CIRCLE PINES, Minn. – (Feb. 5, 2015) – It’s deep winter and cabin fever is setting in. This time of year in Minnesota is about finding ways to stay active or make good on that New Year’s Resolution. That is where Fit 4 Life in Circle Pines changes the game. It is not an ordinary gym with standard routines. Here they run a fast paced 30 minute boot camp and the exercises vary everyday.
“We want you to push yourself, get that heart rate really going. Even if it’s a core work you can really get that heart rate going. It’s kind of like intervals. So if you hear a lot about in the training world or outside of here about interval training, it’s kind of similar to that,” said personal trainer Kristy Adrian. Instead of motivating yourself to work out alone, this group setting with a personal vibe has exactly what anyone looking to get healthy needs, a routine.
“There’s just a different mindset when you’re doing something with someone, you build that sense of community and connection with someone else you’re doing it with. There’s a big difference between like if I just tell you do ten push-ups now but if you’re in a group of like five people and you all start doing push-ups. You know if you start to get tired and it’s just you, you’re gonna slack off and I might yell at you but you’re used to that if you do. A good trainer, they yell at you all the time, but if the person next to you is really going at it, you’re like oh man I gotta catch up to this guy. I gotta do my push-ups too. It just kind of raises the level,” said Fit 4 Life owner John Maravelas.
This gym focuses on encouragement. “Any environment we try to make here is very encouraging. Both of the trainers who work for me have gone through a significant weight loss of there own so they know exactly what everyone is going through and then we try to make nutrition a huge part of it as well. Obviously you can’t out train a bad diet, I’m sure you’ve heard that before,” said Maravelas. Two years ago Adrian not only had a huge transformation but now takes that success story as an example to her clients as she is now a trainer for Fit 4 Life.
“So I had no idea what to expect out of the whole thing and then as I got started with the boot camps I quickly fell in love and realized it was something I really liked. Its 30 minutes and you leave and go about your day. So I started out coming three days a week. I just kind of continued on my weight loss. It took me about 14 months to lose 100 pounds,” said Adrian. Transformations do not come easy and mindset has a lot to do with that. “Losing the weight was a challenge. You had your plateaus that you kinda had to figure out why you’re plateauing and how to get through that. It’s really great to have that support system around you to help you do that. You know my home life, my husband, and my kids are really supportive. I think the big takeaway is to really make sure you keep yourself the most important. If you’re battling nutrition or weight you gotta kinda always stay one step ahead of yourself and keep yourself the forefront. Otherwise you’re gonna revert to those old tendencies again,” said Adrian. Maravelas has created a setting that actually cares about its clients and pays attention to who is showing up. When he was a trainer at a corporate gym he said about 85 percent of the members almost never work out. He was out to change that kind of gym atmosphere.
“I tried doing some, just to make it more affordable to people, I started training them in groups instead of one on one cause one on one training can get a little expensive. I actually started finding they liked it better and got better results so we started doing more of the groups. At a local 24 hour gym you could maybe do a group of like three people before it gets out of hand so we started looking for a space to find and that’s when we found this space, opened it up about two years ago and so we’ve been open since,” said Maravelas.
With weekly regimes and daily workouts, Fit 4 Life combines a hard fast paced cardio routine with muscle building. It’s a 30 minute work out that just about anyone can do as long as they are willing. “Workout wise again its 30 minutes and not many places you go have a 30 minute session and we incorporate a lot of things within that 30 minutes. We have our cardio, we do our weight training, we do full body movements. We focus each day on a specific body part so that changes everyday but we try to get a little bit of core work and everything in within that 30 minutes,” said Adrian. The kinds of transformations this gym has seen is evidence that is can be valuable to the community. There current goal is to reach 10,000 people.
“Not everybody has to lose weight. Just a matter of wanting to get into shape is really important too. It’s not always about weight loss. We have clients here that don’t need to lose weight. They’re here just to tome and bringing in the family atmosphere I think that really fits in with this small community as well and that’s kind of what binds us all together,” said Adrian. This winter when you want to lose some weight, do some activity, or just get healthy Maravelas and Adrian have certainly created a space to maximize those benefits. More information on Fit 4 Life can be found here.
