Double Edge Fitness

DE Update | Week of November 17th

• Jacob Wellock

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Have you ever wondered how a community can come together to transform lives beyond the gym? In this week's episode, we celebrate the monumental success of the Metcon for Hope CrossFit competition, raising over $9,000 for Forever 14—a cause that hits close to home. Join us as we discuss the triumphs and the hurdles, like declining CrossFit event participation, that push us to rethink our future strategies. We're inviting you, our vibrant community, to share your ideas and preferences to help shape the future of our events, ensuring they resonate with your passions and interests.

Our updates don't stop there! We spotlight the wins and transitions at the South Gym. With Michelle Morrison leading the charge by exemplifying the power of referrals and winning our $200 raffle, it's clear our community is thriving. We'll give you the scoop on the technical upgrades that are in the works, including the manual light switch installation for a more customized workout environment and the resolution of previous landscaping mismanagement. Your continued support is the backbone of our community, and we're eternally grateful for how your referrals help us grow and improve.

Looking ahead, we're excited to introduce a series of operational updates alongside engaging community initiatives. From switching to a new hand soap that keeps our facilities running smoothly to the rollout of fitness podcasts aimed at sparking dialogue among members, there's plenty to buzz about. Plus, we're thrilled to announce our collaboration with Good Giant, a marketing agency dedicated to elevating our content's consistency and relevance. Your feedback is invaluable, and we can't wait to hear what topics you're eager to explore with us as we embark on this journey together.

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Speaker 1:

all right party people Happy Sunday. Had full intentions of doing this recording at the South Gym this weekend, but my lovely wife wanted to take the dogs to the dog park, let them run around. So I'm at home, so I'm here giving you the weekly update from home. Let's recap what happened this weekend. So we had Metcon for Hope, one of our CrossFit competitions that we run. The teams that came. We ended up raising over $9,000. 100% of that goes to Forever 14.

Speaker 1:

And, as I've said in the past, forever 14 is a foundation that we want to continue to support because it's a big deal to us. Their entire premise of what they do is to bring awareness and prevent teen and adolescent suicide right here in Washoe County. Tragically, like I stated in the past, suicide is the number one cause of death amongst that age group in Washoe County and just this year we had an 11-year-old take their life, the age that this stuff is taking place. It's absolutely tragic and the more we can talk about it, the more we can be support for each other in our community, the better. So raising over $9,000 that helps them with their cause and get their message out and to do the things that they're doing, it's a beautiful thing. We are very grateful for everybody that came down, threw down, got after it. All the competitors did a great job and it was awesome. It was an awesome day for an awesome cause and that that truly grateful for. With that, we are looking at going into 2025, evolving some ideas, changing some things up a little bit when it comes to our competitions, how we do them and so forth. So I'm going to be sending out and trying to connect with members and, you know, people at the gym and also some other local gyms and various ways to evolve these ideas to see what and where the community is going when it comes to participation and stuff.

Speaker 1:

When it comes to the CrossFit style events, if you will, something I've noticed is just participation and interest has dwindled over the years. Speaking for myself in this, my life has definitely evolved. Where I am not competing at CrossFit style things anymore, I feel like that's been kind of a trickle-down effect and a lot of the younger generation of CrossFitters, if you will, that 10 years ago we all used to thrive and this was our training purpose, if you will, it seems like all of us are evolving in life in many ways. I mean for myself, for instance, just speaking for myself, kids' activities, kids' events weekends are busy, months go by fast and the involvement interest community-wide this isn't just something that is affecting us. Just watching local events and local things community-wide, it just seems the interest in these type of events has faded over the years and you know, we're going to be doing a little little market analysis, if you will, a little research and seeing how we want to move forward with events like this and make sure that we're putting our effort, energy into things that you guys want to do, want to participate in and so forth. So, going into 2025, we're going to be taking a scalpel and a microscope and looking at a lot of these things that we do because we want to make sure we're putting our best effort and energy forward for you all and our community when it comes to events and fundraising and various activities. So just keep your eyes and ears out. I will be talking to people and connecting with various people on these topics and seeing what ideas come to fruition through those conversations as we move into the new year. So yeah, another negative there. Just want to make sure that when we're doing something, putting our effort and energy into it, it is something that the community as a whole values and when participation is very low, it sends a signal. So we're just going to. We're going to. We're going to evaluate going into 2025, how we're going to move forward with our events in this category and our fundraising efforts and so forth. So if you guys got ideas, suggestions, feedback on the events that we've run in the past things you liked, things you didn't like giving me insights onto why you no longer maybe you used to compete in these events and now you don't Any insights into those areas are very helpful and help us and myself make decisions on where we can put our effort and energy for you guys All right. So, all in all, awesome weekend, very happy with the money we were able to raise for Forever 14. And that in itself is a huge blessing and we just want to make sure we keep moving forward, helping people out, giving people opportunities to challenge themselves and bring awareness and money and resources to awesome causes like Forever 14.

Speaker 1:

Next, bear Complex. We have a lot of Bear Complex products at both gyms. As I'm taking the microscope and scalpel to various aspects of the business, bear Complex is one of those things. We aren't going to carry Bear Complex anymore, sit on quite a bit of inventory and most folks they have their grips, they have their things they like and they just the state of online retail. It's easy to go and get the things you like and want to try and so forth. I have nothing bad about Bear Complex. It's just inventory we've been sitting on, so it's all marked down 25% If anybody, if y'all are looking for a new pair of hand grips I think there's some weightlifting belts, some knee pads or knee what are they called Compression sleeves, if you will, for your knees. There's various products at both gyms. If you guys want to swoop those up, could make a good stocking stuffer. Add a nice little discount and we're just moving apart from that as being a part of our retail process, if you will. So that's why they're discounted. Bear Complex is a company. Somebody asked me if they're going bankrupt or something. No, I know, it's just a product that we sit on quite a bit and, as I'm looking through the microscope of the business, this is just sitting on inventory for long periods of time like that isn't very advantageous, and although I'm not primarily a retail business, we do offer retail products, and sitting on something for a long time, just not a smart move. So we're gonna move on from those products and if you wanna score them at a discount, now's your opportunity. All right, so snag them up and enjoy them. All right.

