Kayla Itsines: SA’s $46 million queen of lean

SHE’S proud of her big Greek family, enjoys cooking and cleaning, and swears she’s no princess. But “Bikini Body” personal trainer Kayla Itsines and partner Tobias Pearce have built a $46 million online fitness empire from their home in Adelaide.

Kayla Itsines. Picture: Matt Turner

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IT’S a big deal for me, but the fact that I’m sweating with Kayla doesn’t make me special. In a breathless 28 minutes that left me jelly-legged and slightly queasy, I’d joined a community of women that’s said to be 15 million strong. That fairly elastic figure counts the number of people who have liked, followed and generally bowed down — in mind if not in body and perhaps only fleetingly — to the extraordinary, global phenomenon that is Adelaide fitness trainer Kayla Itsines.

In less than four years, Itsines, 25, and her boyfriend and business partner Tobias Pearce, 24, have harnessed the power of social media to build an empire based first on downloadable PDF Bikini Body Guides (BBG) with exercise and healthy eating plans, to bundled e-books, branded fitness equipment and, since late last year, a smartphone app called Sweat With Kayla. In so doing, they launched themselves in a spectacular star jump on to the 2016 BRW Young Rich List with an estimated fortune of $46 million.

Speaking of star jumps, in Week 1 of Kayla’s workouts for beginners, you’ll meet her version, the X-jump, which includes a squat and a cross-body bend. Like all of the introductory exercises, they look easy, but put them together, with up to 15 repetitions and finishing with 50 skips, then repeat, and you’ll realise it’s HARD. But then, you only have to check in with Kayla’s 5.9 million followers on Instagram (that’s more than Gwyneth Paltrow, but not as many as Kim Kardashian), or any one of the myriad BBG Instagram communities, or to Kayla’s Facebook page (9.6m likes) to know that you’re not alone. That’s if you can still think straight. At the end of the 28 minutes, I barely had the strength to lay out my pink Kayla sweat towel before collapsing on the floor. And don’t even get me started on the instrument of torture that is the Kayla Itsines Body Roller. That’s pink, too.

All this (excluding the merchandise) can be yours for $19.99 a month, via the Sweat With Kayla app. Itsines and Pearce are tight-lipped about the numbers, but it’s reported to be one of the top-rating, and highest-grossing, fitness apps worldwide. And, according to them, the BBG community is the biggest online, anywhere. In the past 18 months, her Instagram following has more than doubled, and her Facebook fans have gone from 1.5 million to almost 10 million.

Last month, a Sweat With Kayla Boot Camp drew more than 2000 women to Olympic Park in Melbourne for a staged Guinness World Record attempt, breaking five records.

And last Thursday they moved from the digital world to print with the launch of The Bikini Body 28-Day Healthy Eating and Lifestyle Guide, published by Pan Macmillan and released in the United States and the UK at the end of the month. It was a hotly contested book, attracting pitches from several publishers. If only a fraction of the BBG community buy it, it will be one of the best-selling health and fitness titles of the year.

So what is it about this young woman, raised in a close-knit Greek family in Adelaide’s eastern suburbs, that has inspired so many millions of women from all over the world to get moving? If you thought her exercise program was hard, try getting an interview. Her schedule is crazy-busy. Just ask her public relations officer Claire Raggatt. I have a seemingly endless email chain with her that attests to the degree of difficulty. Even with all the vice-regal protocols, it was easier to secure a place on a trip with the Governor-General than to nail down an hour in the presence of the fitness queen. No, we couldn’t trail her for a day. No, we couldn’t go to her, she would come to us. And no, no, no, she most definitely would NOT wear a tiara for our photo shoot.

“I’m not a princess!” she shoots at me, index finger pointing, when we finally get her into the studio. By that time, I was pretty sure that was the case. At our first meeting, she lopes through The Advertiser and Sunday Mail newsroom with a boyish gait, turning heads, with Raggatt hot on her heels. Slight, of average height, with flawless olive skin and straight dark hair half-tied in a topknot, she’s dressed in baggy grey sweat pants, slung low on her hips, and a hoodie. Except on very rare occasions (such as to pick up one of the business awards she and Pearce have won) she only ever dresses in activewear, she tells me later. “You should see my wardrobe … it’s all Tobi’s and then I have this tiny bit, and it’s all activewear,” she says. “I’d love to see your wardrobe,” I reply. “Can I come over?” She smiles. That was another no.

