An online fitness community, created by personal trainer and social media influencer, Talilla Henchoz, during lockdown as a way of giving something back, has gone global.

Henchoz, daughter of Patrick Henchoz, founder of Esporta Health and Fitness Clubs, started offering daily live workouts on Instagram for friends and family when the pandemic hit Europe earlier this year.

The success of her live-streamed workouts, which quickly attracted a wider audience, gave her the idea to set up a virtual business.

“I turned up to sweat alongside hundreds of people every day for three months,” she told HCM in an exclusive interview. .

“Until I realised I wanted to offer more – that there was an opportunity to create a new fitness solution based on exercise progression.

"People were doing workouts online, but they weren’t getting the kind of development in terms of their achievements that they needed to keep motivated, so we tuned into that.”

Leveraging her Instagram following, she set about creating a virtual fitness service based on five pillars of sustainable health – body, mind, nutrition, community and sustainability – and called it Club V (the Roman numeral for five).

Launched on 1 July 2020, the club is delivered through a private Facebook group using Facebook Live and now has members across 40 countries, paying up to £19.99/month.

Members sign up and pay on the website and are then invited to join the Facebook group, where content is delivered and the content archive is stored. More than 25 per cent of members tune in live for workouts, with the rest – many of whom are in different timezones – join the playback sessions, which include HIIT, strength, low impact, core, yoga and pilates.

Membership is growing daily and Henchoz has decided to cap it at 1,700 to maintain standards.

There’s little attrition, so Club V is now setting up a waiting list.

“My vision for Club V is to build bodies for life,” she says.

“COVID has landed a lot of people in a lonely, negative place. Club V enables members to share and support each other, with a weekly live workout schedule, monthly challenges, recipe booklets, health brand discounts, and content from five health experts; a nutritionist, yoga and pilates instructors, a psychologist and personal trainers.

"We’re providing an all-inclusive offering.”

While Club V has been a success – creating revenues of up to £34,000 a month from its 1,700 members – Henchoz is now looking for additional support from fitness industry experts to help improve the current platform and support the projected exponential growth.

“People in Club V trust me, and I want to do the best for them,” she says.

“I want to connect with people who can help us progress and improve the Club V offering.

“We want to launch an app, for example, and we want to make sure we’re using the right platform – we want to refine and continue to develop the offering and to take it to the next level.”

• To read the full interview with Talilla Henchoz in the current issue of HCM, click here.