Club Sweat brings the full Pilates and sculpt setup to Tampa, on your terms

Built from scratch, brought home

Mercedes Petro and her sister Lola McKee grew up in Key West, where being outside was not a lifestyle choice but a condition of the place. The island has a way of making movement feel incidental, part of daily life rather than a block on the calendar. Both sisters carried that sensibility into adulthood, and Mercedes eventually made a career of it, spending five years as a fitness instructor. Of all those sessions, it was the private ones she kept returning to in her mind, the hours that bent entirely around one client's body, goals, and whatever they were carrying that day. She started asking what a business would look like if it were built only on that premise, if every session was private by design.

The answer took shape gradually. Mercedes moved to Tampa and met Liana Valencia, and the connection was immediate. Before they had settled on a specific concept, they were already certain they would build something together. Then Lola relocated to San Diego, Mercedes followed, and the sisters built Club Sweat there from the ground up. A new city, no client base, and no structure to inherit. What they had instead was full freedom to build the concept exactly as they had pictured it: a certified instructor arrives at your door with the full Pilates and sculpt setup and every piece of equipment, then shapes all fifty minutes around the person in front of her.

The Tampa chapter

Six months of going all in on the San Diego model proved the concept worked, and Mercedes called Liana Valencia with a question: did she want to bring it to Tampa? Valencia left her corporate job to do exactly that, and the model arrived intact. Private sessions, booked by appointment, come to your home, backyard, or office. Every fifty-minute session is custom programmed to the client's specific body and goals, not to a general template or a recycled class plan. That degree of customization is what the concept was built around from the start, and it shapes every session from the first minute.

The private client base skews toward moms and busy professionals in Tampa and St. Pete who have run the numbers on the early morning commute and decided it no longer adds up. For clients who want consistent, personalized work without rearranging the rest of their schedule, Club Sweat offers monthly memberships that fit that kind of regular, ongoing relationship between client and certified instructor.

Group sessions and what's ahead

On the group side, Club Sweat works with bachelorette parties, milestone birthdays, and friend groups who want something active and social. The format scales from a single one-on-one to a group of ten, and the certified instructor adapts the programming to whoever is in the room. Club Sweat also brings sessions into offices for local companies building out their employee wellness benefits, giving corporate groups access to the same custom, instructor-led format as private clients. The common thread across all of it is movement that fits around life rather than the other way around.

Club Sweat's first event takes place at Fallen Oak Farms on September 26th. For a business built on showing up at clients' doors, stepping into a shared event space marks a natural next moment, and a sign that the community around the concept has room to gather. Sessions are available by appointment.