Focused fitness
Boutique studios are booming in Northeast Ohio due in part to more personalized experiences and smaller settings
Michael C. Butz
By Amanda Koehn
A
few years ago, Hetal Patel was living in Florida training to be a physician’s assistant when, prompted by her upcoming wedding, she decided she wanted to get in shape. She had never considered herself to be athletic and was worried about getting started.
“It kind of really intimidated me at first,” she says. When Patel would leave her home around 5 a.m. each day to go to medical rotations, she saw this intense workout class below her apartment. She describes it as seeing a lot of orange lighting, people exercising on rowers with loud music and having “someone yelling at them.” She eventually tried out the curiosity-piquing class, which was OrangeTheory Fitness – an hour-long, high-
intensity workout based on achieving a certain heart rate that allows participants to continue burning calories up to a day-and-a-half after working out. She immediately joined. And as of October 2016, she and her husband, Sachin, relocated to Solon to own and operate their own OrangeTheory studio. “You get to see your results, you get to really hold yourself accountable for what you’ve been doing,” Patel says of the franchise program
16 | BALANCEDFAMILY | SUMMER 2017
Top: From left, OrangeTheory Fitness of Solon head coach Deanna Salapa and co-owner Hetal Patel. Above: Salapa performs one of the exercises in which she leads OrangeTheory members.
that as of June had nine locations in Northeast Ohio
and about 900 open or soonto-be opened worldwide.
balancedmag.com