Oxygen Yoga & Fitness is expanding across California, bringing California a fitness experience unlike anything the golden coast has ever seen.
Californians are known for being health and fitness enthusiasts, but until Oxygen’s expansion into Calabasas, they’d never experienced our unique, Canadian-grown fitness experience. After talking with two studio owners, both opening doors to their California studios this spring, it’s clear the experience is like nothing the state has ever seen. And judging by the studio owners’ experience with Oxygen, it’s sure to be a life changing blend.
For Lindy, owner of the upcoming Agoura Hills studio, yoga itself has been a life changing experience. But when she first tried yoga, she didn’t even like it.
“I didn’t feel flexible. I felt intimidated and I went home with a really bad headache,” she explains. Yet, something drew her to try a different yoga studio and then another. Finally, she found a class she loved and went from thinking she didn’t like yoga to finding a class that she describes was “helping me calm, helping me stay focused, and helping me have an outlet if maybe you don’t want to talk to someone but you really wanna get it out”.
Now, Lindy describes yoga as her happy place. “I could do it anywhere,” she explains. “I travel and even my children are like oh mom needs yoga today. Mom did you do yoga?”
Lindy dived deeper into her practice and slowly started to transition from her work in commercial real estate to the yoga and fitness industry. However, living in California before Oxygen had opened a studio here, Lindy hadn’t yet had the opportunity to try Oxygen’s style of yoga. But it was like kismet, the alignment of Oxygen’s Calabasas studio with her return from a mind opening trip.
“My husband and I climbed Machu Pichu, we finished going around the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador. It was a crazy amazing trip and when we were with nature, I mean every single day, I had conversations with myself like really, really intimate conversations and [yoga] was just calling me.”
And then, when she got home, yoga actually called. Or one of its representatives at least. A friend called to invite Lindy to the soft opening of Oxygen Yoga and Fitness’ Calabasas studio. One thing led to another, and soon Lindy was all in with Oxygen.
Likewise, in my conversation with Camille, the Sacramento area rep, she continuously refers to her journey towards Oxygen as ‘serendipitous’.
She was living in Regina, Canada when the first studio opened in this region and found the community and environment at Oxygen incredibly moving.
“I was doing like pigeon pose and all of a sudden the instructor was like, you know, this is a like women we carry our our emotions in our hips, so if you feel a build up of emotion, just know that that’s normal and your body just needs to release it, and I remember being in pigeon pose and like feeling like an overwhelming like sense of like, oh, I need to cry. And um because she had said that I was like, this is really good, it’s like releasing all the things that I didn’t know had built up.”
Planning to move to the United States, she asked the Oxygen team if they had any studios in the US. While they didn’t at the time, Oxygen reached back out when they were ready to open studios and Camille explains “I jumped on the opportunity, cuz this is what I wanted and I’ve been waiting for this. It was very cool that everything sort of aligned.
One of the biggest challenges both Lindy and Camille have faced in opening their studios is the cold market. While in Canada there’s an abundance of Oxygen studios, in California most of Oxygen’s future members, or even staff, have yet to hear about the brand and its offerings.
“We’re in the midst of training our instructors right now and what I’m finding is that nobody really knows what it is. There’s another brand out here that’s hot yoga, but it’s not nearly the same, or even close. It’s not as fast paced, it’s not infrared, so when people are coming in, they’re expecting it to be like that.” Camille explains.
She continues, “So they’re like hot yoga, they’re like, oh, a hot, steamy room. We’re like, no, it’s far infrared and they’re like Okay, cool, what’s that, right? Okay, like I don’t know what that is. And then we’re like, yeah and it’s a fusion, and they’re like, what’s fusion? So it’s really just education education.”
But while the cold market of California has been a challenge, it’s also brought incredible opportunity.
“It’s also super fun, just creating that vibe up here […]. It kind of gets to be how we want it to be, aligned with the brand obviously, but it’s like, we’re the first, we’re the originals, we get to do this, like it’s kind of cool” Camille shares.
When asked why Camille thinks California customers might want to choose Oxygen over the fitness options they’ve already experienced, many of the answers are the same things they won’t yet have experienced.
“Honestly, the benefits of far infrared,” Camille explains. “The pace of the class is what I love, I love the variety.”
Lindy also explains Oxygen’s unique qualities, such as the mix of yoga and fitness under one roof has been a very unique experience for her as a yoga and fitness-lover in California. “’I’m not trying to be cheesy, but one of the things in my life there’s always been fitness, gym, exercise and then there’s yoga. So the people who do fitness are like, oh, yeah, I don’t do yoga. And the people who do yoga are like, I don’t wanna be around fitness. I don’t know why I’m just stating facts, at least here in Los Angeles. But at oxygen, that’s not the case.” In Lindy’s mind, these activities are better together.
“Being able to take the yoga aspect, so we’re not gonna like harm your body, rip your knees to shreds, you know, try to lift 300 pounds, you know, 20 times so you’re taking the core of yoga. and then you’re just adding some resistance with your body, some resistance weights, bands, whatever it is, so you’re getting this like mentality of no, actually I love the heat and I love doing all this and I have watched the friendships forge between yogis and fitness people and people who are like, I hate yoga and I love your class. And I’m like, oh, that’s funny. That means you like yoga.
Lindy adds, it’s not only Oxygen’s class offerings but also its unique community that’s drawn her to Oxygen after trying other yoga brands. “Having these memberships, having these people you have to have more than just yoga and fitness going on. You have people like going to lunch afterwards, you have people sponsoring, you know, other schools, soccer games, and it just hits different.”
For those opening their own studios in the cold market, Lindy shares, there’s also an excitement in the challenge. “It’s cool right now I’m speaking to a few other owners that are that are a little bit ahead of the process and like I just I just so enjoy watching them.” Lindy continues, “ike the joy of getting to my goals, getting to my numbers like for a warm market no one’s ever gotten 200 presells like it would be awesome to have goals like that where you know we’re opening up with 200 people just the growth of it having, you know, regional people, having the family.”
Looking to Oxygen’s future, Camille is excited “there’s so much potential now […]. It’s growing so fast, which I think is awesome because as we grow, things change, things adapt, and things become better for everywhere.
Try one of Camille’s favorite classes like Total Body Conditioning or Lindy’s favorite Freedom Flow and keep up with their studios on the OYF Agoura Instagram and the OYF Rock Creek Facebook and Instagram.