Phillip Mills, Chief Executive of Les Mills International

With their branded classes taught at 20,000 gyms in 110 countries around the world, Les Mills has become a global leader in the fitness industry. And it all started in a tiny, family-run gym in Auckland. 

Phillip Mills, Executive Director of Les Mills International.

Les Mills, four-time track and field Olympic athlete and former mayor of Auckland City is the eponymous founder of the company, now known as Les Mills International. Along with wife Colleen, he opened the first Les Mills gym in 1968. 

“That first gym was so small they had to have alternate men’s and women’s days,” says Phillip Mills, Les’ son and Executive Director of the company. “I started working at the gym when I was about 13 years-old,” Phillip continues. “I’d clean the locker rooms at night. When I was a bit older I was allowed to show people through their programmes.” 

The popularity of gym-based exercise, and aerobics in particular, took off in the 1980s. Phillip, himself a former Commonwealth Games athlete, combined his father’s sports programmes with exercise set to music, and Les Mills Group Fitness was born. 

“I’d been at university in the US when aerobics first started, so when I came home to New Zealand I decided to open an aerobics centre,” Phillip says. “It went nuts. We had some of the best talent from around Auckland teaching – athletes and actors and dancers – and people would queue down the street to get in.

"What we were doing differently with aerobics was that we came from an elite sports background, so our classes weren’t based on traditional dance aerobics. That was – and still is – something unique about us throughout the world."

In 1990 Phillip and wife Jackie created Body Pump, a high repetition weight training class, which immediately proved to so popular they distributed the programme into gyms around the world. 

“When we decided to take our classes outside of New Zealand and Australia in 1996, we set a goal of being in 10,000 gyms by 2004, which people laughed at,” Phillip continues. “But we pretty much achieved that. “Body Pump became the biggest exercise class in the world,” Phillip says. “Today it’s probably equal biggest with Zumba, but we’re at quite different ends of the spectrum.” 

Les Mills has continued to move from strength to strength, driven by a relentlessly innovative team who always focus on the future. Although they briefly dabbled in workout DVDs, the company seized the opportunity to create home workouts their own way as the world shifted online. 

The company took nearly seven years to create their market-leading app – Les Mills+ – which has been rated as the best at-home fitness app in the world by publications like USA Today. The app’s success was due in large part to work done by Kiwi musician and lawyer, the late Malcolm Black of Dunedin band The Netherworld Dancing Toys. 

“Malcolm set up our global music licensing, which was something that nobody else had managed to do until the last couple of years,” Phillip explains. “He built relationships for us over a 20-year period, basically with every record company in the world, and he led our app development through its early days.

“We got lucky,” Phillip continues. “We’d only just started to market the platform globally the Christmas before Covid hit. We were ready and most other people weren’t.” 

So, as a family-owned company from New Zealand, what makes Les Mills content the best in the world? “Peloton are the biggest direct-to-consumer exercise company. They’ve got all of these teachers who film several classes every day,” Phillip explains. “By contrast, we take three months to make a single class. It’s an incredibly crafted formula. Our creative teams will listen to thousands of pieces of music to choose the ten or 12 tracks for a class, which then go into music licensing through that incredible network that Malcolm built. If we can’t get the rights to the original song or we can’t afford it, we will get the publishing rights and remake the song.

“If we can’t get the publishing rights either, then we’ll write a new song. We create up to 200 new songs each year. I’m told we are New Zealand’s biggest employer of local musicians.”

The production values of the Les Mills Masterclasses which make up the on-demand content are also world-leading. “We have up to 15 cameras filming a class with top New Zealand production teams – it’s movie-level production. We’re trying to create a whole new genre of fitness filming,” Phillip continues. 

The competitive drive for success that the company was founded on prevails in the team today. They continue to push boundaries and strive to be the best, whether that’s in their New Zealand gyms, their 130,000-strong global network of instructors or their ambitious adoption of new technologies. 

“As generations change you have to renew yourself,” Phillip says. "Our son (Les Mills Jnr) and daughter (Diana Archer-Mills) came into the business about ten years ago and they’ve led a lot of the change, but now there’s another generation shift: Gen Z is here and we’re re-designing and re-inventing for them, which is incredibly exciting.

“We’re creating classes like The Trip which lets you cycle through virtual reality graphics on a 20-metre-wide screen. That’s been so popular. We used to get about 1,000 bike rides a week, but since we put that studio in we have been getting 2,500 rides each week. 

“It’s fun to reinvent. You don’t want to let a business age. And for me, as an ageing person – I’m 67 – it’s wonderfully invigorating to be reinventing,” Phillip continues. “Each time we’ve reinvented our businesses, our classes and our gyms, it makes you feel young and exhilarated. I love it.

“It’s been 54 years for us now, we’ve been chipping away at it, perfecting the formula, but we’ve still got a long way to go. With everything we do we always say we feel like we’re about two-thirds of the way there. We know we can be so much better.”