How Megan Roup Built Confidence in Her Body

The Sculpt Society creator found gratification in connecting with women through a joyful movement practice.

Megan Roup / Gilbert Flores/Getty Images

Megan Roup, founder of popular digital workout app The Sculpt Society, arrived at fitness instruction somewhat by happenstance. When she started teaching classes in New York City, she “didn’t view [it] as ‘this is going to be a career path,’” she said on an episode of Whitney Port’s podcast, With Whit.

Initially, she was looking for a way to pay the bills, and a way to make movement more joyful. As a teenager, Roup trained in classical ballet, a movement practice that she really loved. So, when college came along and it came time to find another modality that resonated with her, Roup struggled.

“My perception of the gym was” spending hours on the treadmill, she explained of her mentality at the time. “It was a place that I didn’t like to be, but I had to be.” In part, that perception was the result of struggles with body image. “Unfortunately I didn’t have a good relationship with my body image in my early 20s,” she said. “That looked like a lot of yo-yo dieting and over-exercising.”

In the years immediately post-college, a couple things changed for Roup that bolstered her body image and led her to eventually create The Sculpt Society. For one, “I worked on a lot of internal dialogue and how I was looking at myself and treating myself with my thoughts,” she said. “But also the missing puzzle piece in healing a lot of that was finding a movement practice that was joyful and fun.” That sort of joy came when she started teaching fitness classes in New York.

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“I really quickly fell in love with connecting with women in a movement practice that was joyful and fun for me,” she explained. “It was almost cathartic. It was such a missing puzzle piece in my healing journey. To be able to connect with women on how to build confidence [in] their body in working out really opened my eyes in a big way.”

Early on, Roup was experimenting with the boutique fitness scene, which was really booming at the time. But she found that the sort of class she was looking for didn’t quite exist yet. Eventually, she arrived at the basis of The Sculpt Society, a workout that combines all of the “modalities that I love,” she said. “It’s reformer Pilates, it’s sculpt, it’s lightweight. It’s using your bodyweight for strength. And then you’re sprinkling in really easy to follow, fun dance cardio.”