It is no easy feat for a fitness studio to have survived years of Hong Kong’s high rents, the 2019 anti-government protests and a pandemic, but that is exactly what Heather Thomas’ Flex Studio has done.
Flex Studio opened in 2005 in Stanley, in the south of Hong Kong Island. Today the Pilates studio has two Hong Kong branches, in Wong Chuk Hang and Central, and one in Singapore. Around 900 clients visit one of the three studios two to three times a week.
“I had to constantly explain to people that it is not yoga,” Thomas says. Back then, there were only three other centres in the city offering Pilates classes.
It gained popularity in the 1920s in New York after Pilates was introduced there. His original teachings, which consist of specific movements done in a sequence he devised, are referred to as “classical Pilates”.
