Why Studio Gay exists.
Fitness has been designed around too narrow an idea of who belongs.
It is a cold, hard world out there. Too often, we are made to feel insufficient: not big enough, thin enough, buff enough or fit enough.
When people struggle to begin, return or stay consistent, fitness often treats the person as the problem. Studio Gay asks a different question: what if the environment, the coaching or the system needs to change instead?
Strength training, designed differently.
Studio Gay is about celebrating what you have while helping you work towards what you want.
Its mission is to queer fitness by creating more inclusive, adaptable and enjoyable ways to train, without pretending there is one ideal body, one right way to move or one definition of progress.
Drawing on sport science, sport sociology and lived queer and trans experience, Studio Gay builds strength, mobility, confidence and skill through coaching that is technically strong, deeply human and actually fun.
Studio Gay emerged from my desire to make fitness fun, to make it affirming, sexy and cute. However you define those words, I want you to feel them in your body: the one you have now and the one you are working toward.
Our bodies are always in transition. Why not enjoy the ride?
I want you to grow without obsessing over outcomes. To challenge yourself without destroying yourself. To explore your body without judging it.
Goals can be motivating, but they can also produce pressure and shame. Good coaching makes space for both ambition and the life happening around it.
Queering fitness means questioning who fitness is for, how it is taught, what bodies are expected to look like and what progress is allowed to mean.
And, of course, we gay up your workouts 🍑
What should fitness add to your life?
My focus is strength training, with mobility and flexibility built into the work. We define goals, use progressive overload, work with RIR and adapt programming to the person.
But training is not only about exercises, sets and reps. We also talk about confidence, aesthetics, gender affirmation, body awareness and what movement is actually meant to add to your life.
The person behind it.
Sport scientist, coach, consultant and founder of Studio Gay.
Nici's work combines strength training with a coaching approach shaped by inclusion, queer joy, body autonomy and the belief that good coaching should leave people more capable, not more dependent.
Alongside coaching individuals and groups, Nici works with gyms and wellness spaces to shape training programs, class concepts and coaching systems that are distinctive, practical and possible for other coaches to deliver.
The ideas have to work in real life.
Studio Gay exists across private coaching, group fitness, education, consulting and community work. These spaces are where its ideas are developed, tested and refined.
Studio Gay also exists outside paid personal training and consulting. Nici teaches accessible group classes in Berlin, contributes to queer and trans fitness activism, and offers free workshops with TIN* Fitness through Seitenwechsel e.V.
Better fitness should not only exist in premium coaching. It should exist wherever people move.
Queering fitness.
Different ways into the same idea.