The founder of Instaphysique considers her body of work

By Ed Goldman

Amy Brown is telling me about a three-week period during the COVID-19 crisis when she and her then-small staff would arrive at her Instaphysique studio by 5:30 a.m. to roll some of her patented Lagree Fitness machines into the parking lot in time for the arrival of her first client.

“This was in the summer, so we had to roll the machines back inside around noon,” Brown says. “Each machine cost me $15,000, and I sure didn’t want them getting ruined sitting around in the sun.”

If you’ll recall, conducting business outdoors—whether you ran a fitness studio, a hair salon or a restaurant— was one of the few options available during the pandemic. The others involved your wearing a mask while business owners, stylists and restaurant hostesses, also wearing masks, took your temperature. It was a good time to own a golf course or tennis court, which didn’t even require players to wear masks—unless they stepped inside the clubhouse.

Brown’s fitness machines sit like sentries, ready to unfold and morph into spring-based Transformers in her 4,100-square-foot facility. Sited diagonally across from Pavilions Shopping Center, a popular upscale Sacramento landmark, and next door to Chef Bo, a neighborhood Chinese restaurant, Brown founded the business in 2016. It features both workout and recovery equipment. 

In 2018, she opened a second branch, in the city of Roseville, which is about half that size and is strictly fitness-focused. Between the two locations she serves 500+ members and occasional walk-ins, who come an average three times per week for a 40-minute workout she says is “low on impact, high in intensity.” Her eldest client is 75, she says, adding with a laugh “and she’s the toughest of them all.”   

At 5’8, the sinewy 47-year-old Brown is probably her own best advertisement for her workout facilities (as well as for following a vegan diet). Her marketing background and the contacts she made in her Southern California years have allowed her to personally handle nearly every facet of her business. 

“When I started, I taught a lot more of the classes, too,” she says. Now she has 29 employees (three of whom are fulltime) who provide individual attention to the maximum 15 attendees per class. She looks around at her multi-mirrored, exceptionally immaculate place and says, “It definitely helps that I love what I do.”   

In addition to the Lagree Fitness machines, Brown’s studio has small, tight-coiled trampolines to help people who have balance and posture issues (they’re not made to allow you to bounce very high or wide). Some of these, along with infra-red “body roll” machines that provide lymphatic massages are in the portion of Brown’s Sacramento studio dedicated to recovery.

Brown was recommended to me by two of her clients, one of whom, Sherri Ngai, cuts my hair whenever I run out of excuses not to do so. “It’s the best workout I’ve ever had,” says Ngai, who’s already on her feet five days a week running her hair salon, Shapes for Hair, in East Sacramento. “This helps give me the strength to do my work,” she adds.

On my visit, I watch two of Brown’s clients using the two body-roll machines, which resemble scaled-down paddlewheels (think land-locked riverboats) which the client sits beside and in front of as the wheels roll down their frames. The machines have proved especially helpful for people with health concerns that include lymphedema, swelling, and inflammation, according to medical sourced—and, of course, physical therapy sites.

As much as she’s helping people achieve fitness and recovery, Brown says a principal goal of her business is “community building. This is a non-competitive environment where people form a definite camaraderie, which can have as beneficial an effect on you as being in decent physical shape.”

Brown is a single mom. Her son, Jayden, is 11. When she returned to Sacramento a few years ago she lived with her own mom, Linda Brown, a retired teacher now 80. “That helped ground me and also gave me the chance to save money I’d need to lease my places and get loans to buy the equipment,” Amy Brown says.