If she ever needs a frock, Itsines tells us, she wears it once then, in a commendably thrifty move for one so wealthy, sells it to One Night Stand hire boutique, because the owner knows that Instagram images of Kayla wearing it will guarantee multiple hires.

Sweat With Kayla Boot Camp drew more than 2000 women to Olympic Park in Melbourne. Picture: Jeremy Simmons

After introductions in the foyer, the first act that endears Itsines to me occurs in the lift up to the newsroom. She bends to pick up a discarded wrapper, screws it up and puts it in her pocket. No need for that, I tell her. “That’s just me,” she says. “I’m always cleaning. I’m Greek!”

I’ve made tea, having checked earlier to see what Itsines likes. Herbal. She sits, and immediately plays mother, pouring for us all. She likes to be spontaneous. She’s warm, apparently relaxed, and it’s very soon evident that her enthusiasm for what she does is boundless. Passionate is an overused word, but in her case it accurately describes her attitude to her work training women. It’s as if it’s a calling, rather than an enterprise. She’s the evangelist, it seems, while Pearce stays mostly in the background, taking care of business. That’s only speculation, since repeated requests to talk to him were rebuffed. The success of the BBG guides and the Sweat With Kayla app is not about her, Itsines says emphatically. It’s the community. “Some people say community,” she says. “I say family. It’s like a big group of sisters. It’s a community of women who just want to support each other and see each other do well. They talk to each other and they do meet-ups, they go on boat cruises with each other. It’s just this amazing community of friends who are healthy and fit and support each other through it.”

Family is everything to Itsines. “Like, have you seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding, or, like, Wog Boy or any of those sort of movies?” she says of growing up in the Itsines household. “That’s it. It’s a house filled with family. My cousins are there every day. It was the four of us, my mum, my dad, my sister and me, and then it was, like, four, eight, another 10 people a night, in and out of the house all night. There would be food, a big group, it was just a big gathering and when they didn’t come over it was like, ‘where are you guys?’ ”

Her parents, both teachers, have a substantial Instagram presence thanks to exposure from their daughter, and sister Leah has followed in her big sister’s sneakers and built a business as a personal trainer and food stylist. Anna (7753 followers) and Jim Itsines (7830 followers) have been married 27 years, and their loving anniversary post on Anna’s account attracted more than 3000 likes. According to Itsines, her father is relatively clueless about Instagram and has earned his following because he posts almost exclusively pictures of her huskies. Images of her grandparents — Yia Yia and Pappou — also make frequent appearances online.

She had always been a happy, healthy kid, she tells me, played lots of sport and ate a varied, Mediterranean diet, and still does, including cakes, which she likes to bake. And no, she’d never had had an eating disorder. “I’ve always been like this,” she says of her slight frame. “I’ve never suffered from anything.” Just yesterday, she adds, she’d been at her Yia Yia’s drinking Greek coffee and eating baklava. “I can’t not have Yia’s cakes. You can’t do that. It’s like not having your nonna’s pasta. You’ve got to do it.”

Personal trainer Kayla Itsines with boyfriend and business partner Tobias Pearce

The joy of living in the crowded house that was the Itsines family home didn’t stop her when a 22-year-old Kayla made the decision to move out of home. And not to a share house with girlfriends, but with Pearce, who she’d been dating for less than a year.

“They were not happy,” she says. “Greeks, you know. My Yia Yia and Pappou, and Mum and Dad, they want you there for as long as possible. So when I moved out they were like ‘What did we do?’ I was like, ‘Nothing, I just want to move out and see what it’s like’, so we moved into this little rental and started up the business in a spare bedroom.” But don’t good Greek girls out of home only when it’s time to walk down the aisle? “Yeah,” concedes Itsines. “My grandma is on my bum about it. She’s like (and here she slips into a heavy Greek accent) ‘I want you marry, have nice grandchildren’. She was saying it to me yesterday, ‘Come on’. And I’m like ‘OK, Yia Yia, just relax’.”

