Built from the Ground Up: The Gyms and Gear Actually Designed for Bigger Bodies

Christina Malone and Will Lay didn't retrofit a gym for bigger bodies — they built one. All Bodies Strong, the powerlifting and boxing gym they opened in Northeast Portland in fall 2023, gives each lifter 200 to 300 square feet of floor space, four to six times the industry standard, on equipment rated to hold up to 500 pounds. Neither number is decorative. Both are what happens when the people designing a gym are the people who could never find one that actually fit them.

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Malone and Lay are both competitive powerlifters, and both have said they built All Bodies Strong after years in conventional gyms with seats too narrow, benches they didn't trust under their own weight, and staff who assumed weight loss was the only reason a fat person would walk in. Their gym runs personal training, powerlifting, boxing, and yoga classes, built around strength and movement rather than shrinking. The equipment itself reflects that same founding logic: expanded seat widths, highly adjustable components, open-style trap bars, and reinforced plyometric boxes, chosen specifically to hold bodies the standard gym-equipment catalog doesn't spec for. The gym also runs an Access Granted Community Fund, offering sliding-scale membership for people who can't afford full price.

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The same shift is underway in activewear, where Superfit Hero has spent a decade building the opposite of a straight-size line stretched wider. Micki Krimmel founded the company on Kickstarter in 2015, after several years skating for the Angel City Derby roller derby team, training and competing alongside women of every size and build. In November 2020, the brand permanently phased out its extra-small, small, and medium sizes and extended its range through 7X, following what the company described as an extensive round of interviews with plus-size customers about what wasn't working. "I created Superfit Hero to exist as an alternative, a fitness brand that celebrates bodies as they are, not as they 'should' be," Krimmel said at the time. Superfit Hero now sells sizes 12 through 42 exclusively, and says every piece is fit-tested on models across that full range before it goes into production, rather than graded up from a smaller base pattern.

Superfit Hero is also a sponsor of Sarah Robles, the American weightlifter who has medaled twice for Team USA — bronze at the 2016 Rio Olympics and bronze again at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, plus a world championship title in 2017 — making her the first U.S. woman to win two Olympic weightlifting medals. Before London 2012, when Robles was the country's top-ranked weightlifter and still had no sponsor at all, she told BuzzFeed exactly why: "You can get that sponsorship if you're a super-built guy or a girl who looks good in a bikini. But not if you're a girl who's built like a guy." Robles competes in the sport's heaviest weight class, built the way that class requires. Sponsoring an athlete built exactly the way activewear marketing has spent decades excluding is itself a design statement, not just a marketing one.

Neither story is unique in isolation — size-inclusive personal trainers, boxing gyms, and independent plus-size activewear labels have existed in pockets for years, and this site has already reported on a related structural shift in competitive sport, USA Triathlon's decision to give its Clydesdale and Athena divisions their own start wave. What's notable here is the design language both All Bodies Strong and Superfit Hero are working from: bigger bodies as the baseline spec, not an accommodation bolted onto a smaller original. All Bodies Strong didn't add one wider bench to its lineup; every bench in the building was specced that way from day one. Superfit Hero didn't add a plus range alongside a straight-size collection; it builds nothing else now.