Avenue Calgary — January 2018

AvenueCalgary.com 61

The Mehalkos moved to Calgary in 2010
when Brad retired from hockey. Jennifer
launched her own interior design company,
Found Design Group, and continued to teach
yoga and spin.
In 2014, the Mehalkos teamed up with two
other couples to launch The Sweat Lab, a west
Calgary gym offering yoga, spin and barre
classes. Mehalko was involved in every aspect
— designing the space, developing a small
apparel collection with Lululemon and training
instructors — but six months in, it was clear the
partnership wasn’t working and the Mehalkos
sold their portion of the business. A period of
unhappiness set in, made worse by a car accident
from which Mehalko suffered a concussion,
soft-tissue damage in her neck and some nerve
damage. She was unable to exercise for several
months and stopped teaching classes for a full
year. Even when she started exercising again,
her heart wasn’t in it. “I would go practice [yoga]
or go spin and I’d show up 60 seconds before
the class would start and as soon as the class was
over, I was gone,” she says. “Nine times out of 10,
I’d cry through the class.”
After that year without teaching, Mehalko
came up with a new idea. Having been taught to
sew by her grandmother, she had long dreamed
of designing activewear. The name Parts + Labor
came to her as she was driving home from having
her car repaired. “Those are the two things a per-
son needs to achieve the happy rush that comes
from movement,” she says. “Parts are the gear, the
clothing; labor [sic] is the sweat they put into it.”
The first collection, “Heart Work,” was released
in 2017 and features jackets with the same flirty
evil eye image tattooed on her arm.
For her own workouts, Mehalko sometimes
trains with her husband (it’s a source of pride
that she can outperform him in abdominal pikes)
but group classes remain her go-to for everyday
fitness. She’s an early morning workout person,
hitting local studios for 6 a.m. classes in yoga, spin
or barre and she visits Bridgeland’s Movement
U gym once a week for a class called RowBody,
a mix of rowing machines, free weights and
resistance-band exercises.
“When you only have an hour, that hour is
pretty sacred,” Mehalko says. “If I go in with the
right mindset — that I just need to take some-
thing away from it — I always feel better.”

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