The work started long before the wellness industry had a name for it.
Chantelle van den Berg has been teaching, coaching and running her own small businesses since she was twenty. Balancing in Motion is not a career pivot. It is what all of that finally became.
Two decades, several countries, one pattern that kept repeating.
She left school in Potchefstroom in 2001 and was teaching dance within three years, first as an assistant at a local studio, then running her own dance school in Musina, in Limpopo, complete with the invoicing and the fee collection and the rugby team she trained on the side for flexibility and injury prevention. In between, she spent over a year in Tai-Chung, Taiwan, teaching English to children and instructing aerobics in the evenings, and picked up Mandarin along the way.
Back in South Africa, the work kept alternating between admin and movement: reception and PA work for a GP in Musina, an office job at an employers' organisation in Kempton Park, evenings teaching aerobics at gyms across Johannesburg. By 2008 she had joined Planet Fitness in Cape Town on the welcome desk, and was running the Smart Weight Programme within a few months. The promotions kept coming. By 2011 she was Regional Group Activities Coordinator, responsible for group fitness across five Planet Fitness clubs in and around Johannesburg: scheduling, instructor management, member liaison, the full operational load of keeping five clubs' worth of classes running on time.
In 2011 she opened Soulfit, her first wellness business, offering personal training, boxing, yoga and massage. From 2013 to 2021 she taught for Dancemouse across three franchises, and was named Dance Teacher of the Year in 2014. In 2021 she opened Balancing in Motion as a family wellness centre in Honeydew. In October 2024 she closed that chapter and rebuilt it as what it is now: a smaller, sharper practice built around one idea rather than fifteen services.
That idea did not come from a textbook. It came from years of watching people show up once, mean it, and then quietly stop. Information was never what they were short of.
