The Optimal Aging Podcast
Millions of people over age 50 represent the biggest consumer market in history for fitness, nutrition, travel, recreation and more. But most businesses don't know how to market to them. We'll interview entrepreneurs, business leaders and innovators to discuss this exciting opportunity.
The Optimal Aging Podcast
Talking Red Light Therapy for People Over 50, with Club Pilates Founder Allison Beardsley
In this episode I interview Allison Beardsley, the founder of Club Pilates and Red Light Method to explore how red light therapy is transforming fitness and wellness — especially for people aged 50 and above.
Allison shares her journey from launching Club Pilates to pioneering Red Light Method, a new wellness concept designed to help people improve their health, manage pain, lose weight, and rejuvenate their skin — all through the power of red and near-infrared light.
Topics Covered :-
✅ How red light therapy works and why it’s gaining popularity
✅ Benefits for pain relief, arthritis support, and inflammation reduction
✅ Why red light therapy is ideal for gentle fitness and the 50+ demographic
✅ How Red Light Method blends fitness, wellness, and biohacking
Connect with Allison Beardsley:
• On LinkedIn
• Red Light Method Website: www.redlightmethod.com
Connect with Jay Croft:
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/croftjay/
jay@primefitcontent.com
if you are doing everything right, like you're doing your 10,000 steps or 8,000 or whatever, and if you are trying to eat healthy, then adding red light method in as like a rocket turbo booster accelerator to help you achieve your goals faster.
Speaker 2:Hi everybody, I'm Jay Croft and welcome to the Optimal Aging Podcast, where we discuss the business of exercise, healthy living and well-being for people 50 and over. Each week, we explore what healthy living and well-being for people 50 and over. Each week, we explore what healthy living means for millions of people over age 50 and what's coming next, with a focus on communications, content and making powerful connections. Well, hey, everybody, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:My guest today is Club Pilates founder Alison Beardsley, who's now trying to do for red light therapy what she did for Pilates, which is bring it to the masses, make it accessible, make it affordable is bringing more people into the fitness world with a low-impact, low-intensity activity combined with red light therapy in a warm environment. That, she says, is very appealing to a lot of people who otherwise might not be finding access into fitness. And for our demographics of folks over 50, it's particularly appealing because Allison says that red light therapy is great for relieving aches and pains and other issues commonly related to aging. She's actually found a bigger gap in understanding about red light therapy, not so much among different generations but among people in different parts of the country, which presents its own unique challenges for communications and marketing. Right. I was happy to meet Allison and to learn a little bit about red light therapy and how it can help people in our demographic, and I think you will be too. So enjoy this conversation, allison. Hi, how are you?
Speaker 1:I'm doing awesome. How are you doing, Jay?
Speaker 2:I'm great. It's so nice to meet you.
Speaker 1:You as well. Thanks for having me on your podcast. I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so am I. I'm really excited to talk about your new venture. Well, it's not strictly new. New and newish in that it's growing and it's going to be rolling out to a lot of new people Red Light Method and also, I imagine you have some interesting stories to tell about Club Pilates, since you were the founder of that as well. So we're going to get into it. I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 1:Awesome, me too. Yeah, I love talking shop.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, what I like to talk about on the show is the over 50 market. Over 40 market whatever I don't put too fine a point on it, the idea being that in fitness and health and well-being, I believe it's a large and underserved and lucrative market and a lot of people need help connecting with them, and so one of the things I like about Red Light Method is that you've identified some appeal that your service has for people in this demographic, so I think we're going to have some good things to talk about. So, before we get to all of that, tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got to create Club Pilates and then how you got to where you are now with Bread Light Method, and then we'll get into that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I started teaching Pilates in the year 2000 in San Diego and I was teaching at multiple gyms. This is before boutique fitness really existed. Multiple gyms this is before boutique fitness really existed. And then I was six months pregnant with my firstborn son when we started Club Pilates. So it was December 2nd 2007, right before the 08 crash of the economy. So we opened up just like any other Pilates studio and then, once the economy tanked with Club Pilates in 08, my members were like, oh, allison, I can't afford $30 a group reformer class anymore. And I was like, well, keep coming. And we reduced it down to $10 a class and people were losing their houses and losing their cars and their jobs, but they're like I won't lose my fitness. And so we grew in that 08 downed economy and we grew to 12 reformers, $10 classes and before you knew it, we were seeing about 150 people a day. Because it was so like Club Pilates. The concept of it affordable Pilates for everybody was birthed out of necessity, because of a doubt economy, and so we rapidly expanded across San Diego County. We would go replace studios that went out of business and then we would pay a third of what they paid in rent because the commercial real estate values were so low. It was just an awesome time of lots of growth and franchise. That and I learned a ton because I knew nothing about franchising when I franchised Club Pilates. It just all happened so organically.
