I built the gym I couldn’t find.

I moved to Philadelphia in my late twenties to be closer to work, closer to city life, closer to something I couldn’t quite name yet.

One of the first things I wanted was a gym I could walk to. I visited three in a single week. Dirty equipment. Limited programming. Nothing that felt welcoming, alive, or worth going back to. On a brutal August afternoon, walking back to my apartment drenched in sweat, I had one thought: how does a city this big not have a good gym?

I had never run a gym in my life. What I had was a business plan, a ten-year lease on a Northern Liberties warehouse, and a belief that Philadelphia deserved better. Six months after I opened the first City Fitness at 2nd and Spring Garden, the economy collapsed.

The years that followed were hard in ways I won’t fully get into here. Banks wouldn’t lend to gyms — one banker told me that if Walt Disney himself came to them to start a gym, they wouldn’t lend to him either. I bootstrapped everything, personally guaranteed everything, and kept the doors open on borrowed time and borrowed money. What I kept in front of me, every single day, was what was happening inside those walls: people coming in after losing their jobs and telling me this place was the one thing keeping them grounded. People telling me the gym had changed their health, their mental state, their whole outlook. That feedback became the reason for everything.

The story of City Fitness is a lot like the story of anyone who works out. You can quit any time. You hit your lows. You start going backward right when you feel strong. But if you decide to stay, there’s a better version of you waiting around the corner.

I never set out to build the biggest, most beautiful gym — someone with more money can always do that. Our first club was a warehouse, and people loved it. They still miss it. Not for the space, but for what we made it feel like. City Fitness is a place where the community around you — the energy, the culture, the people — matters to your wellbeing as much as anything you do with a barbell. That’s what I was looking for when I moved to this city and couldn’t find. It’s what we’ve been building ever since.

What that means has only grown. Clean equipment and a team that knows your name were always the baseline. Now we’re building in recovery, thinking hard about longevity, and taking seriously what it means to be there for people at every stage of life. Bodies change. Needs change. A gym worth belonging to should change with you. My goal is a place that can adapt alongside its members — not just strength for right now, but quality of life for the long run.

Nineteen years later: eight neighborhoods across Philadelphia, more than 24,000 members, a Revive recovery space, and a new city on the horizon in Hoboken. Getting here took loans, and in the earliest days — when it was the only way to keep the doors open — a few minority investors who believed in what we were building. But the vision has never belonged to anyone but us. Every decision about culture, community, and what City Fitness stands for has stayed ours to make, and we’ve reinvested in the business every step of the way. The core of it hasn’t changed.

This is what we’ve built. Come be part of it.