Most fitness brands will tell you the body is the project. Ivana Bruic thinks that’s exactly the wrong place to start. The founder of Storm Cycling has spent over a decade in Dubai building one of the region’s most devoted communities on a premise the industry finds deeply inconvenient: that transformation begins on the inside, and the body is simply where it eventually arrives.
She came to this not through wellness, but through advertising and business – a career path that gave her an unusually clear-eyed view of how people are sold things they do not need. Storm, by design, refuses nearly all of it: no leaderboards, lust to compare, or performance theatre. What it offers instead is human connection, stillness within intensity and a space where the outside world loosens its grip. It turns out to be exactly what science now identifies as one of the strongest predictors of a long, healthy life. Fresh off the launch of Storm Cycling’s new Palm Jumeirah studio, Bruic sits down with MOJEH to talk performance, belonging and what she’s only just learning about herself.
MOJEH: People use words like “transformative” to describe a Storm session. What is it that you are actually trying to give someone in that room?
IVANA: Storm is not just a workout. It never has been. It’s a practice. From the moment you walk into that room, we ask you to leave the outside world exactly where it belongs – outside. We dim the lights. The room is candlelit. About three-quarters of the way through every session, the playlist shifts. There’s a three- to four-minute soulful meditation, something closer to a small TED talk, spoken from the heart of the instructor. Unrehearsed. Honest. That moment is intentional and it’s designed to reach the person who has finally, truly disconnected, and meet them there. The room itself is called The Eye of the Storm. And if you know anything about meteorology, you know the eye is the calmest part. That’s the analogy. That’s the intention. Walk out feeling better than you walked in. That’s the only metric that matters to us.
The wellness industry can feel very curated and aspirational. How important is it to you to speak honestly about the reality of the journey?
It’s the most important thing we can do, and the industry is terrible at it. Wellness sells you the after photo, the morning routine, the perfectly lit smoothie bowl, and implies that if your reality doesn’t look like that, you’re doing it wrong. That’s not wellness. That’s performance. Real wellness is far less linear. Life is up, down, sideways, and sometimes completely upside down. There will be seasons where consistency feels impossible, where the last thing you can do is show up for yourself the way you intended. And if we all spoke more honestly about that – stopped curating only the highlights – we’d realise something radical: we’re all human. Every single one of us. The practice will be there when you’re ready. Storm will be there. The door doesn’t close because life got complicated.
In a city full of fitness options, what keeps someone coming back to Storm specifically, week after week, year after year?
The fitness is the vehicle. The belonging is the destination. If it were purely about the workout, you could ride a bike alone. The fact that people choose to show up, in person, consistently tells you everything. COVID made this undeniable – when the world reopened, what people craved above everything else wasn’t a treadmill or a barbell. It was each other. The energy of a room full of people moving together. The instructor who remembers your name. The familiar face on the bike next to yours. We are wired for connection – deeply, biologically wired for it. In a world that has become increasingly digital, fragmented and isolating, a space that offers genuine human community has become something almost sacred.
Over two decades in Dubai is long enough to watch the city reinvent itself several times over. What has it given you that you couldn’t have found anywhere else?
Dubai has a way of reshaping you if you allow it. Arriving here at a young age, as so many of us do, I could have kept the world small. Instead, the opposite happened. What shaped me most profoundly was immersing myself in Emirati culture – not as an observer, but genuinely. Some of my closest friendships are with Emiratis, and through those relationships I developed a deep understanding of the GCC, the warmth of this community, and the values that underpin it. That closeness informs everything about how I build, Storm included. Before indoor cycling, I spent years in advertising as a copywriter, then built and ran a distribution company importing Australian brands into the Middle East. Each chapter taught me something different about commerce, creativity and resilience. Dubai rewards the adaptable. What the city has ultimately given me is independence and a near-pathological solutions orientation, if I’m honest. Storm wasn’t built despite the challenges of this market; it was built because of them.
You’re midway through a professional breathwork certification. What has it changed about how you understand wellness and yourself?
