About us

We just opened the premier Concierge Performance Gym. So some of you may be wondering how did we get here and what is a Concierge Performance Gym? Well I guess this requires a little back story, but I will keep it brief.

I joined this industry in 2009 while I was in college, worked at an Under Armour affiliated facility, began training UA affiliated athletes and building my book before I ever graduated college. I quickly became the performance director of that facility. I left there to run the fitness and wellness program for a large corporation. Although a nice cushy job with benefits, after almost 3 years I was going insane sitting behind a desk most of my day. So, six years ago I jumped back into the mud. I jumped back into the jungle that is personal training (sometimes referred to as privatized strength and conditioning if you want to sound ostentatious).

Over the last decade I worked with Paralympic Gold Medalists, World Record holders, Olympians from four different countries, All-American Athletes, a Heisman Trophy winner, Top 5 draft picks in two different sports, and literally hundreds of other clients. Throughout those experiences I knew something was wrong with the industry of strength and conditioning, and personal training. My relationship with the field became one of those, “It isn’t you it’s me” break-up lines, but we all know what that line really means. (Insert slow depressing songs from high school here…)

The point was, it wasn’t me. It was the field. The field is archaic, and it glorifies itself over the service it provides. And by the way, typically the service it provides is a complete pile of shit...well actually a few different piles of shit.

Shitpile number 1: Personal training. Built off the concept that you have about/over a thousand dollars per month to spend on the services of an individual who may, or may not, have gone to school for anything related to Exercise Science or Kinesiology. Possibly they have a certification of some level or some alphabet soup behind their name, most of which means nothing to you the client, nor do you know what those letters behind their name mean. Also, personal training is a commission based field, so trainers often view the client as a walking dollar sign and not an individual. Yay! Wow! What a system!

Let’s go with the other way people use personal training. Let’s say you can’t afford to train with a trainer at least 2 or 3 times a week, but you still want some guidance for your program. So you train once a week (on top of the cost of your gym membership) then hope you can get a good, unguided, workout on your own, knowing full well you probably don’t really know what the hell you are doing, aren’t willing to push yourself hard enough, or don’t know how to progress or regress an exercise properly if something is too easy, or too hard. Either way personal training is either brutally expensive, or it doesn’t offer enough for you to get the results you want.

Shitpile number 2: Group training. Holy hell does this suck. So basically you pay between 150 to 300 dollars, if not more, per month to show up to class times that may or may not really fit your schedule, to go through a lift likely not personalized to you, with a ratio of what? 10? 15? 20 to 1? It is impossible for one person to effectively coach 20 people at a time, let alone attempt to personalize workouts for a class when they have no idea who, or how many, are showing up. So you are going through the motions, hoping you don’t get hurt, hoping for results, in a class not designed for you or your goals. Currently the economy is in a OK spot, but if this were post WWII Germany I would recommend that burning your money for heat would be more useful than joining group classes. If you just want to sweat and don’t care about trackable and consistent progress, then maybe group classes are for you, and I guess that’s OK?

Shitpile number 3: You join a gym thinking that if you just read magazines and listen to other members, you will magically learn the art of training. Like somehow the people in the gym, that can’t accomplish their own goals, will guide you to a realm they themselves don’t know the way too. Believing that will work is a Lord of the Rings Gandalf the White Deus ex Machina prayer. It hasn’t worked well for many people, and almost guaranteed won’t work well for you; at least not when the programs become serious. You need the one squat rack but someone is doing wrist curls in it, guess your lift is going to take a while today, if it happens at all. You start your lift and someone asks to work in, but you only had 30 minutes to get your lift in, and they want to go through a full warm-up and use different weights, but you’re the jerk if you don’t let them work in. Yeah, good luck with those disaster scenarios.

The Solution: So as one of my former bosses said, bring me solutions not problems. Well here we are. The Iron Bunker. The solution to all of the fitness industry issues. How did we do it? Create something that has never existed, by making sure we are none of the previously identified problems. We are a Concierge Performance Gym. We are membership based where every program, for every client, is written and based on the client’s individual needs, goals, and restrictions. Sounds like someone just arbitrarily writing programs? HERESY! We have limited our membership so our multiple strength and conditioning coaches can be working on the floor to train you and guide you through your program. At roughly half the cost of personal training, we are providing a service with no scheduling limitations, educated staff, the best equipment that exists, and above all else, complete dedication to the client. Let’s change the way the world views training.

Mike Whitman
NSCA, CSCS, USAW