This International Women's Day, The Kallang continues to spotlight the women shaping our world across Sports, Entertainment, Community and Lifestyle - each story a reflection of resilience, reinvention and purpose.
In this series, we first met Welsh table tennis star Anna Hursey, whose rise on the world stage embodies grit and belief at the highest level of sport. We then turned to local singer-songwriter Jill-Marie Thomas, whose journey through music has been shaped by perseverance and the quiet strength of maternal support. Most recently, we featured Alicia Lim, a student-athlete and marketing intern determined to tell more inclusive, long-form stories of women in sport.
Each woman, in her own way, reminds us that progress is not linear - and that there is power in carving your own path.
In this final feature, we meet Barbora - entrepreneur, mother of two, and the woman behind FS8's growing presence in the precinct - whose philosophy is simple: movement is for everybody and every body.
Three Studios, Two Daughters
We met up with Barbora two days before the grand opening of her second FS8 studio, where she was at the reception desk at Tanjong Rhu, MacBook open. Behind her, chic new reformers are lined up with mechanical precision, light coming in clean. The studio is spacious by Singapore standards — she notes this herself, without complaint: "In Singapore, everything can feel a bit small. So having the space, it feels really nice."
She opened Singapore's first FS8 — a hybrid of Pilates, Tone, and Yoga — just last September, in Siglap. This is her second outlet, and her third fitness studio overall, the first being F45, a few units down on the same floor of Kallang Wave Mall. Three studios. Sixteen staff. Five or six training sessions a week for herself. Two daughters aged four and eight. A juggle, she calls it. The word doesn't quite do justice to what she's describing. Building a business in a new country while raising two young daughters — unglamorous in the day-to-day, but remarkable in the sum.
Movement Without Mirrors
The FS8 format is hybrid: reformer Pilates layered with mat work, weights, and functional training, where classes are never repeated. The studio has no mirrors. Once you notice, it reorients the space: you are here to move, not to surveil yourself (or others) moving. The idea is about directing attention inward — toward how a movement feels rather than how it looks, and allowing the instructors to come around and advise on alignment.
"I don't want anyone — any group — to feel like it's not for them," she says. "We've got no ego." The mirrorless design decision came from FS8's HQ in Austin, Texas, and Barbora embraces it wholly. "Some people love mirrors. I totally understand. It's just not us." This is how she leads: by removing the conditions that make people feel like they don't belong.
She wants FS8 to be inclusive for all. She is planning a class specifically for men, who she says can find Pilates intimidating, carrying assumptions she considers misguided. Her argument is a historical one: Joseph Pilates was a man. Whatever cultural coding has accumulated since is not intrinsic to the method.
Fit For Purpose
For Barbora, entering the fitness industry was less a pivot than a return — she had attended a sports school, training up to three times a day as a matter of course. "I didn't know any different, really." There is a way she holds her own life — not as exceptional, not as the product of discipline, but as the only arrangement she has ever known. That same quality — the belief that this is simply how things are done — is what makes her a persuasive entrepreneur. She doesn't sell a lifestyle. She embodies it.
Miss a workout session and she feels the absence acutely. "If I don't work out, I do feel a bit miserable," she says, chuckling, "I feel like I'm not myself." At Siglap, people tell her it is the welcome that sets the studio apart. "Even people who don't know me — they come and say, 'I walk in and everyone is so friendly.'"
Making It Work
When she first met her husband, he was not especially interested in fitness. He now goes to the gym five times a week. "He's got his own routine," she says, with something like quiet satisfaction. Spend enough time around Barbora and this trajectory starts to feel inevitable. He handles the school runs and pickups when she is at the studio. "It's a team effort," she says. "We make it work, because sometimes it can be challenging." She laughs when asked about work-life balance. "I do feel like I haven't been around much for them recently. But I know it's just temporary."
It Was Never the Right Time
Her touchstone is her great-grandmother, who lived to ninety-nine and was still telling stories from her hospital bed near the end: a baby delivered while wartime jets flew overhead; a two-hour queue for bananas that ran out just as she reached the front.
Barbora invokes this history not as hardship comparison but as calibration. When she and her husband were weighing whether to open the Tanjong Rhu studio so soon after Siglap — the timing imperfect, the first location still finding its feet — she thought about what her great-grandmother had survived. "It's never the right time. For anything. Even having kids — it was never the right time for us. But we had them. And now you wouldn't want it any different way." Resilience, for Barbora, is an inheritance — passed down through the women who came before her.
The Model She Is Setting
On 28 February, FS8 Tanjong Rhu officially opened its doors at Kallang Wave Mall, where her daughters were present at the ribbon cutting. They already know what Pilates is. They love jumping on the reformers and trying out all the equipment; she has brought them into her days rather than kept them separate from it. "Okay, just take one kilo!" she tells them when they go for the weights.
What she is passing on is something fundamental: that movement is simply part of how life is lived. The model she is setting is not the entrepreneur — it is the healthy, joyful person who shows up for life.
As we conclude this International Women's Day series, Barbora's story reminds us that strength takes many forms - sometimes loud and visible, sometimes quiet and consistent. It lives in the daily choices, the risks taken before the timing feels right, and the example set for the next generation watching closely. We celebrate women across Sports, Entertainment, Community and Lifestyle who are shaping culture not only through achievement, but through the way they live. And while this chapter of the International Women's Day series closes, the stories, and the women behind them, continue.
FS8 Tanjong Rhu - Kallang Wave Mall
FS8 Tanjong Rhu's opening adds a new dimension to the precinct’s growing lifestyle offering. More than a fitness studio, FS8 reflects the kind of community-focused, wellness-forward spaces that define the evolving Kallang experience — where sport, movement and everyday living intersect seamlessly.
As a mall anchored in sport yet designed for all, Kallang Wave Mall continues to expand beyond retail. From fitness concepts and family-friendly activities to dining and everyday essentials, it is a space where athletes, young families, working professionals and weekend explorers coexist — each finding something that fits their rhythm of life.
FS8’s arrival underscores that vision. Here, movement sits alongside lifestyle; strength alongside community. Whether you are stepping into a reformer class, meeting friends for coffee after a workout, or simply passing through on your daily routine, the mall becomes more than a stop — it becomes part of how you live well.