Speaker 1:So, doing this red light method, I discovered the red light when I turned 40 in 2020.
Speaker 1:And I just started using it for, like my skin, because I'm all natural and hippie and everything.
Speaker 1:And then in 2021, I was doing business consulting for a group out of the Bay Area that had a weight loss clinic and they mailed me these red light wraps the full body medical grade wraps and in two weeks I went from suffering from long COVID to where I had so much fatigue and just was having a hard time getting back to normal. I went from feeling like I was 80 to feeling like I was 20, and I lost 11 pounds in two weeks and I was like this is the best thing since sliced bread, like I was so excited, so it essentially brought me out of retirement. I was like I need to do the same thing I did with Club Pilates make these affordable and accessible, because the device we use is normally $200, $300 a treatment. It's a $40,000 medical grade system, and so we're doing the same thing. We're making it affordable, available and accessible and it really helps cellular health. So that's kind of the backdrop, with me and Club Pilates and Red Light Method.
Speaker 2:Wonderful. You're no longer at the helm of Club Pilates, right? You sold that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I sold the franchise company. I sold 75% in 2015, and then I sold the remaining 25% in 2016. And then I was a franchisee in the Reno market and I sold all three of my locations in Reno in 2018. So I've been out of Clipilates, but I'm very happy to see how successful it is. There's over 1,200 locations in the United States and it's international and it's doing a lot of good out there. So I'm very happy that my first fitness baby was a big love for lots of people in the world.
Speaker 2:So yeah, that's right. Wow, well, good for you, that's wonderful, congratulations. So, red Light Method, how many are there now and how many will there be shortly, in a year or so?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we started franchising late March of 2024. So it's been. We're approaching one year. We have 58 locations signed with area development agreements and so far we have three open and about five more getting ready. So it takes about 10 months to birth a studio, so not all 58 are going to open at the same time. I always explain to people it's going to be. Those 58 will roll out over years. But meanwhile we're still signing new ones. I just signed Oklahoma City just this morning. They're doing three in Oklahoma City Great demographics there. And then Tulsa, oklahoma as well, three more going in. So we have Detroit. We have Atlanta, tennessee, huntsville, alabama, san Diego, houston, dallas, fort Worth, tucson's getting ready Houston, dallas, fort Worth, tucson's getting ready. I'm developing for Northern Nevada in the Reno Carson City markets. It's been amazing. Tampa.
Speaker 2:You're everywhere.
Speaker 1:We're going to be popping up. Just three are open, but all three have opened in the black. So Reno just opened two Mondays ago, february 17th 2025. We opened up with 315 members and we're already at 350 in our first two weeks, which is crazy. Tucson's poised to open in April and she's at about 230 members. And Fayetteville, arkansas opened up about five weeks ago and they're over 200 members right now. So that's awesome.
Speaker 2:And what's the ideal number of members for a location?
Speaker 1:A mature studio can hold between four and 600 members. We have a bigger capacity, like club Pilates, basically. I mean, a club Pilates can hold 500 members and they see 12 people an hour. But at 500 members their attrition goes up because you can only see 12 people an hour. So with us, if we have nine treatment rooms, we can see 18 people an hour, so we can hold 50% more capacity than Club Pilates. Or if we have like 10 treatment rooms, we can see 20 an hour, so we can hold a lot more capacity than a Club Pilates, which is great. So we don't need as many of them, so we're not clustering them so close together and we try to get bigger radiuses so they don't cannibalize each other. Because I know right now a lot of club Pilates, they can only market with a two mile radius around their location, which is kind of sucks for the franchisee because they're spending more marketing dollars and getting less of an effective reach because they have to have such a small radius with their digital marketing.
