Background

Alan McGuinness and Sol Gilbert have been running gyms together since 2014, when the pair launched the inaugural Underground Gym in Brighton, UK. Now extended from 4,500sq ft to 10,500sq ft and spinning off to two more large sites in Newhaven (2017) and Tunbridge Wells (2018), Underground Gym prides itself on its powerful sense of community, bold atmosphere and clear intent: to welcome all, but nonetheless to be a place where you can really train.

The brand continues to perform strongly, serving a loyal community with a product members love and use regularly. However, over recent years McGuinness and Gilbert felt there was another complementary avenue they wanted to explore.

McGuinness explains: “We all know that gyms typically attract the same 10–11 per cent of users. Beyond this, there’s a far greater number of people who aren’t on a good health and wellness trajectory, but for whom going to the gym is a scary prospect.

“We’ve wanted to engage this population for a long time, but you’re never really going to attract and appropriately cater for them in a big box gym environment.

“We realised we needed to create a different type of venue: welcoming, nurturing, empathetic, holistic in its approach, coach-led and designed around small group training.”

The result is COACHED, a 3,500sq ft facility that opened in Brighton in February 2023.

Objective

“The idea of COACHED is to change people’s health and wellness trajectory by empowering bodies and educating minds,” says McGuinness. “In the process, we know we’ll also change the lives of those around them: friends, partners, children.”

Spread over two floors, COACHED offers predominantly strength-based small group training on the top floor – at a ratio of one instructor to four members – and group exercise downstairs, once people are ready for this, at a one-to-16 ratio. There’s also a recovery suite and café.

With membership of the new high-end club starting at £150 a month, and all members going through a detailed application process to prove genuine commitment to making a change, the whole club experience needed to be a premium one, says McGuinness, not only in the level of personalised service but in the design and fit-out.

“That was one of the key requirements for us: equipment that was robust but also good-looking,” he adds. “We wanted our whole space to be visually appealing as well as highly functional.”

Solution

McGuinness and Gilbert met Physical in 2022 and quickly realised this was who they wanted to work with “for the full kit-out, top to bottom: flooring and turf tracks, loads of functional kit, large storage racks, DAP, AirBikes, squat racks, sled…”

McGuinness explains: “The high quality of the Physical kit was the first selling point: everything is really well-made and looks great too.

“The option to integrate our branding was also key to our decision: we plan to open multiple COACHED locations in the future, so we’re very focused on building a strong brand.

“With Physical, we’ve been able to create a bespoke turf track for each floor: highly customised and branded centrepieces that we know are also manufactured to last. Our storage and squat racks are also custom-branded. There are flashes of COACHED branding all across the club.”

Results

The response has been hugely positive, says McGuinness, with membership reaching 35 per cent capacity in just two months. “Everyone loves the warm welcome they receive in a club that feels like it should cost more.”

He adds: “It’s also been a great experience working with Physical. As so often happens in projects like this, we had a number of challenges in the build process, but the Physical team was incredibly accommodating, working closely with us to adapt to our evolving timeframe and equipment list. They’ve been a fantastic partner.”