Waves of reinvention

Jill Ellis-Worthington spent decades in the media and ­communications business. Now she’s dipping her toes into entrepreneurship

Photos: Tammy Belaire, #1breathphotography

SHE’S ALWAYS LOVED the water. “I was about six months old, [and] my daddy threw me into a pool and I started to swim,” says Jill Ellis-Worthington, founder of fitness business WaterOn Aquatic Fitness. Later, after her first sojourn into the pool as an infant, came real experience: lifeguarding, swim team, scuba diving. “I just love water,” she says.

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Perhaps this love of aquatic activities wouldn’t be complete, though, without testing the waters of aqua fitness — a form of water calisthenics that sometimes catches a bit of teasing, simply because it has long been marketed primarily towards retirees. But for Ellis-Worthington, the classes were a great low-impact, easy-to-schedule workout. “I would go down for classes at the GoodLife Galleria,” she recalls. “They had half-hour aqua classes at lunchtime, and it was perfect: I could run down, do it, come back to work with a little wet hair, but no problem.”

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For almost her entire career before 2023, Ellis-Worthington worked in publishing — for a time she was an editor at The London Free Press, and since 2010 she has run her own communications consultancy, WriteOn Communications. Her aquatic fitness hobby was, for the most part, just that. But then she started to feel that itch, that compulsion that tells you — even after decades in publishing, even in your 60s — that maybe you should embrace something different and see where it takes you.

“I want to do this thing, and it’s ­different, and it’s offbeat, and it’s not like anything that you’ve ever done,” she recalls telling herself. “It’s not what people picture of you. Some people never do it.”

In 2024, she went ahead and did it. WaterOn specializes in smaller aquatic fitness classes and following a soft-launch phase in Texas (Ellis-Worthington is a Texas A&M grad and her family has a property there), she opened in London in the summer of 2024. Her classes are primarily held at the Berkshire Club pool, but she is increasingly exploring private classes held in places like condo pools, or even backyard pools. “I will come to you,” she says. “I will help you pull together the class and deliver you a series of six or eight weeks of classes — once, twice, three times a week in your pool.”

Ellis-Worthington is clear that what she does is qualitatively different than what you might be picturing: she’s not the instructor barking commands at a pool of 50 septuagenarians, bobbing up and down in floaties. No, she says, this is real work, aimed at getting real results in terms of functional fitness.

“A lot of traditional aqua fit, where they lead from the side, is very cardio based,” she says. In WaterOn classes, the large group setting is pared down to a maximum of nine participants, and the water-based environment is put to work to build fitness, particularly in populations where mobility might be a challenge.

Each class, Ellis-Worthington explains, features some cardio, but moves further into elements of gait training — strengthening the muscles responsible for balance and mobility — and then into strength sets that help equip the body for the physical demands of everyday life. The aquatic setting, she explains, reduces the load on bones and joints, allowing for more complete movement and, ultimately, a better (and safer) workout.

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“The beauty of the water is that it’s paying our gravity bill for us,” she says. “People who have joint issues in their knees, hips or ankles — they are always saying they can jump and play [in a way] they couldn’t do on land.”

So enjoyable is the workout, says Ellis-Worthington, that she has a 100 per cent retention rate of people taking classes and coming back for another. Now approaching its third summer, she says she now has around 50 regular members, a number that is consistently growing.

Speaking with her, it’s obvious ­Ellis-Worthington is nothing if not a go-getter; if it weren’t this she was throwing her time and energy into, it would almost certainly be something else. But the fact that it is aquatic ­fitness is a source of great joy and energy for her personally. “I am loving it, I really am,” she says. “When you’re in your mid-60s, you’re not expecting to start a new business and love it this much. I want to just keep going as long as possible.”

There’s no doubt that hopping in the pool to lead the classes has helped reinforce her own functional fitness. But it’s also apparent that the spiritual benefits she touts — seeing others breaking out of their shell and find joy in the water — also positively impacts her as an entrepreneur and individual.

“To see the confidence growing in my members and the way they can move their bodies, I see huge growth,” she says. “When you’re having this much fun, why would you want to go away from that?” Kieran Delamont