Every question we get from someone thinking about opening an EMS training studio starts the same way: what does the licence actually decide, and what is left to me? It is a fair question, and it deserves a fair answer before anyone talks about anything commercial. This is that answer, written from the rules themselves rather than from a pitch.
A licence system, done honestly, is a trade: it fixes the things that must never vary, so that a member gets the same training whichever studio they walk into, and it leaves everything else - the building, the market, the day-to-day running - to the person who actually knows that city. Writing that trade down clearly, before a single studio opens, was the first job of building Robla at all.
Opening an EMS studio: what the licence fixes, and why each rule exists
The session is 20 minutes, once a week, with a qualified trainer - not a suggested format, a fixed one. It exists because the training is dosed around a week of recovery, and a studio selling a denser schedule is not offering a premium version of the same product; it is running the format wrong. An operator does not get to shorten the recovery week to fill more slots, because there is no version of the format where that trade is honest.
The supervision ratio is a maximum of 2 trainees per trainer - a ceiling that appears in the published scope of DIN 33961-5, the German standard written for this category. For an operator this is not a marketing line, it is a staffing requirement: a trainer’s time is the scarce resource in this format, and the ratio sets a hard limit on how much of it any one person can be stretched across. Every studio schedule has to be built around that limit from day one, not fitted around it later.
The screening happens before the first impulse, documented, every time. Operationally, that means a studio needs a real process for it - a place for the conversation to happen, time built into the first visit for it, and a way to record it - not a form handed over at the front desk. It is the part of the format most invisible to a member and least optional for a studio.
Cancellation is monthly after any initial term, in every studio, wherever it operates. For an operator used to longer lock-ins elsewhere in fitness, this is often the rule that takes the most getting used to - and it is not negotiable studio by studio. The licence’s position is that a format worth running should not need long contracts to keep the members it earns.
What the licence leaves to you
Price, the exact length of the initial term, the building, the schedule, local marketing, and how the room itself is fitted out beyond the standard’s requirements - these are the studio’s own decisions, made by the person who knows the city, the rent and the competition better than a national document ever could. The licence sets the training; the operator runs the business around it.
That division is deliberate rather than a gap we have not gotten to. A studio’s costs, its local market and its own strengths differ enough between a city centre and a small town that a single national answer to “what should this cost, and how should it be marketed” would be dishonest to both. What a national document can honestly fix is the training itself - because that is the part a member has no way to check city by city, and the part that has to be identical everywhere for the word “Robla” to mean anything consistent.
Why the format fits a small footprint
The supervision ratio does more than set staffing - it sets the shape of the room. A trainer who may take at most 2 people at once has no use for a large floor, so the honest architecture for this format is small: a corner, a converted room, a space inside a building already doing something else, rather than an open gym floor built for volume. That is why the corner format keeps coming up in conversations with people who already run another kind of business and are looking at a spare room rather than a new lease.
It is worth being specific about why this matters operationally, not just aesthetically. A large room with a 2:1 ratio is an expensive way to serve very few people at once - the ratio does not scale with square metres, so extra floor space buys nothing the format can use. A small, well-built room built around one or two trainers working at a time is the format’s natural size, and building smaller from the outset is a decision the licence’s own structure argues for rather than a compromise.
What we would tell you to check before anything else
Ask to see the full operating standard before you ask about anything commercial - the whole standard is published, not summarised, because a document you cannot read in full is not one you can actually evaluate. Ask what is fixed by the licence and what is yours to decide, in writing, before assuming either answer. And treat the supervision ratio as a staffing plan you will build a rota around, not a number on a page - it is the single fact about this format that shapes a studio’s schedule more than any other.
None of that is the commercial conversation, and it should not be: what a licence actually costs, how it is structured, and what support comes with it are questions for the licensing side of this business, not for a journal entry written to explain the format honestly to a general reader. The training rules are public because they should be checkable by anyone; the commercial terms belong in that separate conversation, which lives at partner.robla.fit rather than here.
The category itself is well past the point of being a novelty worth a gamble - EMS training has been part of the German studio landscape for well over a decade, inside a national fitness market of more than 11 million memberships, per the industry association DSSV. That scale is also why the rules matter as much as they do: an operator entering an established, regulated category inherits its standards along with its customers, and a licence that has not thought through both is not one worth trusting with either.
What a full session looks like - the part every one of these rules is actually protecting - is worth reading in full before any conversation about opening a studio goes further. The rules only make sense once you have seen what they are built to deliver.