At its private studio on Aston Street, Train With Dave has built its approach around a relatively simple proposition: if personal training is a coaching business, then the quality and continuity of the coach should matter as much as the workout itself.

Today, in our Best Stories in Town series, we’re sharing the story of Train With Dave in Irvine and looking beyond the rankings and review counts at the business model behind the studio.

The Irvine location was ranked No. 10 in California in Business Rate’s 2026 personal-training rankings, according to Train With Dave, joining the company’s Orange studio, which ranked No. 3. But the ranking is really just an entry point. The more interesting story is what the company has chosen to build around: college-educated coaches, individualized programming, nutrition support, ongoing accountability, and a compensation model intended to make coaching a career rather than a revolving-door job.

In a fitness industry where the physical space is often the product — the equipment, the classes, the membership, the amenities — Train With Dave has made a different bet in Irvine. The coach is the product.

We hope you enjoy it.

At 16510 Aston Street in the Irvine Business Complex, Train With Dave operates a private, appointment-only training studio. There is no open-floor membership model.

Clients come in to work with a coach on a program built around their goals, limitations, schedule, and progress. The Irvine location serves clients from Irvine and surrounding areas including Newport Beach, Tustin, Costa Mesa, Lake Forest, Spectrum, and UCI.

That format says a lot about how the company sees itself. Train With Dave has three Orange County studios — Irvine, Orange, and Laguna Hills — but the business is not built around access to a room full of equipment. It is built around the person delivering the coaching.

Founder David Cozzens started Train With Dave in 2016 after years of coaching Orange County clients. He holds a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology and, according to the company, stopped personally training clients in 2020 to focus on developing the coaching team and running the business.

Since then, the company says it has completed more than 150,000 training sessions, including more than 32,000 in 2025, and accumulated more than 1,000 five-star reviews across Google and Yelp.

Growth, though, creates a familiar problem for any service business built around individual expertise: how do you add clients, coaches, and locations without making the people delivering the service interchangeable?

For Train With Dave, much of the answer begins with who gets hired.

The title “personal trainer” can describe people with very different educational backgrounds and levels of experience. Train With Dave chose to set its own minimum standard higher.

The company says every coach holds a college degree, several have graduate-level education, many hold NSCA-CSCS credentials, and all complete the company’s in-house nutrition certification. Coaches come from backgrounds including kinesiology, strength and conditioning, nutrition, corrective exercise, and sports performance.

Those credentials matter less as a list than in what the company expects coaches to do with them.

The hour spent inside the studio is only part of the job. Coaches build and adjust programs, work around injuries and movement limitations, guide nutrition, track progress, and change the plan as a client’s circumstances change. On days the client is not in the studio, the training app carries the program with them, while direct access to the coach keeps the relationship from ending when the session does.

Train With Dave is unusually direct in how it talks about its hiring standard, contrasting degree-based education with short certification courses. A degree alone does not make someone a great coach, of course. But the decision tells you what kind of business the company is trying to build: one in which coaching is treated as skilled professional work rather than something that can be easily standardized and replaced.

Once you make that decision, another question follows. If you want better-qualified people, what makes them stay?

Trainer turnover is not just an employment issue. For a personal-training business, it can become a client issue very quickly.

A coach may spend months learning how someone moves, what injuries need to be managed, which cues work, where the client tends to lose consistency, and what happened during the last plateau. When that coach leaves, not all of that knowledge transfers neatly to the next person.

Train With Dave has made compensation part of its answer to that problem.

The company says it pays the highest average trainer compensation of any personal-training company in the United States. That is Train With Dave’s own claim, based on comparisons it has published with other employers and industry data, rather than an independent national ranking.

More interesting than the headline is the reasoning behind it. Train With Dave says its compensation model is designed around client retention and results rather than simply hours worked or sales generated. Trainers are not expected to spend part of their day prospecting for leads or trying to sell packages; consultations and marketing are handled by the company. Its employment materials emphasize scheduled coaching blocks rather than the split shifts and unpaid floor time common in parts of the industry.

Cozzens summed up the philosophy when discussing the model: “We built the opposite: elite pay, sane hours, and coaches who stay long enough to change lives.”

There is no simple equation proving that a better-paid trainer automatically produces a better client outcome. The connection the company is trying to make is more practical. If continuity matters to the service, keeping good coaches becomes part of designing that service.

A client should not have to rebuild the relationship every six months.

That philosophy is easiest to see at the Irvine studio because the service is packaged as more than an hour of exercise.

Every program includes individualized workout programming, nutrition coaching, access to the company’s training app, body-composition tracking, and communication with the coach between sessions. Sessions are priced at roughly $60 to $80, according to the company, without separate add-on fees for those components. New clients can begin with a free 45-minute consultation to discuss goals, obstacles, movement, and what the initial program might look like.

