The rags-to-riches portrait of a gym instructor

Private fitness instructor Hou Jun, 25, is already famous although he has been in his field for just three years. Entrepreneurs, high-ranking company officials and show business people, including A-list actresses Fan Bingbing and Zhang Ziyi, and actors Feng Shaofeng and Zheng Kai, and singer Wang Feng are among his clients.

He arrived in Beijing three years ago, after finishing college in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, with very little money but enough ambition.

He wanted to earn quickly to help his parents repay about 3 million yuan ($490,000) in debt.

"It was Christmas Eve, and Beijing welcomed me with flakes of snow," Hou recalls. He slept beneath an overpass near a railway station like the homeless do as he couldn't afford a hotel.

Today, he makes thousands of yuan daily and has a home gym in a 300-square-meter apartment in an upscale community in downtown Beijing, for which he pays 43,000 yuan a month.

He has paid off one-third of his parents' debt.

"I never thought I would become a celebrity fitness coach. I didn't know anything about this profession when I first came to Beijing," Hou says. "But one circumstance led to another."

Hou Jun shows off his muscles at his gym in Beijing. Hou became famous for being a private fitness instructor for celebrities. Provided to China Daily

Hou was born in a village in Huai'an, Jiangsu province, where people like to practice martial arts. Huai'an is also the hometown of former premier Zhou Enlai.

Hou practiced Chinese shadow boxing through his childhood, and never stopped the daily training until he reached high school and then college to study logistics management.

In 2009, after their business collapsed, Hou's parents sent him to join the army. Although Hou was in the army for about a year, the training made him physically and psychologically stronger. Then he came to Beijing to earn the money he needed for his parents.

To make the most of his experience in shadow boxing and bodybuilding, he applied to be an instructor at the city's various gyms.

But because he hadn't previously been employed in any such role, Hou couldn't find a job. He lived on the meager sums of money he had borrowed from his college friends. The turning point came when he accidentally met the manager of a gym, who offered him an assistant coach position at his gym.

The job paid him about 1,000 yuan a month, all of which he spent on buying books on fitness training, setting aside the little left for food and a room's rent.

A few months later, he passed the examinations required for professional certification, and became a qualified fitness trainer. Many of the gym clients enrolled to train with him. But his popularity led to his falling out with the management there, he says.

In 2012, he joined another gym, where he earned between 5,000 and 6,000 yuan a month, an income that was higher than what he made earlier but still lower than many of his industry peers.

A year later, Hou decided to open his own "studio" that targeted affluent customers. Two business associates invested 160,000 yuan in the venture, that operated out of a 150-square-meter rented apartment in a high-end housing community.

However, for the first three months, his business didn't take off; one investor also left. Then, one day, a man whom Hou had once coached, came to him, saying he wanted to lose weight and that Hou was the best trainer he ever had. The personalized exercise kit that Hou had designed for the man led his client to shed some 10 kg.

Very soon, friends of the client found their way to Hou.

In June 2013, a client helped him get youth icon Zheng as a customer. Personal Tailor, a film starring Zheng, was a big hit that year.

Zheng was happy with the fitness training and recommended Hou to many of his showbiz friends, such as director Wang Quan'an, and actors Feng Shaofeng, Hu Bin and Chen Sicheng.

"Business people come to me for a healthier body, but actors and actresses are desperate to look better," Hou says.

The minimum membership requirement at his gym is 54 sessions, and he charges 800 yuan for a two-hour session. Hou now has about 100 regular clients.

"My clients want the strictest privacy. Because the gym is located in a well-protected community, they don't have to worry about it," Hou says.

Yu Qun, one of Hou's clients, who runs his own consultancy, points out that the high-profile trainer updates his own skills by attending fitness clinics in Japan and in Hong Kong.

"Most importantly, he never brags about his clients or makes use of them," Yu says. "That makes us trust him."

liuzhihua@chinadaily.com.cn