Sydney Dunitz is the owner of La Femme Strong, a gym that aims to take the intimidation factor out of fitness.Jennifer Roberts
Opening a gym wasn’t part of Sydney Dunitz’s master plan.
Now the owner of La Femme Strong – a gym in Toronto’s Riverside neighbourhood – Dunitz originally came to the “big city” from Napanee, Ont., to study theatre. After she graduated, she spent the next few years auditioning and working in musicals.
“I learned very quickly that in order to be successful in that field, you have to do film and TV,” she says. “I was always typecast as the leads, but I was never thin enough … which brought me into the gym all the time non-stop.”
Dunitz says she “hated the gym at first” because she didn’t know what else to do other than run on the treadmill, but slowly, through various classes, she found strength training and “realized that it didn’t have to be so horrible.” Eventually, she got her personal training certification hoping it was something she could do on the side while acting.
But when Dunitz began looking for gyms to work at, she couldn’t find any spaces that focused on taking the intimidation factor away from fitness. “So, I started looking around being like: ‘How much is rent in Toronto? What would it take to do this?’ And it kind of snowballed from there.”
Her leap of faith paid off: La Femme Strong just celebrated its 10-year anniversary.
When she reflects on her reason why she opened a space for women and non-binary folks, she says at the time “it just felt better.”
Ten years in, she can better articulate its importance: “I think [for] women and non-binary and gender-diverse people, our society just doesn’t bring us up with the same amount of confidence and ability to go into an unknown situation and ask the questions and feel confident.”
Dunitz certainly has had her challenges operating a small business over the past decade: she has operated in four locations, for example. Plus, there was that pesky global pandemic.
There have been rewards, too.
She’s proud of the third place La Femme Strong has become for many, and that people who were originally scared of the gym and strength training aren’t any more.
As for the future? “I don’t want a big business,” she says. “I like the idea when people e-mail, they know it’s me on the other end. I don’t want it to grow so grand that I can’t keep up with it.”
She adds: “I’m not out here trying to be a millionaire. I really believe in affordable fitness.”
And although Dunitz spends her days now operating a gym versus singing and acting, she hasn’t lost her love for music and performing. Her playlist for classes includes tracks from The Rocky Horror Picture Show and RuPaul’s Drag Race alum.
“I get to perform every day,” she says. “I get to play my own music. I get to sing along to it. It’s probably really annoying for everybody, but this is where I get my joy.”
