On most mornings in Hong Kong, you can spot women from the Bikini Fit camp putting themselves through a series of grueling workouts in one of the city’s parks.
They are led by Tricia Yap, a fitness guru who, after spending seven years in a lucrative job as a technology consultant, decided to pursue her passion for a healthy and active lifestyle professionally.
The tipping point for Yap’s transition into a fitness career came when a friend signed her up for a charity white-collar boxing tournament.
Even though she felt she was stepping outside her comfort zone, Yap threw herself into the training, which gave her the confidence to make the changes in her life that she yearned for.
“I decided that now is the time for me to say goodbye to my corporate career and pursue something that for many many years I just dreamed about,” she says.
Today she co-owns Bikini Fit, founded in 2013, which she says isn’t quite a boot camp or a traditional gym, but more a health and fitness lifestyle community.
The company runs workshops on nutrition, goal-setting and motivation.
Exercises change every day, and are scaled according to a person’s fitness level, designed to gradually push them beyond their boundaries.
Yap says that what first attracted her to group fitness classes was that they acted as a pressure relief from her stressful job.
“You could enter a class and you could be in the worst mood, but the energy you get from the instructors is just unbelievable, and you feed off that. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I want to inspire people like that because I’m feeling so uninspired with my own life right now,’” she says.
She acknowledges that when it came to switching careers and giving up a steady income for pursuing something new, she had her fair share of fears.
“You get to the stage where you’re getting paid really well you get all these perks that come with your role, and trying to restart a career,particularly when you’re about to turn 30, you think do I really want to digress, do I really want to take that pay cut, it’s scary,” she says.
“The funny thing with fitness is,” she adds, “we don’t actually understand how much empowerment comes out of being able to do something that you told yourself you couldn’t do.”