Speaker 2:Okay, Tell us what happens at a red light method. I know, obviously, but I want to hear it from you and tell the folks out there, because you know we hear red light. It's sort of a buzzy thing in the last few years, kind of like cold plunges, or you know a lot of things that have just come up in the last few years or come to public awareness in the last few years, but I'm not sure everyone knows exactly what red light is. So tell us about that.
Speaker 1:So red light method is super unique.
Speaker 1:First of all, we can absorb red and near-infrared lights at the rising sun, but we need to basically be in our birthday suit if we want to absorb that with the rising sun, with no sunscreen, no sunglasses, no hat and most people today are light-starved. And so the red near-infrared light helps to really energize the cells at a mitochondrial level. Same thing with grounding and earthing. Most of us don't have our feet connected to like the energy of the earth, which is why you're seeing all these PEMF things coming out and stuff. But red near infrared light, so good for cellular health, helps the mitochondria at the cellular level. But red light method is very unique as we're like kind of a hybrid spa fitness concept. So we have treatment rooms or individual treatment rooms and in each room there's a massage table and a black sheet and we have our medical grade. It's a class two device of red near infrared light and this device is proven for body contouring or inches loss, reduced pain and inflammation and an increased blood flow and circulation. It does many other things like. It helps your skin, helps sleep and energy. It does just tons of stuff. It gets rid of arthritis pain and we've seen miracles. We even had a lady with macular degeneration, have her eyesight completely healed. She was going into eye surgery with an ophthalmologist and he's like you don't even have macular degeneration, what are you doing? And she's like, oh, I'm doing red light therapy and sure enough, it's proven for that. It also reduces blood sugar by 28% as well, and there's actual PubMed studies on this. But anyways, let me go back to what is red light method. You go into a treatment room and you undress down into your knickers and you push a call button and our staff come in and we wrap the entire body in 86 degrees. They're warm, red, near infrared lights, and so the light is directly on the skin. There's no distance. The more you get distance away, like in a bed or with two-dimensional box panels, you're losing the light energy. So this is the most effective way to absorb it and it wraps around, so you're getting under your arm, You're getting all three-dimensionally wrapped. After their 25-minute treatment, they then moved to a 15-minute digitally guided power plate class, and so the power plate is part of the clinical trials that were done with our system that prove its efficacy, because we have to move the lymph and so the lymph doesn't have a pump. It's done through exercise or massage or the power plate. If anyone's ever been on it, it's an amazing vibrating platform triples muscle fibers activated so they move to 15 minutes of that and then they moved to a 15 minute digitally guided Pilates reformer session.
Speaker 1:We keep our Pilates on the vanilla side, so we're not standing, we're not planking, we're staying on our back doing the basic footwork. So we cater to 80% of people. Obviously, if someone's very like elite athlete, they're going to want to do more on the reformer than what we can offer because we don't have instructors. I'd compare us to Ruth Chris Steakhouse. If you go to Ruth Chris you're probably going to order a steak. You don't go and order chicken.
Speaker 1:So red light method. Our steak is the red light treatment, the Pilates is just broccoli and then the power plate is like parsley and so. But our value is the red light treatment because our members can like if they're on unlimited in the Reno market they can come 30 times a month for $1.99 a month. It's amazing. So we're doing very affordable, whereas these treatments normally costs like $1.99 for one single treatment or like where we opened our prototype in Arkansas there was a doctor who offered these treatments and she would be like oh, you can get 20 for $2,000 for 20 sessions. So we're offering this huge value and we've just seen beautiful miracles happen. So it's almost like a ministry of loving our neighbors, ourself and helping people.
