Training
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3 min read
Walk into 6400 California Ave SW in Morgan Junction today. There's a strength studio now where Thunder Road Guitars and its co-tenant, The Bass Shop, once stocked basses, having operated out of that address since 2019. NW Fitness Project opened its second location in the space on July 11, 2026, with an open house that ran from 9am to 2pm. Jeremy Stewart runs the day-to-day. He's the studio's co-owner and general manager. He's a longtime West Seattle resident. So are the two trainers who run the floor beside him.
5 min read
Lap swim before 7am is the whole test, and Seattle Parks and Recreation set it themselves. A March 27, 2026 post on the department's Parkways blog said Evans and Medgar Evers pools, typically closed on Sundays, would add Sunday operations along with early morning lap swim in fall 2026. The fall schedules are now posted. Four of the city's indoor pools have one that could be located: Evans, Rainier Beach, Helene Madison and Southwest. A fifth, Meadowbrook, is still running a late-summer sheet. One of those five puts lap lanes in the water before 7am, and it is Meadowbrook, on a sheet that expires September 5. Evans, one of the two pools Parks named, is not it. Medgar Evers has no fall schedule posted anywhere this piece could reach, and the department's last public word on it, a May 6 aquatics bulletin, said the pool was closed for maintenance and anticipated reopening later in the summer. The promise lives on the blog. The hours live on the PDFs. They do not agree.
5 min read
Six years ago, the corner of Westlake Avenue North and Denny Way sold armchairs. Ligne Roset, the French furniture retailer, had a showroom on that corner before Barry's Bootcamp took over the address and painted the inside red. The studio at 112 Westlake Ave N opened around March 21, 2019, Barry's first Pacific Northwest location by its own count. It sits in South Lake Union, close enough to the Denny Triangle line that the two neighborhoods blur at that intersection. CEO Joey Gonzalez said as much when the studio opened, telling Seattle Magazine in 2019: "Seattle has been on the top of our list for a long time, it was only a matter of finding the right real estate." Seven years after the format's Los Angeles debut, the wait ended at a corner that used to sell French sofas. What Barry's actually sells is a room split down the middle, treadmills on one side and free weights on the other, run by a company that has changed hands twice since Seattle got its studio and whose own materials currently can't agree on how big it has grown.
4 min read
SoulCycle started in 2006 in the rear lobby of an old dance studio on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a space Elizabeth Cutler and Julie Rice found on Craigslist after Ruth Zukerman, who had already been teaching spin in the city for a decade, introduced the two over lunch. The first class rode on April 15, 2006, on West 72nd Street. Two decades later, the format has spread far enough that it now fills a glass-fronted retail space inside a South Lake Union residential tower at 2105 9th Ave, on the edge of Denny Triangle, running the same candlelit, music-driven ride the company built its name on. The Seattle studio keeps the brand's formula intact: dim rooms, a stacked platform up front, and class themes that turn a workout into an event. Fuego Friday runs a Latin-music ride. Taylor Swift + Friends builds an entire class around one artist's catalog. SoulSurvivor rounds out a schedule led by a roster of local instructors, Kolten, Stephanie P., Jess L., Victoria H., Evan, Earl, and Jenna among them, each bringing a different music sensibility to the same forty-five minutes on a bike.
4 min read
Henry's Gymnasium opened in Lower Queen Anne with a pitch nobody else in Seattle was making: a full gym built inside a restored 1909 Ford Model T garage, its walls covered in three hundred historic photographs of the city, its floor plan built around a working bar. Owner Glen Swain has since proven the concept holds up. In December 2024 he opened a second, larger Henry's on Capitol Hill, roughly three times the size of the original. A niche idea that could have stayed a novelty just became a two-location company, and that expansion is the actual story worth telling here. Swain built Henry's after roughly thirty years in the fitness industry, including time at Gold's Gym and 24 Hour Fitness before he started his own company. In a sponsored interview with KING5, he described both locations as designed to be part nightclub, part museum, and part fitness space, the kind of third place people spend time in outside of work and home.
2 min read
MOOV Seattle sits at 777 Thomas St, and the machine inside is not a classical reformer. MOOV runs the Megaformer, eighteen of the M3K model, built for the Lagree method: spring-loaded resistance, slow and controlled tempo, constant tension instead of quick pulses. The difference shows up in the first ten minutes. A classical reformer session isolates and lengthens. A Lagree session on the Megaformer holds a muscle under load and does not let it rest, drawing more from bodybuilding principles than from Pilates' original vocabulary, even though the machine's silhouette looks familiar.