Meet VIBE, Denver’s specialized gym and wellness center for women and genderqueer people. Located in Northwest Denver in the Sunnyside neighborhood, Vibe is breaking new ground as a queer, feminist gym.
VIBE Gym and Wellness Center’s main mission is to provide a welcoming and inclusive environment, specifically catering to women and genderqueer people. As well as being a regular gym space with an open gym, fitness classes, and personal trainers, VIBE also emphasizes the wellness aspect of fitness, with access to physical therapists, a Reiki healer, a sound bowl healer, a pelvic floor therapist, an esthetician, and more.
Meghan Nelson, owner and founder of VIBE, created the gym to fill a void in the market and help people feel safe in their fitness spaces. In her experience in the fitness world, many people who attended bigger chain gyms encountered a lot of negative experiences and didn’t feel like they were included due to “their size or their skill level, or the way that they looked or the way that they dressed.”
When deciding to create VIBE, Nelson did a market research survey of 10,000 people in Denver and found that around 56% of women and genderqueer people said that they would go to the gym more if they felt it was a safe space, and about 45% of women and genderqueer people who already go to the gym said that they would switch gyms if they found one where they felt safer. Nelson’s goal with VIBE was to address people feeling unsafe in gyms and fitness spaces, and she does so by creating a space where people feel safe and are represented by the staff and other gym members.
Nelson is constantly working to make the space more inclusive and explains that it requires an active effort to create a truly inclusive space. She says, “You can’t just slap a rainbow sticker on something and say that it’s good enough; you really have to be intentional about it for the long haul.” For VIBE to be an inclusive space, Nelson says that personally, she meets this goal by “constantly trying to educate myself on best practices, getting audits, talking to people in the community about how to best serve women and genderqueer people,” and more.
To encourage inclusivity for VIBE as an organization, Nelson emphasizes working with the community, such as working with different local organizations, hosting events to offer different educational services, having a diverse board of people working at the gym, making activities accessible to people of all physical abilities, using large print to be accessible to disabilities, having a space for neurodivergent people who get overstimulated, providing childcare for mothers, and so much more.
Nelson herself is an example of how anyone can get into fitness and how it can improve somebody’s life. Unlike many other fitness professionals, she doesn’t have a positive childhood history with fitness. She was unable to participate in sports as a child due to the monetary barrier to school sports, as well as the bullying she faced from her classmates and feeling uncomfortable in a locker room space. She has also suffered from disordered eating for a long time, which has made exercising difficult.
Nelson describes her struggle with disordered eating and explains that “I was first diagnosed with an eating disorder in third grade … and I never had a good relationship with food or exercise” after growing up in what she described as a “constant state of fight or flight.” This unhealthy relationship she had with food and exercise continued into her twenties when she owned and ran her own marketing firm and ended up working herself into the ground. After she got sick from this and gained weight, she hired a personal trainer to help her lose that weight. The personal trainer was able to improve Nelson’s relationship with food, exercise, and her body.
“She really helped me reframe my relationship with food and exercise and … I slowly but surely realized the value of that and how important it was for me to make the time and hold myself accountable to self-care,” Nelson reflects. Due to the growth she experienced with this personal trainer, she eventually sold her marketing business and transitioned to fitness and personal training, where she began to focus on the mental and emotional parts of coaching.
Her favorite part of being a fitness coach are the emotional and mental aspects of coaching. She says, “That stuff always got me way more excited, like showing people what they were capable of and bringing people together and making them feel empowered and capable.”
Nelson reflects on a day at VIBE Gym where she coached her clients through maxing out in a way that focused less on gaining muscle and more on empowering themselves highlights this.
“They’re learning a skill set within themselves, and then they’re helping other people learn it too. And they’re feeling capable, and they’re motivating other people. And we had people that did it and cried because they did their max, and they cried because they didn’t think that they’d ever be able to do something like that,” Nelson explained, her voice full of pride in her clients’ wellness and fitness journey.
This strength and empowerment are key to Nelson, who believes that they are especially important as “women and genderqueer people live in a world where we are not allowed to be strong. We are not allowed to take up space, to be loud, to take what we deserve, to honor ourselves, to work together.”
In this world, we must be strong, loud, and take up space to truly be empowered. Gaining physical strength and confidence is extremely beneficial to fighting against these silent expectations of the world.
If you are seeking a space to be healthy, confident, and supported in your fitness journey by a community, VIBE is the place for you. “There are people out there that are just waiting to see you and to experience your potential. And if you’re feeling alone, it can feel really scary, but it only takes one thing to change everything. And for a lot of people, all that has been coming to VIBE,” Nelson promises.
