About
One room, one continuum.
Rehab at one end, a loaded barbell at the other, and no line drawn between them.
Nadia Farrell
Founder and head coach
Nadia spent six years as a strength and conditioning coach in university rowing, which is a sport that will happily break a shoulder and then ask the shoulder to do another twenty kilometres. Hers went in 2018.
The rehab was the useful part. Working through it with a physiotherapist, then rebuilding with reformer work before she could load a barbell again, changed how she thought about training entirely — not as two separate worlds, one clinical and one athletic, but as one long continuum with a person somewhere along it.
Ironbark opened in 2021 in a former joinery workshop on Sydenham Road, with eight reformers at one end and a lifting floor at the other. The name is the tree: dense, slow-growing, and almost impossible to burn. That is roughly the point.
Qualifications
- ASCA Level 2 Strength and Conditioning Coach
- Polestar Pilates — Comprehensive Certification (Reformer, Mat, Studio)
- Cert IV in Fitness, AUSactive registered
- Six years strength and conditioning, Sydney university rowing program
- Pre and post-natal training certification (2022)
The room itself
A joinery workshop for forty years before it was a studio, which is why the ceiling is high enough to press overhead and the floor is solid enough to drop a deadlift on. The reformers sit along the north wall under the original sawtooth windows.
Nothing about the space is designed to hide in. There are no mirrors on the lifting floor, no rows deep enough to disappear into, and no music loud enough to stop a coach talking to you. That is deliberate, and it is the reason the class caps are what they are.
- 2021
- Opened
- 8
- Reformers
- 10 people
- Largest class
- 3
- Coaches
Who is on the floor
Matthew Mackie
Strength coach
Matthew came out of powerlifting and coaches the barbell classes. He is unhurried about technique and will spend a whole block on your setup if the setup is the problem. ASCA Level 1, Cert IV in Fitness.
Timothy Walters
Reformer and mobility coach
Timothy teaches most of the daytime reformer timetable and wrote the Mobility & Restore program. Comprehensive reformer certification, with additional training in working alongside physiotherapy referrals.