As a founder and Chief Executive of Les Mills International

Les Mills International

Les Mills International is a New Zealand company that is the world's largest provider of choreographed exercise-to-music group fitness classes distributed to health clubs. The first Les Mills program was BodyStep, with BodyPump being the first program released internationally...

, Phillip Mills is a pioneer and “thought leader” in the global fitness industry and “revolutionized” the modern group-exercise experience. He is also an author and a public advocate for the environment and sustainability in business.

Sport

Phillip Mills was born into an athletic family in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1955. His father Les

Les Mills

Leslie Roy Mills CNZM, MBE, is a retired New Zealand athlete, who represented New Zealand at Olympic Games and Commonwealth Games over two decades. He competed in shot put, discus and weightlifting events...

, mother Colleen and sister Donna all represented New Zealand at Olympic

Olympic Games

The Olympic Games is a major international event featuring summer and winter sports, in which thousands of athletes participate in a variety of competitions. The Olympic Games have come to be regarded as the world’s foremost sports competition where more than 200 nations participate...

 and/or Commonwealth Games

Commonwealth Games

The Commonwealth Games is an international, multi-sport event involving athletes from the Commonwealth of Nations. The event was first held in 1930 and takes place every four years....

 in track and field

Track and field

Track and field is a sport comprising various competitive athletic contests based around the activities of running, jumping and throwing. The name of the sport derives from the venue for the competitions: a stadium which features an oval running track surrounding a grassy area...

.

Phillip Mills competed at the 1974 Commonwealth Games in the 110m hurdles, and four years later

1978 Commonwealth Games

The 1978 Commonwealth Games were held in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, from 3 to 12 August 1978, two years after the 1976 Summer Olympics were held in Montreal, Quebec...

 in both 110m and 400m hurdles. He attended the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA)

University of California, Los Angeles

The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...

 on a track and field scholarship, and graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1978.

Business

On returning to New Zealand in 1979, Phillip Mills took an increasing role in the Les Mills fitness-club business founded by Les and Colleen in 1968. The Les Mills business floated on the stock market in 1984 and was taken over by an investment company in 1987. After the share market crash that year, Mills bought the business back and continues to operate it.

There are now ten Les Mills clubs in New Zealand with over 50,000 members. The largest club, Les Mills Auckland is well known in the fitness industry for having some of the world’s biggest regular fitness classes.

Inspired by the birth of the aerobics industry he witnessed while studying at UCLA, Phillip Mills developed his own exercise-to-music system that grew to include the nine proprietary group fitness programs – BODYATTACK™, BODYBALANCE™/BODYFLOW®, BODYCOMBAT™, BODYJAM™, BODYPUMP™, BODYSTEP™, BODYVIVE™, RPM™ and SH’BAM™ – that are offered in more than 13,000 fitness clubs in 75 countries through Les Mills International.

In 2004, Mills was named Ernst & Young’s

Ernst & Young

Ernst & Young is one of the largest professional services networks in the world and one of the "Big Four" accountancy firms, along with Deloitte, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers ....

 New Zealand Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2009 he won Kea New Zealand’s World Class New Zealand Award for New Thinking.

The environment and sustainability

In 2007 Mills and his wife, Dr Jackie Mills MD, published Fighting Globesity – A Practical Guide To Personal Health and Global Sustainability (Random House).
Mills is also founder of the 100% Plan, a group of New Zealand business leaders lobbying for green business policy.
“We are a group of New Zealand business people with a strong commitment to, and concern for, our country’s future,” says the 100% Plan website. “We want to improve the New Zealand economy and our environment, and we believe that the two are not mutually exclusive.”

Works and Publications

Mills, Phillip. “Green chances far outweigh costs”. New Zealand Herald. January 2, 2010.

Mills, Phillip. “Imagining 2020: Green opportunities far outweigh the costs”. New Zealand Business council for Sustainable Development. March 11, 2010.

Mills, Phillip. “To do more than catch up, we need to clean up and green up”. Dominion Post

The Dominion Post (Wellington)

The Dominion Post is a metropolitan broadsheet newspaper published in Wellington, New Zealand, owned by the Australian Fairfax group, owners of The Age, Melbourne, and The Sydney Morning Herald.- Foundation :...

. February 25, 2010.

Mills, Phillip and Dr Jackie Mills MD. Fighting Globesity: A Practical Guide to Personal Health and Sustainability. Random House

Random House

Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...

. 2007.

External links

Building Intelligence Group, The. “Fit for the Future”. Think. November 15, 2009.
Celsias website. “Geoff Ross leads high-powered green ginger group”. April 28, 2010.

Chauvel, Charles. “Energy and Resources Policy in New Zealand: Where's the Plan?”. Speech to Power and Electricity World New Zealand 2010. February 16, 2010.

Club Industry. “Interview with Geoff Dyer, CEO of Lifestyle Family Fitness Inc., St. Petersburg, FL”. July 1, 2007.

Club Industry website. “Les Mills Examines ‘Future of Fitness’”. January 12, 2010.

Dale, Suzie, Sue Godinet, Natalie Kearse and Dr Adrian Field. The Future of Fitness – A White Paper. Les Mills International. 2010.
Easy Green Living website. “Les Mills Gyms Going Green”. October 9, 2009.

Ernst & Young New Zealand website. “Entrepreneurial Hall of Fame”. 2009.

Fallow, Brian. “The upside of climate change”. New Zealand Herald. Jan 21, 2010.

Felstead, Alan and Daniel Bishop, Alison Fuller, Nick Jewson, Tracey Lee & Lorna Unwin. “Moving to the Music: Learning Processes, Training and Productive Systems – The Case of Exercise to Music Instruction”. Learning as Work Research Paper, No. 6. Cardiff School of Social Sciences , Cardiff University

Cardiff University

Cardiff University is a leading research university located in the Cathays Park area of Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom. It received its Royal charter in 1883 and is a member of the Russell Group of Universities. The university is consistently recognised as providing high quality research-based...

. June 2006.

Ferguson, Mary. “Phillip reveals the secrets of his success”. Work Out. July 2009. Pp 1 and 24.

Goa, Karen. “Les Mills: The father of fitness”. Plenty. Autumn 2007.

Hunter, Tim. "Making a very healthy profit”. Sunday Star-Times. October 17, 2004.

McNeil, Ben. “NZ wants to lead the Clean Ind Revolution!”. The Clean Revolution website. March 10, 2010. Accessed 28 July 2010.

National Business Review, The. “The Rich List 2006”. July 21, 2006

Popke, Michael. “Wide World, of Sorts – Review of Fighting Globesity: A Practical Guide to Personal Health and Global Sustainability”. Athletic Business. November 2007.

Williams, Alexandra. “Green Up Your Fitness.” Idea Fitness Journal. July 2009.
ategory:Biography}