Courtesy / Peter Gumaskas
From left, Andrew Blais and Sarah and Eric Olivares partnered to found the Form Lab in Portland as a gym focused on personal training and building careers.
Updated: April 1, 2022
The Form Lab gym launches in Portland with goal of forming muscles, careers
Courtesy / Peter Gumaskas
Form Lab co-founder and head coach Andrew Blais trains Kristi McCarthy on proper weight-lifting form as she lifts 65 pounds.
Like competitors, a just-launched gym in Portland teaches members how to work out in proper physical form, and offers personal training and small group classes.
But the founders of the Form Lab say they're also helping trainers form careers with good earnings and benefits.
“We’re far ahead of any gym that I’ve been part of,” said Andrew Blais, a co-founder and head coach at the Form Lab, about its compensation model.
Blais launched the fitness club in February with wife-and-husband team Sarah and Eric Olivares at 144 Fore St. At first there were around 30 customers. The number is now north of 250.
“Word-of-mouth is big,” said Sarah Olivares.
Personal trainer
A Westbrook native, Blais obtained an associate degree in mortuary science in 2011 from Mount Ida College in Newton, Mass., and worked in his family’s funeral home business, which goes back several generations.
It wasn’t an unlikely start for a fitness professional, he said.
“You’re working with people through pretty tough time in their lives,” he said of the funeral home profession.
That fostered a desire to help people and create a sense of community, he said. And that desire translated to ideas about working in the fitness industry, where Blais envisioned incorporating one-on-one training that paid attention to clients’ individual needs and habits.
In 2017, he enrolled in the National Academy of Sports Medicine and became a certified personal trainer.
As a trainer working in a number of gyms in Portland and Westbrook, he said, he saw many clients looking to work out but lacking a focus on form so that they could function better during their workouts.
One of those clients was Sarah Olivares.
Biotech professionals
A Portland native, she has a Ph.D. in molecular biology, cell biology and biochemistry from Boston University, where she studied genes related to muscle and heart development.
She spent over 10 years working in biotechnology in the San Francisco area. She met and married Eric Olivares, a California native who worked in the same field.
The couple returned to Maine several years ago to be closer to family. After the premature birth of her son and the new world created by the pandemic, Sarah said, she needed to leave biotech and turn her attention to her family.
She’s also a lifelong sports and fitness buff, with an enthusiasm for rock climbing in places like Yosemite National Park and experience as a coach at a San Francisco rock-climbing gym .
Despite years of physical activity and competing, she realized her technique wasn’t doing well by her body type. She began working out at Orangetheory Fitness in Portland, where Blais was head coach.
Under Blais’s guidance, she learned to fine-tune her form with the goal of continuing to be active and free from injury.
“He’s super-talented and a more empathetic than anyone I ever met in the fitness world,” she said.
When Blais became a personal trainer at Iron Legion Strength Co. in Westbrook, Olivares followed him there.
Twist the floor away
The two began talking about starting their own gym, with a focus on the personalized attention to form that Blais was using.
For example, “I thought I could do push-ups,” Olivares said. “Andrew taught me I was doing them incorrectly my whole life. I had been hurting my shoulder and having my arms out too wide. He said, ‘Bring your hands in, put them under your chest, and when you’re pushing up, imagine you’re twisting the floor away.’ That one cue — and getting the proper cue into your brain — was the first time I felt my pectoral muscles being engaged in a push-up.”
Courtesy / Peter Gumaskas
The model for co-founder and head coach Andrew Blais, in the orange T-shirt, is to focus on clients’ individual needs and habits.
Olivares’s family, including her parents, were soon training with Blais as well.
Then the couple and Blais decided to partner on opening the Form Lab.
“Our model is about retraining people to properly move their bodies,” said Blais.
“Our passion is to be a safe and inclusive space for all people and all body types,” said Olivares. “We focus primarily on personal training. So someone like Andrew can focus on understanding you and your limitations, figuring out how you move.”