So, is it going to happen? “Hopefully one day,” she says. “If he asks me one day.” Surprisingly, Pearce has yet to pop the question to the girl who’s the irreplaceable face of their multimillion-dollar business. “No,” she says, he hasn’t asked. “That hasn’t happened yet. We’re boyfriend and girlfriend. If that happens, then yes. Until then ... ” She breaks off, looking quietly amused.

Of course, she knows she will be quoted. And she’s quietly confident, relating a story told to her by one of Pearce’s colleagues a few days after they met. He’d walked into work and announced “I’ve found the girl I’m going to marry”. And his Instagram page lists Itsines under the engagement ring icon, as does hers.

The couple met at a gym (where else?) and Itsines admits that at first the attraction wasn’t mutual. She was intimidated by his weightlifter’s appearance — by that time, Pearce had made his transition from a “60kg classical musician in high school to a 102kg bodybuilder” as he put it in the introduction to a 2014 version of the BBG. What won her over was his intelligence, and his ability at the piano, which he apparently plays at concert pianist level, and which reduced her to tears the first time he played for her. “Look, I’ll show you,” she says, flicking through her phone to find a video of him at the keyboard, playing with much flourish and many trills.

Personal trainer Kayla Itsines. Photo: Matt Turner

At the time, Pearce was doing a double degree in Law and Commerce, studying to be a personal trainer, training clients and running a boot camp business. “He was living (with his parents) in McLaren Vale, getting up at 4.30 in the morning, driving to the gym, training his clients, going to uni, doing his study, doing his bodybuilding, doing his food ...,” she says. (Body-builders are much occupied with feeding.) “He worked like crazy,” she adds. “Because he didn’t have a lot growing up. His parents gave them everything they had, but it wasn’t a lot. He always said ‘I want to have a good life for my children, I want to work hard, I want my children to have what I didn’t have’.”

She describes him as a genius, and it’s a description I’ve heard from others, too, although since one of their conditions in consenting to the interview had been that there be no outside voices in this piece, I can’t quote them. It was his idea to create the Bikini Body Guides. “I was perfectly fine as a personal trainer doing my own thing,” she says. Her word-of-mouth reputation was growing and she was receiving more requests from women who wanted her to train them. She hated having to refuse.

“I started feeling really bad, and this is another reason why Tobi loves me, I just burst out into tears,” she says. Pearce persuaded her that she could still train them, that it didn’t need to be face-to-face, that these women clearly needed her. “So we created a program, I wrote the workouts, wrote the explanation of the exercises, put it into the 28 minutes and put it online. And it just went off.”

With her encouragement, women began to send her before-and-after photos of how they’d transformed their bodies with her program, and her young cousin showed her how to post them on Instagram. Then it really went off. The transformation selfies are a hallmark of the program, and Itsines’s Instagram account features daily images of herself, doing nothing more than smiling into her phone. Typically, they attract 40,000 love hearts.

She has never, however, posted a “before” shot. That’s deliberate. “It’s not about me,” she stresses. It’s about the stories posted by followers, of how they’ve turned their lives around. She sees herself as a friend and a mentor. At her boot camps, which can draw up to 4000 women and have a religious fervour about them, people line up for hours to “meet and greet” her. “You’re not just a personal trainer,” she says. “You listen to their problems, you help them out. All personal trainers do it. You go to your personal trainer and you’ve had a bad day and you vent. That’s me, that’s what I am. I experience that most at the boot camps. We do the workout and then they come up tell me their stories. And they’re not good stories. They’re beautiful at the end, but they’re overwhelming.”

