California Fitness & Yoga celebrates 15th anniversary with array of exciting and inspiring challenges

California Fitness & Yoga, Vietnam’s pioneering health club brand, is celebrating its 15th anniversary with an array of challenges, the most exciting involving a giveaway of seven ICONIC Gold membership cards.  

Made from 24 karat gold, these limited edition cards offer a year’s ICONIC Gold membership – California’s most exclusive membership tier – and are each worth over approximately US$7,000.

Crucially, the gold membership cards can only be won, with four being awarded to the winners of special Gold Hunt Challenges taking place across the country. The remaining three will be given away in a prize draw; new and existing members will be automatically entered on signing new membership contracts and/or personal training packages.

The Gold Hunt Challenges kicked off in Ho Chi Minh City in October, with Out of Reach seeing competitors leap as far out into the pool as possible to snatch the ICONIC card suspended above the water. Hanoi and Da Nang’s Gold Runs followed in November, requiring participants to carry and stack gold bars into a neat tower – Hanoi’s in a 15-metre dash, Da Nang’s via an obstacle course. The final event – The Summit – returns to Ho Chi Minh City this month and will see participants powering uphill before they can stack their gold bars.

This is all just one part of a year-long celebration planned by California Fitness & Yoga, which opened its first club in Ho Chi Minh City’s Chinatown district in August 2007 – a club that still exists today, with a number of members who in 2007 paid in real gold bars for a lifetime membership. These members will be among the special guests at a series of celebratory gala events this month.

Dane Fort, co-founder of California Fitness & Yoga and Chief Executive of FLG Vietnam, which now owns the California brand, notes “we’re seeing the milestone of our 15th birthday as the perfect moment to go even further in leading a wellness revolution in Vietnam. We want to help more people find an activity they love to keep fit and well, and so far we’ve organised a yoga competition, our first ever kickboxing challenge and a Guinness World Record for the largest ever album of ‘before & after’ body transformations – 21,000 people. We have lots more to come, too, in our bid to inspire the country to wellness.

“When I arrived in Vietnam, the only choices for fitness were hotel gyms, basic government-owned facilities or private gyms in people’s front rooms. The market is now far more diverse, but California was – and still is – the trailblazer, setting the standards, providing the benchmark and ultimately laying the foundations of the fitness sector as it exists in Vietnam today.”

As part of APAC supergroup Fitness & Lifestyle Group (FLG), today California Fitness & Yoga operates 37 large, full-service clubs that host almost 11 million workouts a year. With an average footprint of 3,500 square metre, clubs are home to between two and four yoga studios, two to three group exercise studios, a comprehensive gym floor, large functional space, and in around two-thirds of clubs a Centuryon-branded VIP area where facilities include a private gym, pool and hydrotherapy. There are also three standalone California Centuryon clubs, while some California clubs have on-site Hypoxi studios for low-impact fat and cellulite busting.

Image: Out of Reach was the first of the Gold Hunt Challenges. Competitors had to leap as far out into the pool as possible to snatch the ICONIC card suspended above the water.