Marcus Jones still works in medical technology sales. He spends his days sitting across from clinicians, and years in that seat showed him exactly how often women’s bodies get treated as the exception, not the standard, in medicine. That same career taught him how health products actually get adopted inside hospitals and clinics: budgets, procurement, trust, not just clinical opinion, which is a different kind of education than most first-time founders get. At the same time, he was personal training on the side, hearing directly from women what they actually needed in a program, and what nothing on the market was giving them. The two jobs kept pointing at the same gap: nothing built specifically for women, and nowhere that felt like a genuinely safe space to say so out loud. Body by MJ started as an attempt to close it.

So he started teaching. First a handful of women in a Chicago gym. No app, no funding, no marketing budget. Just meeting with women every single day, understanding their goals, their hesitations, and their setbacks. Today he still leads several of those classes himself, BODIED Glutes and BODIED Field Fitness among them, alongside a growing roster of trainers across the city.

He built Body by MJ around his medtech job, not instead of it. Evenings, weekends, and a lot of early mornings teaching classes before client calls, sometimes after being in the OR for hours the day before. That’s not a caveat. It’s the reason this works.

3,800 women. 85+ in-person events. Every one of them found Body by MJ because another woman told her to come, not because of an ad. That’s the number Marcus is proudest of, and the one that’s hardest to fake.

The app is the next chapter, not a pivot. Cycle-aware training and nutrition built from what 3,800 women have already told him, in person, about what their bodies actually need at every stage, from a first deadlift to perimenopause.