Ingrid Ohlsson, Head of Nonfiction at Pan Macmillan Australia, is the publisher behind the successful I Quit Sugar books by Sarah Wilson, Food for Life by Michelle Bridges and a forthcoming CSIRO cookbook. Hers is the only other voice permitted in this piece, but as she’s a personal friend (of mine, not Itsines) I know she’s not just giving me spin. Her working relationship with Itsines and Pearce and their team had been “enormously positive”, allowing them to turn around a large format book of almost 400 pages on a very tight timeline. “I found the relationship to be hugely productive and creative,” she says.

The fact that Itsines still personally trains a handful of long-term clients, as well as her staff — when she’s not travelling, that is — grounded her work in the real world and lent it the kind of authenticity that others who work only in the virtual world lack. It also attuned her to what women need and what they want. “When I’ve met with Kayla, how she is in person is how she is online,” says Ohlsson. “And, in my opinion, that is the secret to her success. She’s a young, successful Adelaide woman and what she’s passionate about is training other women.”

It’s true that, in person, Itsines seems utterly authentic. By her own account, the life she shares with Pearce is a seamless blend of the personal and the professional. “It’s the same thing,” she says. “But we love (the business) so much, it doesn’t get in the way.” They don’t drink or stay out late, and socialise mostly with family. Bed by 10, up between five and six, training clients, working on content (she writes all her own posts), cleaning house, doing the laundry, visiting her family, making dinner. “I’m like a Greek housewife,” she says, and no, there’s no domestic help.

The carefully managed access perhaps owes something to the bruising encounter with another Adelaide trainer, the self-styled Banana Girl, and her body builder boyfriend, which ended in court in March last year and was gleefully reported by the media. “Bikini Girl goes head-to-head with Banana Girl” were typical headlines. Pearce and Itsines sued Leanne Ratcliffe (aka Freelee the Banana Girl), and her boyfriend Harley Johnstone for posting defamatory comments online including what they alleged were false claims that the BBG eating plan requires you to starve yourself, and that Pearce used steroids. The matter was settled before it went to trial, and Ratcliffe and Johnstone were required to remove the offending videos and refrain from making further comments.

Kayla and Tobias in an Instagram photo.

Then there was the no-doubt unwelcome attention on Pearce and his parking habits. A groundswell on Instagram to identify the owner of a $500,000 Lamborghini Huracan, which was photographed parked across two bays and in a space reserved for disabled drivers, led to reports in this newspaper which identified Pearce as the owner.

For an outfit that so carefully manages its image, such coverage would almost certainly sting. Theirs is a business built on positive messages. Negative posts on their social media accounts are quickly deleted, and the posters blocked, but trawl the net and you’ll inevitably find venomous opinions directed at them both. Itsines claims to welcome negative feedback, about technical problems with the app, for example, because “we’re able to see what they’re saying and fix it for them”. Nor is she uncomfortable with criticism. What about those who say that Kayla Itsines is “full of shit” (that’s a direct quote from a particularly nasty website). “You can’t make people like you,” she says. “I know who I am, I know what I stand for, I know my morals. I’m very secure.”

From the outset, she was clear about how she wanted to be depicted. She rejects requests to be photographed in a bikini, for example. “I said to Tobi when we started, one, I would never sexualise myself to sell my product, and two, I don’t want this to be about me.” She has also been guided by advice given to her by her mother. “She said ‘don’t give other people the right to talk about you’, and that was huge for me,” she says. “So I just make sure that everything that surrounds me is positive.”

She’s said she regrets using the term “bikini body” but believes the BBG acronym has taken on a life of its own. “It’s different women and different body types from all over the world and each one is beautiful in their own way,” she says. “That’s why I changed to (Sweat With Kayla) because sweat is universal … you’re working hard, it’s determination.

At the end of our photo shoot — during which Itsines has been professional, engaging and unfailingly obliging, with not a trace of the diva about her, she gathers her belongings, rummages for her car keys (a BMW, I note) and then slaps her forehead. “Oh, I didn’t get a ticket,” she says.

Meet Kaylah Itsines at Westfield Marion on December 11 at 12.30pm

The Bikini Body 28-Day Healthy Eating & Lifestyle Guide, Kayla Itsines, Pan Macmillan Australia, $39.99