Speaker 2:That's a lot. So I want to know. You mentioned a lot of benefits of red light therapy or treatment. Does this replace traditional exercise and dieting? Can I just do whatever I want, but as long as I come into red light method I'm going to be okay? Or is this meant to be a supplement to dieting and working out? How does it fit into the overall picture of fitness, particularly for people who are a little bit older?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so for the older folk, if you're spending 15 minutes on the power plate, that's equivalent to a 45 minute workout without the power plate. It's like a bio hack. It's like, ok, I spent 15 minutes here, 15 minutes here so on Pilates. So they're getting 30 minutes of exercise and movement in within their hour long session, and then 25 minutes is of the red lights.
Speaker 2:OK.
Speaker 1:What can replace. But I always tell people it's not a magic bullet. It matters what you put in your pie hole. So the red lights work, but you can't just keep putting stuff in your pie hole. Yeah, improving, so we're either always getting better on our diet or we're declining, but there's no such thing as flatlining while we're alive. So what we tell is if you are doing everything right, like you're doing your 10,000 steps or 8,000 or whatever, and if you are trying to eat healthy, then adding red light method in as like a rocket turbo booster accelerator to help you achieve your goals faster. Now if you're doing the red lights and then you're eating pizza and drinking beer or whatever, you're still going to get cellular benefits, but you're not going to see that body contouring Like for me.
Speaker 1:I'm good about what I put in my pie hole. I don't eat sugar or anything, but I do like my daughter bakes fresh sourdough bread and I have crock pots of like corned beef and taco stuff like right over there. So I eat a good, healthy diet and when I'm under the red lights consistently I'm 20 pounds lighter and I'm about six feet tall. So 20 pounds is different for on me than a five foot tall person, but it keeps me at my game weight and I'm still enjoying life. So but if I were to like be very strict and like cut out all the carbs and do and like not have wine or something like that, I could probably be even lighter, but I'm content.
Speaker 2:And you enjoy having a glass of wine once in a while. Nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 1:I'm like some cream in my coffee, so absolutely Okay.
Speaker 2:So let me be Mr Skeptic here, cause I'm sure you get this sometimes. I'm not going to say anything. You haven't been asked before. But come on, you point a red light at my skin and suddenly I lose weight and I feel better and everything's hunky-dory with me. Really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we have hundreds, hundreds of members who've lost over 100 pounds in two and a half years. At our prototype in Bentonville, Arkansas, we would have people limp in and then they have no more pain. Their arthritis pain completely goes away. One of our members, tracy I love her to pieces. She was accused by her friends of having a facelift. Now Tracy is an esthetician and she takes very good care of her skin. But once she added in all the red lights, her friends didn't see her for a few months and they're like girl, you got a facelift. And she's like no, I didn't get a facelift.
Speaker 1:And me, I'm 45. 45, I'm natural. I don't do Botox or filler and I use castor oil and water. That's all I do with. I'm pretty granola, but my skin's better now at 45 than it was when I was 35, like actually 10 years ago. I looked 10 years older back then than I look today and I'm older, so it's really cool. But it does get rid of all the aches and pains. It's amazing what it does. And and yeah, we're light starved. We spend 90% of our time indoors. We're not getting sunshine. That's why so many people don't have the proper levels of vitamin D and I think with the indoor comforts of air conditioning and blackout curtains and our little devices, we are all light starved and we also need to do more stuff like grounding and stuff like that as well. But yeah, it really works.
Speaker 1:It's usually the husbands of our members who are very skeptical. And so we have one gentleman. He wants to open a red light method now, but him and his wife drug him in and he's he'll say it and he's got the cutest southern twang. He's like oh, I don't know about this, I can't even do a southern twang, but anyways, so sweet. And he was a runner his whole life and he had such bad arthritis in his shoulders he couldn't lift his arm up. He has full range of motion in his shoulders and he had a heart arrhythmia. That's completely healed. His heart arrhythmia is gone. He has no pain and he is like a firm believer.
