Reise on realistic wellness, letting go of the perfect path, and learning to offer herself the same grace she gives her students.
Interview by Ian Milton · Edited by WrenLife · Based on Reise Speroni’s interview and follow-up answers
Affiliate disclosure: Reise is a WrenLife affiliate. WrenLife provides her with complimentary products, and she earns a commission when someone purchases using her code. This profile reflects her personal experiences and opinions; it is not medical advice and does not describe results from using WrenLife products.
Reise balances a full-time job with her roles as a fitness instructor and Studio Operations Coordinator at The Fitness Room, where she teaches yoga, strength, and sculpt classes. People come into her classes carrying something from the day. For the length of a class, she invites them to leave some of it at the door. She offers a challenge when they want one, a modification when they need one, and room to begin exactly where they are.
One of the most rewarding moments, Reise says, can be almost invisible: watching a student who is often restless or uncomfortable finally settle into Savasana, the final resting pose in yoga. The invitation to “relax the body and calm the mind” may sound simple, but stillness is neither easy nor effortless. It takes practice to notice the mind wandering without letting it overtake the experience. When a student finally sinks into that quiet, Reise feels she must be doing something right.
Reise practices yoga at The Fitness Room. Photo supplied by Reise Speroni.
That same permission—to adjust, to listen, to keep going without punishing herself—was much harder for Reise to offer herself.
When “push harder” stopped working
For much of her life, effort was something Reise understood in an athlete’s terms. Growing up in Milford and Uxbridge, Massachusetts, she was shaped by competitive cheerleading and swimming. Today, she is most involved in CrossFit. Health meant showing up, pushing through, and asking more of herself.
When she came home from college feeling low and without a clear direction, a local wellness center gave her a way back to movement. She began working there and watched classes change the energy people carried into the room. When the center offered yoga teacher training, she enrolled. She now holds a 200-hour yoga teacher training certification, and she has since successfully earned her Power Pilates Core Mat 1 certification in Beginner Classical Mat Pilates.
Teaching gave her a new sense of direction. But as her schedule filled, guiding others could crowd out her own practice. Balance meant protecting time to be a student, too.
Learning to modify
During a period of unexplained weight change and severe acne, Reise says she learned she had PCOS. She tried restricting and tracking more, but those tools deepened an unhealthy relationship with food and left her feeling increasingly disconnected from herself.
At times, the person in the mirror felt unfamiliar. The physical changes, acne treatment, and pressure to solve everything at once affected her mental health. Calorie and macro tracking could also pull her back toward disordered-eating patterns she was working to leave behind.
Reise began applying the same principle she offered in class: a modification is not a failure. A difficult day does not erase the work that came before it, and five minutes of movement can still matter. “Not every day is going to be a perfect day,” she says.
Discipline and grace, she learned, do not have to cancel each other out. “You’re just a human being. You’re not a robot,” Reise says. Then she offers the simpler truth: “Being human is really hard.”
“Being human is really hard.”
That realization widened her definition of health. Movement is still part of it, but it is no longer the whole picture. Health also includes mental health, therapy, kindness, compassion, community, and the way a person moves through the world. “Being healthy is a way of life,” she says—not a perfect gym record, a food log, or a body that never changes.
The real life behind the post
Social media introduced a different kind of pressure. In college, Reise found herself measuring her value through attention and outside approval, while curated feeds made other people’s lives look effortless. The gap between what appeared online and what she felt in real life became impossible to ignore.
Over time, she began sharing more openly about the setbacks, the skin changes, the body-image struggle, and the days when progress did not look like progress. The response surprised her. People she had known years earlier reached out to say they were going through something similar. Some had believed they were the only ones.
Those messages changed what visibility meant to Reise. Honesty online can still invite judgment, but it can also interrupt isolation. She wants to help build a community where people feel safe enough to be vulnerable, support one another, and speak openly—especially women navigating PCOS and the disorienting experience of feeling at odds with their own bodies.
No cookie-cutter path
Reise has never wanted to fit a template. Her bright hair and tattoos are part of that self-expression, but the instinct runs deeper. “I’ve never been a cookie-cutter girl,” she says.
The same is true of her approach to wellness. Other people can offer useful tools, language, or inspiration, but their path cannot become a prescription for someone else’s life. The goal is not to reproduce another person’s timeline, body, routine, or version of success. It is to notice what helps you feel more present in your own.
Reise’s story has no tidy before-and-after. Its center is the daily practice of meeting herself honestly—and choosing to make that honesty useful to other people.
Back in the studio, people still walk through the door carrying something. They may not leave with everything resolved. But for a while, they have space to breathe, move, adapt, and feel capable. Reise has learned that she deserves that same space.
Sometimes coming back to yourself looks like a challenge. Sometimes it looks like a modification. For Reise, realistic wellness means making room for both.
Why the WrenLife partnership felt different
Reise says the WrenLife partnership felt different because it began face to face—with a conversation about her goals for the partnership and the values she wants her work to reflect. Some previous collaborations had felt transactional. Here, she says, the expectation was to keep talking.
That continuing conversation is what WrenLife in Real Life is built for: honest stories that make room for the complicated, everyday work of caring for yourself.
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