SoulCycle has come to the UK – but will Brits embrace £24 spin classes?
There is a place on Sunset Boulevard where Oprah Winfrey celebrated her 60th birthday and Lady Gaga her 26th. The sound system is state of the art, the room is always packed, the lighting a dusky flicker of grapefruit-scented candle. The atmosphere, according to Oprah, is “spiritual”. But there is no dancefloor, and no bar, just 55 exercise bikes screwed down in tight rows. This is SoulCycle, where you come to pedal your way to happiness.There are 91 SoulCycle studios, all in North America, with a 92nd about to open in London, and they are to this fitness-obsessed decade what designer boutiques were to the 00s. They each have their A-list fans (Michelle Obama and the first daughters were regulars at the Washington branch of SoulCycle during their White House years). They have waiting lists (the most popular classes involve hovering over a screen to secure your place). And if you are lucky enough to outwit the list, you can expect to pay £24 for a session. Still, as status symbols go, it is cheaper than a Hermès Birkin.An obsession with fitness, fetishised by a complex hierachy of waiting-list-only classes, heavily merched and served up with a side order of mild fantasy role-play, is one of the quirks of modern urban life. You can pay £22 for a class at Barry’s Bootcamp in London or Manchester and get shouted at while you do your press-ups, just like Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman. You can join a barre class, twist your hair into a bun and relive your childhood Royal Ballet School dreams in a dance studio as your turnout is corrected for the umpteenth time.SoulCycle, which opens its new UK studio on Friday, ratchets up the concept of fitness-as-transcendental-experience. Every SoulCycle studio is home to a large amethyst crystal, placed next to the instructor’s bike to help dispel negative energy.
“We view what we do here as a live production,” says Melanie Whelan, CEO, over a mango, banana and turmeric smoothie from the studio’s inhouse Good Life cafe. “And it happens on the hour, every hour. The curtain goes down on one class, and it goes up on the next. We want check-in to feel a little bit frenetic. We want the class
to be physical, musical, emotional and inspirational. We want everything, from the dry shampoo in the locker rooms to the retail, to be part of the experience.”
Whelan presents in the emotionally keyed-up pitch of SoulCycle. In place of a CEO’s suit, she wears a long floral skirt, a “LOVE” slogan T-shirt, a charm necklace with her kids’ initials, and white trainers. So intense is the SoulCycle experience, it is not uncommon, she says, for people to find themselves crying. “It could be that you haven’t given yourself permission to think about something in a long time and then something about that experience, in the dark, lets it all out.”
The “science” of SoulCycle is based on somatic coaching, “which means breaking you down physically in order to build you up mentally,” says Whelan. “Your instructor is a voiceover telling you that you can push through this, that you can overcome this. Those words are being said about the bike, but we can take them with us outside. What we find is that the words the instructors are sharing in the room are mantras that we as riders are taking out into the world. We are training our emotional health, as well as our physical health.”The first-person plural gets used a lot at SoulCycle. It can sound a lot like a cult or a clique, I suggest; Whelan shrugs and flashes back: “We prefer to think of it as a community.” The lockers are deliberately narrow, creating spaces “designed for natural collisions. The community starts on the bikes, and then you have all these people funnelling out into the lobbies, shoulder to shoulder, and that’s where people connect.” The rhythm of the day works like a Hogwarts sorting hat, channelling like-minded people together. “People gravitate to classes with the instructor who represents something about them – their kind of music, their preferred tone of communication. And so there’s a like-minded element to the people in your particular class. Also, there are different communities around different times of day. Six am is our Rooster time slot: very type A, in and out very fast. Later in the mornings you get freelancers, moms. And then in the evening, it’s the millennials who come here instead of going to a bar.” The diversity of these communities is, of course, limited to those blessed with money, free time, physical ability and the confidence to join this glossiest of cliques. For all the talk of crystals and communities, SoulCycle is a finely tuned and aspirational experience. What the bikes themselves lack in visual appeal (one reason for the dim lighting, you imagine) is made up for in the locker rooms, where marbletiled showers are stocked with boutique hotel luxury: bergamot-scented Le Labo shampoo, Drunk Elephant jelly cleanser. There are Dyson hairdryers and peonies on the bleached-wood beauty stations. The lobby is lined with rails of the SoulCycle-branded leggings that Victoria Beckham wears to class when she is in Los Angeles. (SoulCycle’s many celebrity devotees are another reason for the dim lighting. When Beyoncé takes classes at the West Hollywood studio, she slips in after the lights have gone down.) Audience enthusiasm is harnessed and curated as social media content. A recent post on the brand’s official account repurposed a rider comment – “I think SoulCycle is the first ‘safe space’ I’ve ever actually been in” – as an inspirational quote, framed in an Instagram square against SoulCycle’s trademark shade of yellow. Marketing only works when it speaks to a need in us – even if that need isn’t, in essence, anything to do with indoor cycling. When Whelan left Virgin America 13 years ago to join Equinox, the upscale New York gym company that went on to buy SoulCycle a few years later, she says: “My parents were like, really? You were working for an airline and now you’re going to work for a gym?” Whelan, it turns out, was ahead of a curve that has seen fitness move up to the fast lane of culture. Fitness has come to stand for being happy, being successful. For discipline and hard work, and for being your “best self”. This is a potent cocktail of positivity – endorphins plus a holistic understanding that fitness can be about more than burning calories – plus existential angst. The more we sense the robots gaining on us in the inside lane, the more urgently we feel the need to be faster, stronger, more disciplined. The instructors – “the talent”, as Whelan calls them – become mini-gurus in their studios. “The inspirational coaching aspect is what we scout for when we’re casting for instructors,” says Whelan. “It’s a lot easier to teach someone how to count down backwards from eight than it is to teach them how to actively inspire a room full of people.”Whelan and her team have been researching London for two years in preparation for this launch. “We’ve been finding out when the school drop-off is, what time people get coffee, where the train stations are. We need to really understand, anthropologically, how this community functions. Every place has its nuance.” For instance, there may not be as much whooping and hollering in the London studio as happens in West Hollywood. But “one thing we hear everywhere we go”, says Whelan, “is that riders just love to have 45 minutes where they don’t check their phone”. In a world where technology has flattened work and life into a neverending to-do list that oozes out of your phone like toothpaste, a sign inside each locker reminds you that there are no exceptions to the no-phones rule in class. (“If you are a doctor or your child is sick, kindly leave your phone with the front desk and we will get you if there is an emergency.”) Just below the no-phone notice, every locker has a USB port, so that you can charge your phone while you are in class. The research shows, says Whelan, that it’s what the people want.