Reagan Kang Opens Up

Sarah Shortt:

Hi Reagan! You were one of the Shadow Presenters on the BODYCOMBAT UNITED Release. What was it like to film this from your home in Malaysia?

Reagan Kang:

It was really hard. During that time [of filming] I wasn’t able to leave the front door of my house because of COVID-19 quarantine. So I couldn’t go and film outside in some beautiful location. I ended up buying a partition to cover up my shoe rack, and I didn’t have very much space to move in! So everyone else on the video has these great views, and there’s me with my partition and my shoe rack, haha!

And how did you get into the fitness industry?

My background was in competitive swimming. I trained from the age of seven up until 15, and then I stopped completely. I had to make a choice between going to sport school or a normal school and I chose the latter. I was training eight hours a day: 5-9am in the morning, and then from 4-8pm. And I just got sick of it. It was constant training, staring into a black line.

I went from swimming every day to really doing no exercise. I was studying and I started to gain weight, so my Dad suggested I should join the gym. When I first joined I was just lifting weights, then one day I saw all these people going crazy in a studio – it was RPM. I tried it and just got hooked. The cardiovascular intensity was the closest I could get to the training that I used to have from swimming. I started doing one class a day, then two classes a day, and then one of the Instructors said, hey, you want to try being an Instructor? I was 19.

You own two fitness studios in Malaysia. How has it been coping with the challenges of the pandemic?

It’s been really tough. Revenue has dropped tremendously and as a business, we had to pivot really quickly by offering classes online. As a new business owner, this has been a very steep learning curve.

You know, the business goes on and you still have to pay rent. There were a lot of numbers, man. You have to consider if you want to take a loan, or what the timeline might be until the business closes down. I’m constantly asking myself, is this the best decision to make? What can we do to stay relevant, despite the whole situation?