Anne Laing and Tim Bean

Its always great to hear stories of kiwis going overseas and conquering the world whether in business, sport and life.  One such story is that of Tim Bean and Anne Laing who spent many years building up their Performance Training Company Gym in Timaru.  One day they decided to visit their children in UK and decided to stay longer, 7 years infact,....sound familiar? a very typical kiwi story but this couple have made some extraordinary inroads into the UK health and fitness industry.  They've done a TV series called 'turn back your body clock', written a book, created fitness programmes for celebrities and also carved a niche amongst the corporate health market in England and around the world.  So its all go for these high flying kiwis! read more below to find out what they think of the UK fitness and bodybuilding scene and what else they have in their sights.

2. Why did you make the decision to go to UK?  Our incentive to go to England was a holiday to see our children who were doing the 2 year working holiday stint in the UK, (Seven years ago) and to attend several international fitness conferences. We were also taking the opportunity to look at the top health clubs in the United States. - We were really on a mission to get the latest cutting edge ideas to bring home for our club in NZ.

Hoping to bring back lots of exciting new ideas from the UK industry to our New Zealand club, we were instead amazed at the whole approach to training and service within the UK clubs. We placed the general market trends at least five years behind the Australasian and US Fitness industries!  

We saw a gap in the market where people were working out hard in the clubs but not changing their body shape. We were lucky to have a good manager in place at Performance Training in Timaru so decided stay a little while and implement a physique changing programme we had been running in Performance. (We had developed a programme within the gym called Kiwi Slim to help people lose weight because we would see some members come in and religiously train day in, day out, desperately wanting to change shape but because of food choices and other life style factors outside the club it just wasn't happening. This programme was very successful and still runs today giving great results to hundreds of people. Our oldest member was Eric, a wonderful 99 year old.)

3. did you go there intending to work in health and fitness or PTing?  We don't do PT although we do over-see clients programmes and their trainers. We find the clients here generally are not worked hard enough to make an impact on their bodies and spend too much time training over- weight people on low calorie burning core work. (Do believe it has its place though)

4. what is the gym scene like in London, do they have well qualified instructors and knowledge generally? We always strive to hire antipodeans for our clients as they seem better qualified and have good work ethics.

5. in what ways do you think NZ is different or better than in London? NZ weather is better for health, clear skies, less pollution, more environmentally aware, cleaner, far better service and work mentality and of course, friendlier. London is easier than New Zealand to start a business in this area as there is a huge corporate market and people are used to paying for these personal type services. Awareness of healthy food is higher here in businesses and it is easy to get a good range of organic foods in the supermarkets. They don't wrap so many of their food products in soft plastics like they do in NZ

6. was there anything that shocked you or surprised you most about the way gyms are run or the way instructors do things?  The gyms are very up-market with all the bells and whistles but seem to be shells only. They do every-thing they can to get you through the door but just lip service seems to be paid to customer service and helping people on the gym floor.  Unless you pay for a personal trainer it is difficult to get attention on the gym floor and we see some appalling technique.. This I think is due to high staff turnover in the industry here. We have been going to our club in London for six years and I don't think any body knows our names yet.

9. how many years have you been working there and do you think you've got the english starting to do things the kiwi way? We have been seven years here and yes we have created some interest in the market. There wasn't any body we knew back then doing what we were doing but now there are many total body, health and life style make over's. We were co presenters in Turn back your body clock a TV series on Anti Aging and the impact life style has on health.  We have been commissioned to write a book for the publishing company Hamlyn's on healthy aging and have been featured on many other TV programmes.

10. Your background is bodybuilding, what's the bodybuilding scene like in London/UK.  Are they well oganised?  is there much info available about competing etc. It seems to be isolated and not considered main stream.. A bit weird/odd. I cannot ever recall seeing any thing in the papers about this sport. We battle constantly the myth women will bulk up if they lift weights and even with men this is an issue, yet so many have as much estrogen as women!! We see it as an area that needs developing.