By Jennifer Gorlin, Belmont Voice correspondent
A dip in the ocean—that was always the cure, as far as Patty Grady’s grandmother was concerned.
“My grandmother always used to say, if anything was wrong, ‘Go in the ocean. Everything is salt water,’ ” said Grady, founder of SALT, a fitness club in Belmont Center. “The three basic healers are the sea, tears, and sweat – like – workout.”
“Salt of the earth,” also served as inspiration for the business name—the idea of helping people be true to themselves and the inherent value of authenticity.
On Jan. 2, SALT celebrated its first anniversary of serving the Belmont community with welcoming, empowering, and heated fitness classes. SALT hosts a mix of classes that includes heated flow yoga, cardio, and weighted strength exercises, all designed to motivate students to push their limits, cultivate self-awareness, and grow.
Classes range from 35 to 60 minutes and include SALT Start, a posture-focused class for newcomers to help students master foundational moves and build confidence; SALT Style, a signature class format that fuses yoga, cardio, strength, and Pilates; and SALT Strength, a high-intensity, heated strength-training experience, enabling a private studio feel with focused instruction. SALT also offers Still, a restorative candlelight Yin yoga class every Sunday evening to help students target the body’s deep connective tissues and reset for the week ahead.
A former Watertown police officer, Grady has a lifelong love of movement. She’s an athlete whose journey has spanned running, weight training, and, for the last decade, yoga. Grady’s mother was a practitioner of Bikram heated yoga, and she would come home drenched and cheering that she “loved the sweat and the heat.” So Patty began taking those classes in turn.
While she loved it as well, standing in Bikram’s 26 postures didn’t inspire her enough to become a teacher. It wasn’t until Grady took a Vinyasa flow class that things really began to click. She became certified in Vinyasa Krama yoga in 2013, a student of Roman Szpond of Inner Strength, and enriched her studies by graduating CorePower’s Yoga Sculpt Teacher Training in 2018. Sculpt integrates light to medium weights with upbeat Vinyasa flow.
More than a decade ago, Grady began teaching movement classes alongside her full-time work as a Watertown police detective. At the same time, she ran a small studio out of her basement while raising her children. She started to get serious about finding a larger studio space in 2019.
“I was so close to signing a lease in Belmont—I wasn’t sure about the space—and then, all of a sudden, a couple months later, it was COVID,” she said.
During the height of the pandemic, Grady committed to building community and camaraderie around fitness. She would teach weekend yoga classes for friends and neighbors on Cape Cod by opening their garages, turning driveways into makeshift studios, and inviting anyone who wanted to join in to practice.
Still, Grady’s Belmont dream lingered,
“I’ve always loved Belmont as a town. I’ve always loved the town center,” says Grady, who grew up in Watertown and frequented Belmont Center to stroll and shop.
In 2024, she found an upstairs location on Leonard Street in a building overlooking Bellmont Caffé and the surrounding neighborhood—and began to design the studio of her dreams. The result is a sunny, cozy space for students to strengthen their bodies, build resilience, and connect with their neighbors.
Class sizes range from eight to 14 students at a time, limiting available spots, unlike larger studios with 30 to 40 people in a room. SALT attracts people from surrounding towns, from Arlington to Waltham. Her success has enabled Grady to retire from the Watertown Police and make the leap to a full-time fitness career.
SALT’s growth and endurance over the last year hints at the revival of a local fitness community that was decimated by the pandemic.
“It took fitness places a long time to come back from that,” says Grady, “People were very nervous about sweating, especially with the heat.”
With this in mind, Grady focuses on cleanliness and hospitality for the intimate physical space, ensuring it is deeply sanitized after each class and providing students with amenities that larger, more corporate studios might not – like hair ties, electrolyte drinks, towels, and cold water in sealed mason jars. Also, according to Grady, “[the heat is not] a main character” of the classes, it’s a “supporting actor.”
Grady herself teaches about 15 classes per week and is supported by five other instructors. According to Grady, the limited class sizes allow instructors to focus on making people feel cared for and getting to know their students.
“We’re lucky to be able to move. Let’s just move and have fun,” she said.