Speaker 1:But two of our staff have had their eyesight improved. So they go in for their annual checkup and they're like oh, your vision's actually better, which. How often does that happen to 40 plus people, that their vision's actually improving versus declining as they get older. So that's been pretty cool. And I told you about the macular degeneration lady. But we've had about 30 people come off of disability from autoimmune conditions like lupus. So it's amazing. People in tears like I have my life back, I'm able to work again, I can get out of bed.
Speaker 1:Another story we have a member named Emily and she was in a bad car accident and gained about 75 pounds and she's my age, mid forties, and she's tall also. But she lost so much within a year and she's totally pain-free and she's back in great shape. She just recently, on Facebook, got rid of all of her extra larges because now she's like a medium. It's awesome. So we've seen just tons of success stories. I think the biggest thing is that people have to commit and do it. What I noticed in Arkansas we had to do a lot of educational campaigning on what is red light therapy, but with our one we just opened in Reno. When I talk to people I'm like, do you know about red light therapy? They're like, oh, yeah, I know all about it. Like everyone knows about it here in our demographic more to the West we're just a few hours from San Francisco and everything. But yeah, people out here like that's why Reno opened with 315 members. That's crazy.
Speaker 2:Hey, are you a fitness professional trying to grow your business with people over 50? If you are, then you need to know how to communicate with them, how to market to them and how to get them to trust you with their fitness, well-being and money. We're talking about millions of people who are a little older than the typical market that the fitness industry usually pursues. They have more money, more time and better motivation to make the best long-term fitness consumers you'll find anywhere. If you're not focusing on them, you should be.
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Speaker 1:It kind of happened organically because I think that the younger crowds, they prefer more the high intensity training. But what we're finding is with 80% of the population being categorized as overweight and obese. But doing the high intensity spikes your cortisol levels, it fatigues the adrenals, like it's hard on most people. Most people are not high intensity folks. And then as we get older and people have had surgeries and aches and pains and they're carrying 40 extra pounds around, they need something gentle that can meet them where they're at, to bring them back into feeling good and being healthy.
Speaker 1:And I think that that's where red light method has really appealed to people over the age of 40. We still have young folks, we have people bring their teenagers in and we see benefit with like eczema and skin and conditions and stuff like that. So we do see the younger crowd that are. Definitely we cater more towards an older demographic, but I think that they appreciate that time of like. During the 25 minute treatment your body's wrapped, you're laying on a massage table, you have noise canceling headphones on, you're listening to like a meditation or relaxing spa music and then we put a face piece over. There's glasses are optional, like goggles and then we put the face piece that gets the face, neck, chest and decollete, and so it's like 25 minutes of forced relaxation time and I know we all need that for sure, because we're like a go-go-go society.
Speaker 2:so well, great I'll be. I'll be right there, because if you can get me to just sit down and be still for 25 minutes, that's a good thing, because we don't allow that, do we? We don't encourage it, and it's almost like you feel guilty if you take a few minutes to just be still with your thoughts and you want to grab your phone and make sure nobody's sending you a text message that you've got to look at right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, the forced relaxation time is just fantastic and people really love it.
Speaker 2:What kind of challenges have you had in communicating with the over 40 market? The over 50 market that maybe you weren't expecting Anything.
Speaker 1:I think that different demographics of the country. We've had different challenges, like Bentonville, arkansas, where our prototype was. Bentonville is very different than the West Coast where I'm from. It's just a different case of life. You have a lot of people, it's the Bible Belt. There's a lot of farming. It's just a different. There's fast food is like everyone eats the fast food.
Speaker 1:I'm like shocked how the drive-through lines would like go out onto the road and almost cause accidents in the Ozarks. I was like whoa, because out West you don't see that. I mean, maybe In-N-Out Burger has a big line, but besides that, no place really people aren't really eating the fast food so much. So I think it was a little bit more of an educational campaign there of explaining the benefits and having QR codes or articles or sharing different studies with people and educational campaigns. But yeah, it's interesting because out in Reno with our one that just opened two weeks ago, there was no need to even do it. They were teaching me about stuff with red light. I was like, oh, I didn't know it did that. Wow, it was really cool yeah.
