GIRL POWER with Molly McGraw: LOVE

It took me nearly forty years to get it— to understand how important self love is to being a woman. Fitness is certainly part of self love and in that regard, I now devote a whole month to self care on the blog every year. And this next studio was entirely built around the idea of self love. Charles Knowles, the founder of the popular training gym in Conshohocken, Vision + Fitness, just celebrated the one year anniversary of his second studio, LOVE. LOVE is different. LOVE is a uniquely female inspired gym. And one that Charles passed the torch to his long time client, friend and yoga instructor, Molly McGraw, to run and be the face of this special place.

To understand why Charles opened a studio dedicated to women, you have to know his story. Charles opened his first gym, Vision, as a tribute to his late father who passed away from heart failure when Charles was just a boy. The impact of this event strongly shaped Charles. So with Vision, Charles wanted to create a place for people to be active and healthy so that no child would go through the loss that he experienced because a parent didn’t have access to fitness. When the building that shares a parking lot with Vision became available, Charles knew it was time to create a sister gym, this time honoring his mother and all women in the Vision community.

Charles outside of LOVE in 2022.

Charles’ mother, Melody Knowles, is thriving today. She came to celebrate the year anniversary of LOVE with her son in February. But Charles recalls a very different woman who raised him. A woman who was paralyzed by depression due to the abrupt loss of her husband when she was a young mother. At the time, Charles thought of his mother as someone uninvolved, detached and not present in his upbringing. What Charles didn’t realize was how severely depressed his mother was. So much so that it nearly killed her. And it cost her the relationship with her son after she tried to kill herself. Charles left his mother’s home before he was eighteen and wasn’t in contact with her through his early adult life. But through yoga, Charles realized that his mom wasn’t a bad mother. She had so much love for her husband, but when she lost him, she lost the love for herself. And through this revelation, Charles knew exactly what his second gym needed to be.

Charles and Melody Knowles celebrated the one year anniversary of LOVE in February.

LOVE is a place for self love. It’s a place for restoration and recovery. It’s a place for recentering oneself. It’s a place for community. And it’s a place for female empowerment through movement. And communicating this theme of self love throughout the four walls of LOVE is attributed to one woman, Molly McGraw. When I said earlier that Charles passed the “LOVE torch” to Molly, he tasked her with the job of creating every aspect of this gym. And Molly ran with it. She made LOVE the successful studio it is today.

All of the female instructors who teach at LOVE share a strong bond.

Molly always knew that she wanted LOVE to be a hot studio, with infrared heat. Aside from the added fitness benefits of moving in infrared heat, such as reducing inflammation and making the body more pliable, there are all sorts of other wellness benefits of infrared heat — skin improvement, detoxification and improving mental health. So the simple addition of the infrared heat while you exercise right there alone adds many levels of self care. And self care is self love.

Molly immediately hired fellow yoga instructors, Sherri Ponticello and Nicole Priest, as the original instructors at LOVE. And from there she brought in other instructors organically, as they presented themselves. LOVE started as a yoga studio but quickly grew to include other formats such as Pilates, hot sculpt, kettlebells and all types of yoga and meditation classes. Today there are 8 female instructors and 4 men who teach at LOVE. All classes are under the heat. When I recently took a Hot Pilates class at LOVE (which was excellent), I checked the thermostats after class and one read 107°F and the other read 109°F. So it’s hot. There is one “warm” class on the schedule where the temperature hovers at around 80°F. So you have to embrace the sweat during any of the 30 weekly classes at LOVE.

It’s not everyday that you hear a gym owner opening a separate gym to honor its female members. LOVE was created for the women of Vision, but it’s not a female-only studio. The guys are welcome to join in, with one rule- they cannot take their shirts off no matter how high the temperatures get in this studio. Charles and Molly did not want LOVE (or Vision because the same rule applies) to be “that” kind of place. There is one other studio rule that I found out when I signed up for two classes in a row at LOVE (you know me, I like to stack my workouts). Because of the intense heat, members are not allowed to take more than one class a day at LOVE. And if you take a class at LOVE, you are not allowed to use the infrared sauna located inside Vision. While the infrared heat is beneficial, too much of it wouldn’t be self love!

Many gym members have memberships to both Vision and LOVE and use the sister studios to achieve a well rounded fitness routine. There is even a class, Vision of Love, that starts at Vision and moves to LOVE for the second half.

I’ve only known Charles very briefly but even after my first conversation with him, I immediately noticed how spiritual he is. That spirituality drives many of his business decisions. And such has proven to serve him well, as his gyms are killing it today. The importance of numerology is evident in the names of his gyms and some of the classes. Charles is motivated by the fact that everything happens for a reason. And get this— Vision suffered a devastating flood Labor Day Weekend, 2021, only a short time after being able to reopen after Covid. And a year to the day after that catastrophic event, Charles signed the lease for the space that is LOVE. Charles knows that these occurrences are not accidental. And neither were the events that shaped his life to bring him to own his two gyms, Vision and LOVE, today. I’ve heard Charles say, on more than one occasion, that the journey of life is all about the vision, but you can’t have the vision without the love.

Meet Molly McGraw, Studio Lead and Head Instructor at LOVE.

Get to know the woman behind LOVE, Molly McGraw:

Roots: Garnett Valley, Delaware County. Molly lives in Conshohocken now.

Education: University of Pittsburg for Nursing; Jefferson for her Nurse Practitioner degree. (Charles adoringly boasts that Molly never got a grade lower than an A).

Fitness Certifications: 200 Hour Yoga Teacher Training

Go-to workout: Strength training with Charles and the conditioning classes at Vision.

Family: Husband, Matt and dog, Maxine.

Music: Molly loves all kinds of music and her yoga classes are musically driven.

Food: sushi

Full-time job: Clinical Research Nurse Practitioner in Endocrinology at CHOP; specifically, helping to develop therapies for Glycogen Storage Disease in children.

Proudest part of running LOVE: The community of womanhood and friendship among the instructors and members.

This is the Hot Pilates class that I took at LOVE a few weeks ago. To see more, check out my Instragram.

I always say for a gym to really set themselves apart, they need to have a strong community and a meaningful impact on their members’ lives. And LOVE is one of the best examples of this that I have seen.

So give yourself some love, and go try a class or two at LOVE. New members can try both LOVE and Vision for 14 days for just $14. And I LOVE this awesome deal.