Plant Powered Pump

Adrian Hatwell gets in some (purely conversational) reps with Jaxon Burton and Ella Webster, the vegan trainers behind Auckland’s newest weights-based gym, Lift Club.

You can’t build strength on a vegan diet. Any competent fitness professional will tell you this isn’t true, but it’s a misbelief that persists stubbornly, even as veganism becomes increasingly mainstream. A pair of weightlifting vegans in Auckland aim to bust this myth once and for all — and they’re bringing the community with them.

Tucked away in the city fringe suburb of Eden Terrace, Lift Club is a weights-focussed gym run by Jaxon Burton and Ella Webster, both experts on building strength with a plant-based diet. The gym’s motto, painted onto sleek black walls, greets visitors in bold white characters at the entrance: “Elite training for normal people”. And while Lift Club has been running for less than a year, when we drop in on a Friday afternoon Build class it’s clear that many of those normal people feel very at home in the space already.

“Has everybody added to our Friday Jams playlist?” Ella calls to the class as they begin to assemble. Today’s theme is “sweet 16s”, and soon the room is sweating happily to an eclectic mix — Scribe, Eurythmics, Fall Out Boy — as Jaxon and Ella, occasionally flanked by Trooper the dog, weave through the room demonstrating exercises and issuing encouragement.

Jaxon sees Lift Club as filling a specific gap in the workout market: falling somewhere between generic group fitness training (“where it’s just about going to exercise and exhaust yourself”) and the likes of crossfit at the more intense, complex, and intimidating end of the spectrum.

“Lift Club fills that gap by providing really structured, smart programmes of resistance training in a group environment,” he explains. “We’re providing what we think is the optimal way to train, but to a group so we can develop really strong connections, community, and relationships.”

Warm Up

It’s a focus that is working well for the certified nutritionist and trainer, whose interest in physical fitness predates his veganism. Upon leaving school Jaxon spent five years in the New Zealand Army, which taught him discipline and fostered a passion for training and nutrition. After finishing up with the military he started working for himself as a personal trainer, creating a small studio in the garage of his flat where he trained clients.

Over the years he moved to progressively bigger spaces, before deciding it was time to shake things with the concept for Lift Club.

“I got to a point where I wanted to transition to the next thing, launching a group fitness-style gym that allowed us to still do resistance training and strength training with barbells — to elevate the group fitness space.”

Ella, on the other hand, started her fitness journey from a very different place.  

“I hated exercising growing up,” she says with a laugh. “I hated PE class, I would always skip it.”

It wasn’t until she was staring down her late 20s that Ella decided it might be time to “look after [herself] a bit”. She ended up joining Jaxon’s previous gym where she fell in love with weight-lifting and her relationship to exercise was transformed. 

“I would go to sleep at night very excited to wake up at 5:30 in the morning,” she recalls. “It’s really life-changing when you find something you love.”

Jaxon recognised Ella’s passion and when the time came to pull the pin on Lift Club he knew she had to come along for the ride.

“She was already obsessed with training, she was one of those members that wasn’t just there to exercise; she was interested, she had a love for it.”

Together they launched Lift Club in April 2023, originally in a Mount Eden location which had to be abandoned after six months thanks to leasing circumstances. Fortunately they were able to find a prime spot at the end of Eden Terrace’s Minnie Street, where they’re now ready to settle in longterm and cultivate their reputation.      

“It’s hard to get people to trust a brand,” says Jaxon. “Now that we’re here in our new space we can establish ourselves, establish our community, and gain some traction.”

Way of the Leaf

Ella’s journey towards veganism kicked off in tandem with her passion for fitness, but it took some time to fully take the leap. Looking into healthier ways to eat, she got the idea that ditching animal products was where she eventually wanted to get to, but committing fully didn’t come easy — especially with her husband, Matt, being very enthusiastic about his meat and eggs. Then she came across the 2017 documentary What the Health, examining the links between animal product consumption and disease. 

“I watched it one day and thought, ‘oh my god, I need to make this happen’,” Ella recalls. “I made Matt watch it the next day and he finished, turned to me, and said, ‘we’re never going to eat that shit again’.

“Cool! I don’t know what we’re gonna eat for dinner, but we’ll figure it out.”

They went cold turkey from that day in 2018. Ella is aware of the subsequent criticism What the Health has received for certain dubious claims but she’s not bothered; the health-promoting aspects are peripheral to what drives her veganism these days. 

“If anyone was to ask me now what’s the motivation for being vegan and staying vegan; it’s the animals. Once you’ve stopped looking at a slab of meat and thinking, ‘that’s something I would eat’… I don’t know how I could ever not be vegan anymore. I’d be so grossed out.”

Jaxon’s upbringing will be familiar to many in Aotearoa. Raised in the small town of Feilding, he developed a love of animals that sat alongside a love of hunting. 

“We grew up with animals in the home and there was huge empathy for their experiences,” he remembers. “I kind of considered that if I could hunt it and do it all myself, then it’s fine.”

It was during his fitness and nutritional research that Jaxon began to look closer at the way people eat. Specifically, he started seeing US trainers promoting pescatarian eating, which excludes red meat or poultry but includes fish and shellfish. He gave it a try for three months and then progressed to vegetarianism, but had no intention of becoming vegan — he recalls thinking “everything is happy days” in dairy production because no one is getting killed.

“It took me watching some footage of a mother cow running after its calf being taken away, seeing this cow sprinting because it was being separated,” he says. “That was the result of dairy. I just said, ‘fuck that, I’m not supporting that.’”

Motivated by the suffering he had witnessed, Jaxon took up a 30-day vegan challenge in 2018 (coincidentally the same year Ella and her husband went vegan) and has remained free from animal products ever since.  

Training on Plants

When it comes to the difference being vegan makes to their strength training, both trainers have the same answer — not much.

Because he had a solid understanding of nutrition and was already tracking his food, Jaxon knew exactly how many calories and macronutrients he was taking in each day before going vegan. He simply made sure to maintain that as he transitioned.

“I was already eating a pretty well-balanced diet, it just had more animal products. All I did was swap those out. I still ate the same amount, I still got the same amount of protein, so what difference are you really going to see?”

For Ella, getting properly into learning how to lift coincided with going vegan. The biggest struggle she faced was finding a protein powder she actually liked (she’s now a big fan of the Macro Mike brand). 

“There’s a stigma that vegans can’t build strength. I love that I hadn’t really lifted much at all before I went vegan, so I can legitimately say all of my strength has been on a vegan diet.”

While veganism might not have made a difference to their training, the gym has helped them develop a growing community of vegan friends. While Lift Club isn’t a ‘vegan gym’, having two strong, enthusiastic, attractive trainers effortlessly demonstrating the lifestyle benefits certainly doesn’t hurt the movement.

“Vegans can feel quite isolated, especially if their families are not really onboard and they don’t have friends who are vegan,” says Ella. “The gym is somewhere you can start to make new friends — they might not be all vegan, but at least you might find a new community that can open up new opportunities for just doing life with other people.”

On this hot summer afternoon a cool breeze rolls through the gym’s open roller door as the class wraps up, members slick with exertion and beaming with camaraderie. Lift Club is clearly helping to build strength not just physically, but through the bonds of community as well.  

For more details about Lift Club, timetables, and pricing, visit www.liftclub.co.nz.

Aotearoa Vegan and Plant Based Living Magazine
This article was sourced from the Autumn  2024 edition of The Vegan Society magazine.
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The articles we present in our magazine and blog have been written by many authors and are are not necessarily the views and policies of the Vegan Society.