Quiet Achievers with LuxGym
Somewhere between selfies and the 6am queue for equipment, someone decided the commercial gym had run its course. John Caruso discovers that the alternative starts with a phone call.
Cast your mind back to the last time you trained at a commercial gym. Not the idea of it, the actual experience. The car park scramble, the machine that’s always out of order; the loud music, the obsession with capturing the perfect selfie or conducting a full volume phone call – and somewhere in the middle of all that theatre there is you, trying to train! You’re not alone in noticing that something has shifted. What was once a straightforward arrangement, you paid a membership fee and got on with it, has become considerably more complicated.
Personal trainers now compete for floor space with content creators. Prime equipment sits occupied by people resting between sets and scrolling. And because more of us work from home these days, gyms that once ran at comfortable capacity through the middle of the day are operating at full tilt the moment they open. The fitness industry has boomed. The experience, for many serious trainers, has not kept pace.
Jason Robertson, co-owner of LuxGym said the transformation of the commercial gym landscape had been dramatic and broadly unwelcome for anyone genuinely focused on results.
It’s a frank appraisal that Jason, a veteran strength and conditioning coach with decades of experience training elite athletes and world champion bodybuilders, is well placed to make.
And it’s that accumulated frustration, felt across a whole generation of serious trainers, that became the foundation of something genuinely different. Not another gym with a fresh coat of paint, but a rethink from the ground up. The answer, LuxGym! And it’s not a gym in any sense the word usually implies.
Located in Cooroy, LuxGym operates as a performance showroom, available by appointment and not for hire to the public. Nobody drops in unannounced. No membership cards. No queues for the squat rack at six in the morning. What there is instead is a meticulously fitted private training space, engineered with performance and aesthetics in equal measure, and accessible by appointment to individuals, elite athletes, sporting teams, and those who simply want to train without an audience.
Jason said the concept grew from his uncompromising position on what a quality training environment should look and feel like.
“It has to perform as a high-level space,” he says. “I won’t include anything I’m not happy with myself.
I’ve picked my brands, flooring, everything. It’s a solid marriage between performance and quality. Pieces that look good and move and feel how they should. Solid. No rocking, no breaking down.”
The results are immediately apparent. Step inside LuxGym and the contrast with a commercial facility is striking from the first moment. The fit out is considered and purposeful, the flooring premium, the equipment sourced from brands Jason regards as the best in the business. It’s the kind of space that makes you pause at the door before it pulls you in.
Di Robertson, co-owner and a personal trainer said the space had been designed to be as welcoming as it was impressive.
“It’s a nice space to be in,” she says. “It’s inviting. It’s motivating to have good equipment and for women it’s somewhere safe and comfortable.”
That appeal to women is something both Di and Jason have considered carefully. The gradual disappearance of dedicated women’s spaces within commercial gyms over the past decade has left a real gap, and LuxGym fills it with something arguably far better, a private, controlled environment where the focus rests entirely on the person training, without an audience or external distractions.
For Di, whose experience spans decades of personal training and body transformation coaching, the space reflects a conviction she has always held that environment directly shapes the results you get. Beyond individual clients, LuxGym serves a broader and perhaps surprising range of purposes. Elite and travelling sporting teams can book the space for sessions, bringing their own strength and conditioning coaches if they prefer, using the facility as their dedicated base.
Jason has seen this succeed before at premium hotels where teams have chosen accommodation specifically for the standard of the training space.
“Teams can come and train and book it out for a week or for a couple of hours. Spend the morning here, the afternoon at the beach and who knows, they might like what they see and ask us to fit out their own facility,” he says.
That brings LuxGym’s third dimension into focus. For architects, school administrators and homeowners planning training spaces of their own, LuxGym functions as a fully operational demonstration space.
Flooring samples, locker systems, equipment options: everything can be seen, touched and tested in a real, functioning environment rather than imagined from a catalogue or a website.
“They can come and see exactly what we do, use the equipment, feel the quality, see the whole thing working,” Jason says. “We offer the real experience of a properly set up performance space.”
For younger people, the experience carries a different and more meaningful weight. Both Jason and Di have long specialised in working with the 16 to 20 age group, helping young athletes and individuals build strength and, just as importantly, confidence.
The privacy of the setting matters enormously here, removing the awkwardness and anxiety that can make a crowded commercial facility feel like the last place on earth a young person wants to be. For Jason, the reward of watching that shift never diminishes.
“Kids come in, low in confidence, and then their whole world turns around,” he says. “They become leaders, they carry themselves differently and that’s what training can do when the environment is right.”
It’s a thought that captures something essential about what LuxGym is really offering. Not simply a facility, but a considered approach to what training can and should be. One that performs at the highest level, looks the part, and respects the people who walk through the door enough to give them the space, the quiet, and the quality they came for.
Visit www.luxgym.com.au to discover more.