We grew up in a culture that sold us a very specific image of fitness: a certain body, a certain number on a scale or a leaderboard. And for a long time, most of us accepted that as the definition. I did, too. But what I understand now, deeply, is that the body is the last place transformation shows up. It starts inside. If your mental health is off, if something is dysregulated in your nervous system, if you’re running on cortisol and chronic stress, no amount of training will take you where you want to go. Breathwork is not one thing – it’s a vast landscape, from athletic modalities that sharpen performance and oxygen efficiency, to deeper practices that quiet the subconscious and rewire how we respond to stress. I came to it looking for a way to regulate. What I found was something far more expansive than I expected. Feeling well, to me now, means feeling aligned. Strong body, yes. But also a quiet mind, a regulated nervous system and a relationship with yourself that doesn’t depend on what the mirror says.
You speak a lot about what Storm gives to others. How do you take care of yourself in the midst of all of it?
It’s a mastery I’m still refining. There were years where my own health came last. The business came first, the clients, the team, the experience – all of it before myself. And I won’t pretend that was sustainable, because it wasn’t. This year, after navigating the construction and launch of our Palm Jumeirah location and everything that process demands of you physically, mentally and emotionally, I made myself a pact: I was no longer negotiable. Sleep is non-negotiable. Training is non-negotiable. These aren’t luxuries – they’re the infrastructure that everything else is built on. I track my recovery with an Oura ring. My circle is tighter than it’s ever been, and my tolerance for inauthenticity is close to zero. You cannot pour endlessly from an empty vessel. That lesson took time, but I got there.
Storm has earned genuine global recognition. Where do you feel that success most clearly and where does it still feel out of reach?
As an entrepreneur, your vision is almost always projected further ahead than where you currently stand, which means you rarely stop to look around and acknowledge how far you’ve come. I’m also not above any of it. I’m in it: coaching, operations, finances, marketing, answering DMs. Nothing at Storm goes unattended. When you live and breathe your brand at that level of granularity, you don’t experience it from a distance. You experience it from the inside, on the ground. Success arrives in flashes for me. A member who walks in less confident than they walk out. Someone who got genuinely healthier because Storm was part of their life. Have I stood back and felt like I’ve truly succeeded yet? I’m not sure I know what that looks like. But I don’t say that from a place of lack. I say it as someone who still has so much they want to create.
Building something this meaningful rarely happens without difficulty. What has the journey asked of you that you didn’t expect?
The rebuilding of the business is the easier part. The harder work – the work that nobody sees and nobody applauds – is the internal kind. Entrepreneurship holds a mirror up to every weakness, every blind spot, every version of yourself that isn’t yet equipped. And you can either look away, or you can do the work. I’ve done the work. I’m not the same woman who started this, not even close. There’s a kind of grace required when you’re navigating complexity that the outside world doesn’t get to see – when you have to show up composed and forward-facing regardless of what’s being carried privately. That grace doesn’t come naturally. It’s built slowly, through circumstance, through discipline, through choosing again and again to lead with integrity even when it costs you. Would I change any of it? No. Every difficult chapter was a construction site.
Outside of the studio, what are the small rituals that genuinely restore you?
Something involving the ocean. Sand underfoot. Fresh air. Open skies. I’m someone who needs solace as much as I need stimulation, and the two have to coexist. I’m drawn to the simplest things – anything that connects me back to something larger than the noise of running a business. Travel does that for me too, particularly the kind that’s rustic and unhurried. On an ordinary day, breathwork in the morning, something that moves my body, and a conversation that actually goes somewhere. The breathwork has become my most grounding daily ritual and the simplest reminder that sometimes the most profound reset available to you is already right there, in the next breath.
What does the future of Storm look like and what do you think the future of wellness look like, if we get it right?
The impact I’m reaching for is a complete reframe. Not fitness as punishment, not wellness as aesthetic, but a genuine, 360° approach to feeling well. What I want people to experience is something closer to a therapy session than a training session. A space where the mind is tended to as carefully as the body. Where breath, music, movement and human connection converge into something that sends you back into your life feeling more like yourself. One of the most compelling findings in longevity research is that a sense of belonging is among the strongest predictors of a long, healthy life. Not supplements, not fitness regimens – human connection. People don’t want to move through the world feeling isolated. They want to be known, to belong to something, to show up somewhere and feel seen. That’s what Storm is built to be. One ride, one breath, one community at a time. Book now
