street. The desire to make someone feel truly welcome can certainly be a marketing tactic, but it will only be successful if, deep down, it’s what you really value. “It's this beautiful family from all across the world, all sorts of different people,” Lewis says. “It just shows what fitness and mindfulness really does—it really can be something that unites people.”
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