Speaker 2:Do you find that people who are a little bit older are more or less skeptical, more or less open-minded? Are they really anxious to find some relief, maybe arthritis, pain or just a general malaise that often hits any kind of difference on that.
Speaker 1:I think that there's so much out there right now about like just the way the world's going in health and nutrition and cellular health and metabolic dysfunction, that like red light method is poised at such a good time where we don't even really have to convince people. They know it and they start noticing the improvements right away. Like people notice right away they slept better that night, like maybe they woke up five times a night. Now they only woke up once. They also notice improved energy and it really helps with like mood and depression and like happiness levels as well. It's just that like if our every single cell in our body has mitochondria, which are the little batteries, and so we're basking the mitochondria and energizing them in light, then everything it's's like there's so many studies proving the mitochondrial improvement of cellular health and I think cellular health is like all what's going on right now, because we're learning that everything's a metabolic disease, like most cancers, most everything it's. Our cells are not functioning properly and so it's so cool that a non-invasive, like healthy treatment is showing such vast improvements. But I really think that the wave of the next like 20 plus years ago boutique fitness didn't exist and people thought I was crazy. A lot is, and then club pilates kind of almost started the boutique fitness craze and it was or it was at that time that the boutique fitness craze went off. I think right now we're in a similar time, but it's a hybrid of gentle fitness that you can actually do and feel good and not beat yourself up and get injuries. So I think gentle fitness and then biohacking modalities of wellness and fusing the two. I'm a little bit nervous about the cold plunge sauna places because they don't have a fitness component and so and they're like 400 bucks a month. So once we see like a downturn in the economy like I mentioned, club Pilates was built right at that recession Once you see that, I think that we're going to see those $400 a month things that were a million dollar build out for them to do I think we're going to see those start to fizzle away. And I think we're also going to see the boutique fitness fizzle away because people are going to be like, oh, for that same price I can go to Red Light Method and get my wellness modality, because it literally is like a massage, facial, body contouring workout all in an hour for the price of like a regular boutique fitness place. So it's not the $400 a month cryo membership and it's not just the fitness. Now they might keep both another fitness thing for their more high intensity things, because we're definitely not a high intensity market, we're definitely more on the gentle side and nourishing the body and loving it.
Speaker 1:I like to think back to 2000 years ago in Jesus days. Jesus was not doing high intensity workouts, he was walking for like hours, that low intensity. So unless like like historically as humans came about throughout the ages, we weren't doing high intensity things where we're spiking. We only did that in the life and death situation. It's like oh, here comes a saber tooth, like take it out. That was the high intensity.
Speaker 1:But other than that, we're mostly physiologically slow twitch muscle fibers Like our type two slow twitch muscle fibers is like 80% of our body. Unless you're like this elite athlete who can sprint super fast, then you might have like 40%. You might be a slightly different, but most of us are 80% slow twitch and so we beat ourselves up and have to have joint replacements. Combining that with our poor cellular health and like seed oils and all the inflammatory things in our food, that's not even really food.
Speaker 1:But when you combine that with high intensity we have people like getting hurt and sick and then they are so hungry and depleted they don't have all the minerals, they're like overeating a pizza. I know like when I do high intensity I get grumpy and then like want to eat a pizza. So right now yeah, like right now that I become and all of a sudden I'm irritable and I'm like like I think it's because I'm so intense already in my life and the way I do everything that I prefer, personally, gentle exercise, but like my husband's very different. He was a Marine. He does 24 hour mountain bike races, he's like runs five minute miles and does 30 pull-ups, like, but he's like a warrior. So he's very different than me. So, and I think most of us are more in the 80% bucket, not the 10% warrior bucket.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I think that that concept of gentle exercise is interesting and could apply to this large and growing over 50 demographic, because you know, when we were growing up, the idea was that you had to really no pain, no gain and you had to sweat really hard, and the more challenging it was the better it was. And if you're just going to be gentle, stay home and do nothing. But now, no, it's emerging that we, as long as you're moving your body and doing something and getting your heart rate up a little and engaging in some strength training, you don't have to be a warrior.