Group classes of up to 12 people are also offered.
“People are telling us they’ve never been to a gym before or been to a group fitness class before, and now they’re becoming regulars,” she said.
How muscles move
An example of improper movement, Blais said, often occurs when someone bends down to pick up something off the floor.
“It’s something someone does multiple times each day, and most of the times it’s done without thought,” he said.
People usually use the same muscles all the time, resulting in overuse that can cause tightness or even injury, he said.
In the bending example, most people use their quadriceps muscle — the front muscle above the knee — which can eventually result in knee or even lower back pain due to repeated pressure, he said.
By contrast, Blais encourages clients to manipulate their movements in certain ways that bring other muscles into play. His goal is to foster an understanding of what muscles can be active in various movements and how they stretch and contract.
Blais said his understanding of the subject comes from education, along with trial and error on himself.
“I’ve had injuries and I’ve worked through them and figured out ways to move around those injuries,” he said.
Personal investment
When the idea for a business began percolating, “We could see a business model in there where we could do better by our trainers by paying them a livable wage and providing things like paid vacation and ongoing education benefits — making this an opportunity to be a career and not just a part-time gig,” said Olivares.
They spent nine months looking in the Portland area for a location. Criteria included a large open-floor space of between 3,000 and 4,000 square feet to accommodate equipment, along with some private spaces that were either preexisting or that could be built out, in order to accommodate additional services such as massage therapy and private nutrition consultation.
At 144 Fore St., they found a 3,268-square-foot former office space. Minimal renovations included removing old carpet, installing gym flooring and new carpet, painting the walls and installing décor.
Courtesy / Peter Gumaskas
A 3,268-square-foot former office space at 144 Fore St. accommodates a large common area and a couple of smaller rooms with minimal renovations.
Other expenditures went toward equipment such as rowing machines, weights, suspension trainers and fitness bands; along with clothing for trainers, marketing, photography, and brand development by Portland-based Kast-Wagner Branding, where Angela Wagner handled website and logo development, and Chris Kast handled marketing. Both are now customers of the Form Lab.
The partners commissioned a couple of professional photo shoots to market the brand, using social media and soliciting print and broadcast stories.
The Olivareses financed the start-up from their personal funds, investing about $200,000 so far.
In addition to Blais, the facility has one other full-time and two part-time trainers and two massage therapists. The plan is to launch a nutrition coaching program this month. Sarah serves as studio manager; Eric is a silent partner.
Clients hail from as far as Freeport and Biddeford. They come from a variety of experiences in the fitness world.
“People blend this with other fitness facilities they go to,” said Olivares. “Some have left their former gyms because we’re a better fit for them. We have a number of people who haven’t trained formally in a gym before.”
Unlike walk-in gyms, this one is all appointment-based training.
“You have to be signed up for a session or a class,” said Blais.
The clientele has grown enough that the company is already looking for another one or two full-time trainers this year.
Livable wage and benefits
The goal is to provide a career pathway, said Olivares.
“We offer trainers a percentage of all of the training sessions and class bookings that they offer,” she said.
Courtesy / Peter Gumaskas
Form Lab opened Feb. 1 and has already grown its client base nearly 10-fold.
The starting rate is 5% to 10% higher than the start rate at most other such facilities in Portland, said Blais.
The company also offers health care benefits to full- and part-time staff, a yearly education benefit to makes sure personal trainers stay fresh with their skills, and paid time off.
Those perks are not typical for the industry, said Blais.
“That was part of the model from the beginning,” he said. “That was a big influence in why we opened the gym. This is a profession that’s needed. And it’s a hard one to make a living at.”
Blais said he’s seen interest in fitness grow. Emergence from the pandemic, in particular, has brought a spike in activity, he said. But would-be gym-goers, he said, have struggled with the idea of being in a public gym, where space might be tight. The Form Lab’s appointment-only model and large-square footage may help address those concerns.
“It will not be a room full of people,” he said. “A lot of people are excited about that.”
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