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For Abegail Adams her Signature Moment was bringing forward her plans to start her own business – a necessity brought about by the pandemic.
Born and raised in Johannesburg, Abegail Adams is a fitness trainer based in Sophiatown who travels to the homes of her clients delivering bespoke fitness programmes that are about so much more than getting fit or losing weight. “It is not only about getting people moving, but getting them to understand the long term health benefits of movement.”
Adams, who is 33, trained at Fitpro Fitness Training Academy and has been a personal trainer since 2012. She used to work out of one of the big gym groups, but when the lockdown came into effect in March 2020, Adams had time to reassess her immediate needs and future plans. When you work from a gym, she says, you don’t get a chance to see people in their environment and understand their needs, but “when you go into people’s homes it is much easier to make their workouts practical for them”.
Though she had always planned to go out on her own and had started the planning to do so, putting aside savings to ensure a cushion for those difficult first months, she was pushed into fast forwarding her plans. “I was actually planning to go out on my own at the end of 2020. I needed to get my savings in place and checked. But by the end of hard lockdown, I’d made a choice.”
She says going back to the corporate gym environment was not the same after the lockdown. “I had changed the way I train.” Having found her feet training on virtual platforms such as Zoom, she decided to expand on her newfound freedom and not return to her corporate gym job. However, she says, it hasn’t been easy.
“In the commercial setting clients come to you at the gym.” Now she says she has to get out there and market her services, though she is grateful for the core of her clients who left the gym with her. This loyal group of happy customers has allowed Adams to explore other projects within her area of expertise.
One of which is a twice weekly bootcamp programme, Sfitness, she does with a business partner, Sebastian Stewart. Every Wednesday and Saturday she trains 12 committed women at Cecil Payne Park in Roodepoort. She says they started with 30 women in September last year, but were expecting the dropout rate – which is a necessary part of business planning in the fitness industry where a good percentage of people are notorious for quitting the programmes they sign up for.
When it comes to future plans – apart from getting ready for the upcoming hockey season, another of Adams’s passions – she has many.
One project that is close to her heart is one that she hopes will benefit many more members of the community she serves. She says that there is a lack of understanding of the importance of exercise within her community and she wants to help educate more people about why exercise is important while also making it fun and part of people’s everyday routines.
“We are working on an online fitness programme – one that can be bought by people to develop their fitness at home.” She says that her future plans, with her business partner, also include being able to fit out a studio of her own so that she can not only travel to people’s homes, but those who wish to come to her can. She has also recently launched a clothing line of fitness and leisure wear that she hopes will become part of her slowly building fitness business.
It can be…
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This post and content is sponsored, written and provided by Standard Bank.
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