Kayla Itsines

Kayla Itsines was born on May 21, 1991 in Adelaide, Australia, to teacher parents Anna and Jim Itsines. She is of Greek descendent. Her younger sister Leah is also a personal trainer and food stylist. As a child, Kayla loved playing basketball and other sports, but she was underweight and sickly.

When she was 15, doctors told her that she might suffer from fertility problems in future as she had endometriosis. She read on the internet that if she became fit and healthy, she would be able to preserve her fertility. Hence, she started working out at the gym. After getting positive results, she decided to become a personal trainer. At the age of 18, she graduated from the Australian Institute of Fitness.

Kayla met aspiring personal trainer Tobi Pearce at a gym. At that time, he was also studying law and commerce. He owned a bootcamp business and had already started training clients. Kayla and Tobi then began dating. They are engaged as of now.

Kayla Itsines began her career working at a women's gym in Adelaide. Soon she realized that her clients were not achieving their fitness goals by performing exercises on the machines and equipment. As an experiment, she gave them an aerobic exercise class one day and found that her clients loved it.

When she found that her clients were more interested in working out at home but had space constraint for machines and equipment, she designed exercises with minimal equipment which required less space. She personally trained her sister's friends who wanted to play netball at their high school. She also advised them on nutrition.

In March 2013, she, along with her boyfriend Tobi Pearce, founded the Bikini Body Training company with Kayla serving as the director and Tobi as the CEO. Acting on Tobi’s suggestion, she published the first two ‘Bikini Body Guides’ in January 2014. By October 2014, more than a million guides had been downloaded. In 2015, she did a world tour called ‘Kayla Itsines Bootcamp World Tour,’ and gave free group fitness classes. In the same year, she did an advertisement for the Apple Watch, which demonstrated the heart-rate monitoring feature of the watch.

In November 2015, she launched the Sweat with Kayla app. Initially, she was criticized by the customers who felt that the app was costly. They felt that since they had already paid for the Bikini Body Guides e-books, they should be getting the app at a discounted price. In response, Kayla reduced the price of the app to $1 for the first month, only for the customers who had already bought the e-books.

In 2016, her first print book, ‘The Bikini Body 28-Day Eating and Lifestyle Guide’ was published, and in 2017, her second print book, ‘The Bikini Body Motivation & Habits Guide’ was released.