Island Fitness looks to enhance the ‘member experience.’

Island Fitness is ready for its workout.

The Madison Avenue health club has completed the first phase of an expansion that started back in May, adding 2,270 square feet of new space.

“We wanted to do some uplifting stuff with the gray months coming on,” owner and managing director Michael Rosenthal said.

Included in the remodel are two new studios upstairs in the back of the building. One room is for personal training and small-group training, while the other room is dedicated solely to cycling, with 24 new machines brought in.

Both rooms will also have their own heating, ventilation and air conditioning system to keep things cool.

Island Fitness also remodeled and doubled the size of their locker rooms.

They’ve redesigned the area with some brighter colors and added 100 more lockers, deeper shower stalls with new tiling and radiating heated floors.

The gym added a steam room and a massage room inside the locker room area. The makeover extended all the way up to the roof. On many days there were blue skies and sunshine while the remodeling was going on.

The remodel followed Michael and Alexa Rosenthal’s purchase of the building from long-time property owner Dick Bowen, a former Bainbridge businessman and councilman.

“We’re a growing business,” Rosenthal said. “We just wanted to better meet members’ needs.”

He also wanted to not only get more classes involving cycling, hence the dedicated room to it – “It’s huge on this island,” he said – but more classes in general.

The club will now offer more than 55 group fitness classes every week and a dozen paid programs and workshops.

In November, they’ll begin to offer metabolic testing to both members and non-members as well.

“Mostly after four years of business and hearing a lot of members’ suggestions and knowing where the business is going, we felt that this is what we needed to do,” Rosenthal said. “What this club really focuses on is personal training, so that was the need for the training rooms.”

Although the Bainbridge Athletic Club recently took over the Gym at the Pavilion’s space with a new “Express” service, Rosenthal said his own business is not too worried about the competition’s recent move.

“We’ve always carved our own niche,” he said. “What the competition does for us is it causes us to look inward and to decide what we can do best. We’re all about service, we’re about personal training, we’re about the ‘member experience,’ and this just enhances that.”

With phase one complete, Island Fitness will take another four to five weeks to complete phase two, which include plans to move their childcare area upstairs to the former locker room and increase the size of the functional training room and the cardio area.

The progress is exciting, but bittersweet for the club, as they lost their original architect to a tragic accident.

Kathy Bergum and her husband Ken Hartz were killed in a car crash in Eastern Washington in February 2005. Bergum’s last project was the remodel of Island Fitness.

“It’s a pretty emotional time for us, because she never got to see it finished,” Rosenthal said.