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Marco Betti, owner of Antica Posta, a Tuscan restaurant and bar in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood, plays tennis at Wellbridge’s Athletic Club Northeast in Atlanta, Ga., on September 22, 2009. Betti, who splits his time between the restaurant’s exhibition kitchen and its wine dinners, uses time on the court to stay active outside the kitchen.

Every gym has a wall of equipment. Not every gym has a wall of stories.

Back in the mid-2000s, I had the chance to work with Wellbridge on a project that’s stuck with me ever since — not because of the lighting setups or the shot lists, but because of who I met on the other side of the camera.

Wellbridge wanted to do something different with their marketing. Instead of another glossy mailer full of stock photography — the generic smiling model on a treadmill that nobody actually recognizes — they wanted to show the people who were already walking through their doors. Real members. Real trainers. Real results. The idea was simple: let the club’s own patrons tell the story of what membership had done for their lives, and back it up with photographs that felt honest rather than staged.

That’s where I came in.

Finding the Story in the Session

My approach to this kind of work goes back to something my mentor, the late Don Rutledge, drilled into me early in my career: you don’t find the real story by posing someone in isolation. You find it by staying close to the relationship — between a person and their work, their trainer, their routine, the thing that actually matters to them. So instead of setting up a sterile portrait station in a corner of the club, I spent time in the actual sessions. Step aerobics classes with steppers and hand weights. One-on-one training sessions. The unglamorous, sweaty, in-progress moments that don’t usually make it into a marketing mailer — because those are the moments that are true.

Over the course of the project, I photographed a wide range of Wellbridge members, each with a completely different reason for walking through the door:

• A Georgia Tech professor whose entire career was built on studying human performance — using his own training as a real-world extension of the science he taught in the classroom.
• A prominent Atlanta chef, whose long hours on his feet in a high-heat kitchen made his own health and stamina non-negotiable.
• An independent PR executive, whose days were built around client calls and deadlines, using her time at the club as one of the only hours in her schedule that belonged to her.
• Members connected to organizations like the CDC, along with entrepreneurs, parents, and everyday Atlantans — each with their own version of “why I’m here.”

What struck me, session after session, was how different the reasons were and how similar the result was. A professor who wanted sharper focus for his research. A chef who needed more energy to make it through service. A PR pro who needed one hour a day that wasn’t about anyone else’s deadline but her own. Different lives, same thread: showing up consistently changed how they showed up everywhere else.

Why This Kind of Work Matters

Mailers built around stock photography get glanced at and recycled. Mailers built around a neighbor, a familiar face from the community, someone whose kid goes to the same school — those get read. That’s the power of documentary-style photography in a marketing context: it doesn’t manufacture trust; it reveals trust that’s already there.

For Wellbridge, that meant a library of images they could drop into direct mail campaigns targeted at the neighborhoods surrounding each club — real members, photographed in real sessions, with testimonials that reflected their actual experience rather than a copywriter’s guess at one.

For me, it was a reminder of why I got into this work in the first place. Everybody has a reason they showed up. My job is just to stay close enough, long enough, to see it.

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If you run a gym, studio, or wellness business and want to tell your members’ stories the same way — through real sessions, not staged portraits — get in touch to talk about a patron photography project for your own marketing.

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In October 2006, Atlanta public relations professional Elizabeth Fairleigh committed to her health, joining Wellbridge to bring the same discipline to her own well-being that she brought to her clients’ success.

At the time, Fairleigh was building a reputation as one of Atlanta’s go-to independent PR professionals. She had spent years as PR director for two Atlanta-based tech companies — one of which completed a successful IPO during her tenure — before striking out on her own to found thE Connection, Inc., a firm specializing in thought leadership and public relations for entrepreneurial, forward-thinking companies. It’s a career that runs on juggling multiple clients, tight deadlines and constant visibility — the kind of demanding pace that makes personal health easy to put last on the list.

For a PR professional whose days were built around client calls, media pitches and staying “on” for everyone else, time at Wellbridge became a space to invest in herself.

That same commitment to consistency and follow-through — the traits that built her PR career — showed up on the gym floor too, and carried back into her work representing clients across the country.

Want a story like this for your gym? Contact Stanley Leary

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Long before he was known as one of Atlanta’s pioneering farm-to-table chefs, Michael Tuohy learned an early lesson in his San Francisco kitchens: what you put into your body matters as much as what you put on the plate. Decades later, as the chef/owner of Atlanta’s celebrated Woodfire Grill, Tuohy applied that same philosophy to himself — signing up at Wellbridge Athletic Health Spa to get healthy, stay healthy, and keep pace with the demands of a chef’s life.

Tuohy arrived in Atlanta in 1986 and spent more than two decades building a reputation as one of the city’s most influential chefs, known for bringing a Northern California, farm-to-table sensibility to Southern dining. His restaurant Woodfire Grill, which he owned from 2001 to 2008, drew national acclaim for its locally sourced menus and open-kitchen energy — the kind of demanding, high-heat, high-stakes environment that makes a chef’s own health and stamina non-negotiable.

For a chef, the job doesn’t stop when service ends — long hours on his feet, early mornings at the market, late nights closing the kitchen.

That same discipline — sourcing the right ingredients, building something sustainable, showing up consistently — is what carried over from the kitchen to the gym floor, and back again.

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Back in 2011, Georgia Tech psychology professor Dan Fisk walked into a Wellbridge location in Atlanta looking for one thing: to get healthier. What he found was a partnership with trainer Keith Walker that changed how he showed up not just at the gym, but in the rest of his life.

Fisk’s day job is studying human performance — as a professor specializing in engineering psychology and cognitive aging at Georgia Tech, he has spent decades researching how people function at their best as they age. Working with Walker gave him a chance to put that research into practice in his own life.

Under Walker’s guidance, Fisk built a consistent training routine — the kind of structure and accountability that turned a gym membership into a genuine lifestyle change. [Add specific details here: how often he trained, what the sessions focused on, any milestones he hit.]

The results went beyond the weight room. Fisk found that the discipline and energy he built at Wellbridge carried into his work at Georgia Tech — sharper focus, more stamina, and the kind of resilience that comes from showing up for yourself consistently. [Add a specific example: better energy for teaching/research, stress management, sleep, etc.]

That’s the kind of transformation Walker says he loves to see in his clients — not just a change in the mirror, but a change in how they move through their day-to-day lives.

Want a story like this for your gym? Contact Stanley Leary to schedule a client photo shoot and testimonial feature.