Speaker 1:Yes, you don't have to do this killer like oh I'm so crushed the next four days, kind of thing. You could do more of a gentle, lifelong style exercise, something that you could do till you're 80. And I used to always compare because I club pilates like in the olden days I would compare pilates to swimming, because swimming is one of those things you could pretty much do over the span of your life sure pilates, especially classical pilates.
Speaker 1:So now I'm gonna date myself, because 25 years ago people did not think I was a classical pilates instructor. They're like, oh, club pilates, it's so fringe, and's so fringe and so crazy. Well, now me looking 25 years later, I'm looking at all the Pilates studios and I'm like this isn't even Pilates. You guys. I teach more of a classical vanilla Pilates class and everyone's favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla. So I think that most people for the majority would agree that they love the classical pilates more than the crazy circus like high intensity pilates. That really looks nothing like what joseph pilates taught. But I'm now I'm. I'm now I'm the old person looking at all the studios yeah because they all thought I was crazy back then.
Speaker 1:But I was actually like I didn't really deviate from the original exercises. I might have added some dumbbells in with footwork, but besides that I didn't do a lot of the stuff I see now and I'm like that's Pilates, like oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's all changed a lot.
Speaker 1:Well, that's something I'm hearing in Reno is that I have a lot of ladies who've been doing Pilates for 40 years and they're like this is like baby Pilates.
Speaker 1:I'm like it's the classical, like it's neutral pelvis, it's the fundamentals, it's getting into the type two slow twitch muscle fibers, which a lot of these people want to go fast and hard and that's fine. They can do that as well. We have more challenging classes, but being that we are not live with instructors and that they're digitally taught and they're all on their back on the reformer, we have to keep things at a certain safety level and start slow, because if I have a person who's never done Pilates and I'm putting them on a reformer and teaching them with a tablet, I'm going to progress them very slowly to make sure that they're checking their form, that they're doing everything proper, that they're doing it correctly. We throw in like anatomical images explaining things on our digitally taught reformer classes, but it works really great. But one thing we can't do is we can't have people like doing standing Russian splits on the reformer without an instructor, because that's why gyms don't just have reformers out, because it could be very dangerous.
Speaker 2:So Sure, okay, well, listen, I would like you to tell the folks listening how they can learn more about red light method, either as an investment opportunity or as a consumer, if they want to keep an eye out for one in their community. Where should people go to learn more?
Speaker 1:Website, redlightmethodcom, has lots of information, or you could follow us on Facebook or Instagram. Each of our locations have some kind of web access and where they can reach out to people. But yeah, we are really excited. We have 58 locations in development. Currently, just three are opening, but we've only been franchising for not quite a year yet, so we're very new, but we have many more open. By the end of 2025, we should have about 15 to 20 locations open all throughout the United States, from San Diego to Tampa to Cincinnati to Detroit, the Reno market and just all over. Tucson Arizona is opening soon, so we have Oklahoma City and then Tulsa, oklahoma just signed. So we have lots of development happening and I'm excited for people to experience it because it really is such a blessing.
Speaker 2:Well, and I'm going to experience it myself, I'm going to go to the uh location here that provides some of your services. It's not quite a full-blown red light method studio, but they have some of your offerings.
Speaker 2:I'm going to go check it out for myself I'm excited to hear what you think about it, jay I will let you know absolutely, and I'll try to do that before I publish this, this episode, so I can uh add that to it. But I think it's exciting and you know, your track record speaks for itself and I want to thank you for making the time to talk to me today. It's been a real pleasure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you, jay. It's been awesome getting to know you, and thanks for having me on your show. I really appreciate you.
Speaker 2:Same to you. Have a good day. Thank you for listening to the Optimal Aging Podcast. I'm your host, jay Croft of Prime Fit Content. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you'll subscribe, review and tell a friend. All of that helps me grow my audience. I hope you'll share any comments you have with me, including suggestions about people I should interview and topics I should cover. You can learn more about my newsletter and content business at primefitcontentcom and write me at jay J-A-Y at primefitcontentcom. Again, thanks for listening. Join me next time.