For someone looking at personal training in Irvine, the distinction is useful. Train With Dave is not really selling access to the studio itself. The studio is simply where part of the coaching happens.

That helps explain the appointment-only format. The equipment matters, but the sequence matters more: assess, program, train, track, adjust.

“Customized” is an overused word in personal training, so the useful question is what customization actually changes. At Train With Dave, the company says programs are adjusted around a client’s body, injuries, goals, schedule, and progress. Nutrition sits inside the same coaching system rather than being treated as a separate upsell. The app extends the plan into the days between sessions.

Over time, all of that produces something beyond workouts: data.

And Train With Dave has started paying closer attention to what that data can tell it.

In August 2026, Train With Dave published an internal analysis based on 44,000 measurements collected from 375 active clients over a 12-month period. The dataset included 7,358 weigh-ins, 18,920 logged workouts, and 17,721 nutrition entries.

This was not a randomized clinical trial, and the company does not present it as one. It describes the analysis as observational and publishes information about its methodology, sample sizes, definitions, and limitations.

That matters because internal client data has obvious limits. The people who hire a personal trainer are already a self-selected group, and correlations inside that population do not establish that one behavior caused another.

Still, the project is revealing in a different way. Rather than relying only on testimonials and before-and-after photos, the company is trying to understand patterns in what its clients actually do.

Its analysis found an association between more consistent tracking and stronger fat-loss outcomes. Clients who weighed in at least weekly and logged complete days of food showed larger changes than clients who did neither. Train With Dave says observations like these are now informing the way its coaches work with clients.

Cozzens put it more bluntly: “Most fitness advice is opinion — we wanted receipts.”

The company’s more specialized programs follow the same logic. Train With Dave has developed training and nutrition approaches for clients in perimenopause and menopause, postpartum clients who have received medical clearance, and clients using GLP-1 medications. These are not presented as medical treatment. The company says its coaches do not diagnose conditions or manage medications or hormone therapy and refer clients to qualified healthcare professionals when something falls outside a trainer’s scope.

That boundary is worth noting. A more educated coaching model is partly about knowing what to do. It is also about knowing what not to do.

Train With Dave has three locations, but Irvine has become a useful place to see the model at scale.

The studio sits in the Irvine Business Complex, near The District and FLIGHT, within reach of both residential neighborhoods and major employment centers. Its client base extends beyond Irvine into Tustin, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Lake Forest, and the Spectrum and UCI areas.

The location has also accumulated a run of local recognition. Train With Dave lists Best of Irvine awards from 2022 through 2024, Business Rate recognition in Irvine in 2024 and 2025, Irvine Business Hall of Fame recognition, and the No. 10 California ranking in 2026.

Awards are imperfect measures of any service business, and different organizations use different methodologies. Reviews have their own limitations. But the Irvine studio’s review volume and local recognition at least provide evidence that the model has found a substantial audience beyond the company’s own marketing.

The Irvine location lists hundreds of five-star reviews, while Train With Dave reports more than 1,000 across its three Orange County studios.

What sits underneath those numbers is more interesting than the numbers themselves.

People have always hired trainers because they want to lose fat, gain muscle, get stronger, move better, or regain a sense of control over their health. Train With Dave did not invent any of those needs. What it has tried to redesign is the business around the person responsible for helping clients address them.

That means hiring differently. Paying differently. Connecting training and nutrition rather than treating them as unrelated products. Tracking enough information to know when a plan should change. And giving the coach a reason to remain in the relationship long enough to see what happens next.

Fitness businesses have plenty of ways to scale. A gym can sell memberships. A class concept can repeat the same format across locations. An app can distribute programming to thousands of people at almost no marginal cost. Increasingly sophisticated equipment can bring guided workouts into someone’s home.

Train With Dave is trying to scale something less tidy: human coaching.

That makes the business harder in some ways. Individualized work costs more. Educated employees cost more. Continuity depends on keeping people. The more valuable the judgment of the person standing beside the client becomes, the harder that person is to replace with a script or system.

The Irvine studio suggests Train With Dave is willing to live with that tension.

Its bet is that clients will value a coach who knows their history, understands why the program looks the way it does, notices when something changes, and is still there months later to make the next adjustment.

The top-10 ranking makes a useful headline. The reviews show local traction. Thirty-two thousand sessions in a year show scale.

But the simplest explanation of the business may be the one underneath all of them.

At Train With Dave Irvine, the equipment is not the scarce resource. Neither is the workout; workouts are everywhere now.

The scarce resource is a coach worth coming back to.

Every local business has a story worth telling.

If you would like us to share yours, contact us at [email protected].