Les Mills, the UK-born fitness tycoon who turned a New Zealand gym into a global cult, has died at 91. The man who made group exercise a religion leaves behind a legacy that, as I have argued for years, tells us more about British export prowess than any trade deal. Consider the irony: a British expatriate, abandoning the damp shores of the Home Counties for the Antipodes, builds an empire on barbaric yawps and synchronized squats. Yet what is BODYPUMP if not Victorian discipline repackaged for the age of self-improvement? Mills understood that the modern soul craves structure, order, and a good sweat. He gave them choreographed grunting, and they paid him billions.
The Guardian wails about the death of a 'fitness icon'. I say nonsense. He was a systems builder, a man who saw that the decline of manual labour left a vacuum of physical purpose. His programmes filled that void with military precision. Every track, every rep, every god-awful motivational shout was calibrated for maximum efficiency. Compare this to the flabby intellectualism of our age. While academics debate the finer points of post-colonial theory, Les Mills taught the world to lunge. And the world lunged.
There is a deeper lesson here. Mills succeeded where so many British enterprises have failed because he understood the importance of brand discipline. His programmes are identical in Auckland, London, and Shanghai. This is the British genius for standardisation applied to the body. Our engineers did it with railways. Mills did it with burpees. The Empire is dead. Long live the Empire of the Abs.
His passing marks the end of an era. The fitness industry today is a swamp of influencer quacks and wearable tech. Mills stood for something older: the belief that hard work, repetition, and a bit of discomfort were good for the soul. It is a Victorian virtue, and we are poorer for its passing. So raise a dumbbell for Les Mills. He gave us a world where we could all be a little more British, one rep at a time.
