We’ve all been there — you meant to stop at the gym, but with getting the kids off to school, a long day at the office, errands, cooking dinner and helping the kids with their homework, exercise fell by the wayside.
And it doesn’t help that the reduced daylight hours of this time of year leave very little time for fitting in a run, walk or other outdoor exercise while it’s still light out.
What if the gym could come to you at the office to fit into your busy schedule?
Make way for GYMGUYZ, a traveling gym-on-wheels coming soon to Issaquah, Sammamish and Redmond. Owner Kevin Poskitt of Snoqualmie is bringing the national brand, popular on the East Coast but virtually unheard of out west, to the area to serve the needs of what he sees as a very indoor and un-moving population.
“[People] don’t have any time to work out,” Poskitt said. “They need another option.”
The traveling van, complete with weights, exercise balls, ladders, ropes and “everything that would be in Gold’s,” according to Poskitt, brings sports and fitness to people, whether at their home, office, a park or anywhere that is convenient. In an office setting, this could mean an office-wide team-building event, or personal, one-on-one training that is done in a conference or break room.
“Think of personal training in the gym; now think of personal training anywhere you would rather be,” Poskitt said. “You could be anywhere; we’ll come to where you are.”
This means not only any location but also any age group —“to preschool, grade schools, all the way up to senior centers and everybody in between,” according to Poskitt. And people of every athletic ability are welcome, because the trainers “can train Olympic athletes down to someone 100 pounds overweight.” All personal trainers are nationally certified, and Poskitt said that most have degrees in either kinesiology or nutrition and exercise.
The tech hub of Western Washington is the worst area of the country in terms of lack of exercise, Poskitt said. With an abundance of office jobs that require people to be glued to their chairs and computer screens and workers devoting 50, 60, 70 or more hours a week to their careers, there seems to be little room left in people’s lives for fitness.
“In our society, obesity, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes are at all-time high. It’s never been like this in the history of the country,” Poskitt said. “Our society is lazier than it’s ever been. Uber, Amazon and Walmart are delivering everything to your house. You don’t have to go anywhere or do anything.”
For Poskitt, the decision to get involved in GYMGUYZ was highly personal. Last year, his father died at age 79 — an age, Poskitt said, that was “way too early” to go. During the last 10 years of his life, Poskitt described how his father “could barely walk,” and said that this suffering could have been avoided with different habits in life.
“He never worked out,” Poskitt said. “He wasn’t the type to go to a gym.”
Poskitt, too, had to make the decision to change his lifestyle for a healthier model. Spending 23 years in sales, he said, meant taking clients to calorie-filled dinners and pushing exercise off to just the weekends.
“[Exercise] … was always a weekend scenario for me,” Poskitt said. But after a career switch, “fitness is my job.”
Poskitt opens GYMGUYZ in December in Issaquah, Sammamish and Redmond, and plans to expand to other areas of the Eastside and Seattle in the future. GYMGUYZ can be booked in packets of 20 one-hour sessions at $89 per session. There is no membership fee to take part in GYMGUYZ.
“If you’re not using your body, your body is not going to work,” Poskitt said. “If I could start people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, they’ll have a better quality of life. That’s what people need, the ability to create healthy habits.”