Speaker 1:

Michelle Morrison, south Gym member. She won the $200 raffle. I had a video clip somewhere. I did a little raffle deal. She had a bunch of entries. Uh, she brought a nice chunk of folks into the gym last month in the South gym and statistically, looking at how many she had in there, pretty cool. She won. So I'll probably slam that clip of the video into this deal with the raffle. So you know it's authentic.

Speaker 1:

All right, I'm not trying to think I'm pulling a fast one here, but no super pumped for michelle, it's 200 bucks. Spend it. However. You want double-edge supplements, bear complex membership. However you want to apply that $200. Michelle, my brother, jacob, has your gift card and you can use that however you would like.

Speaker 1:

And again, we really appreciate the referrals. It is the biggest compliment we get as coaches is when somebody refers friends and family co-workers to the gym to allow us the opportunity to change their lives and hopefully be the best part of their day also. So again, really thank you guys on your referrals, on your support. It's a big deal to us. It's really helping us a lot right now and we are very grateful. So, yeah, every month I swoop all the cards, I spin the bin, we draw a winner, and that I'm grateful. Thank you so much, really appreciate it. Something I'm really excited about here sal jim this is directed at you guys, sal jim. Actually these next couple bullet points are so if you work out with me or Tammy Chris in the mornings, maybe it's an issue. In the evenings probably is now that it's getting darker a lot earlier, you notice lights just click off.

Speaker 1:

When we built this thing out, we thought it was a great energy efficient kind of idea. All the lights are on individual motion sensors. When there's activity in the gym, they're on. When there's nothing going on in the gym, they're off. These are all LED lights, very energy efficient lights. It was a great idea. It has driven me absolutely bonkers for a few reasons. The coaching class and if all the class is working out at the front of the gym, backlights start clicking off one by one, by one by one, and that combined with I'm trying to get my influencer life on and create some content for you all You're recording videos and you see me having a temperature tantrum and the lights just start shutting off on me. Influencer life on and create some content for you. All you record videos and you see me having a temperature tantrum and the lights just start shutting off on me. Messes up my vibe. So I figured out how to rewire the lights, almost shocked myself once. That's okay, figure out how to rewire them. I am going to be getting after that. It going to take me a little bit of time, but they're all going to go old school. We're going to have the lights on a light switch. It's going to be awesome, super pumped. So when we're in the gym, lights are off. On. When we're out of the gym, lights will be off light switch. So super pumped about that.

Speaker 1:

A couple things people have asked me over the last year, maybe a couple years. So we got some landscape things going on at the South Gym. Right, death of landscaping, got some trees dying. We got some things going on, Something that a lot of people didn't know. I wouldn't expect you to know this, but when we moved in down there, the building did all this.

Speaker 1:

We're part of what's called uh, cam fees, community association management, maybe whatever, but these are the fees that you pay, being a tenant or a resident of a, you know, a business community that takes care of various things such as snow removal, landscaping, overall, keep up of the communal spaces. Well, as you might guess, home Depot is the anchor store of our community down there, and over the last few years well, it was probably shortly after COVID the association management changed, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, for whatever reason, cam fee is getting paid. Nothing was being done for us, nothing at all. We weren't getting any of the benefits but paying the fees.

Speaker 1:

So a couple things happened. There Stopped paying the fees, couldn't get a hold of anybody, couldn't figure out the associate, the people that ran. It was in a different state, I think in Arizona, and it became kind of a legal issue. So good news is a lot of that's being solved right, they admit, they admitted their shortcomings and they're going to rectify that. So, with that, probably over the next year, as things uh get settled with the legal people, uh, things around the outside of the gym will be spruced up, redone trees will be cleaned up, various things are going to take place. So, uh, we also will be, should, should, fingers crossed, be able to participate in the bulk snow removal process that the entire business community down there gets. That we got left out of for whatever reason.

Speaker 1:

Some of this goes back to, I believe, because the previous owners of the building there's like 25 of them and it was a shit show back then. I'm sure something got lost or something happened, whatever, but either way, we just got kind of cut out of it all and there's a new association, a new company that manages everything. We're connecting with them. They admitted their shortcomings, they are rectifying the situation and we should be seeing some nice progress on the community outdoor spaces of Double-edged south over the next year.

Speaker 1:

So I wanted to share that, because I have had members ask me like hey, bro, like, not to mention, I noticed it too. I mean, like I pull up, I park in front of these dead trees every day and, trust me, I want to cut them down. But we needed the proof that they were there and that they used to be alive. Now they're dead. This, this stuff needs to be reconciled because we had paid for a long time for nothing to be done. So all of you that have asked me what's happening with this stuff it looks kind of run down a little, beat up blah, blah. We're on it All right. Inside of the gym is where the magic happens. Let's just all make sure we remember that gym is where the magic happens. Let's just all make sure we remember that. I think we're doing a pretty good job of keeping that dialed in sharp.

Speaker 1:

So next piece of news for South Bathrooms those little stools in there Gonna be getting rid of those pretty soon. Got some benches that are gonna be built that are gonna go in the bathrooms or the showers, are for changing and so forth. Because I hate those benches and I've had discussions with a few members that have been very politely kind towards me that they hate them too. It's a fair evaluation and this is one of those instances of giving me some feedback and then me being in there yeah, let's fix it. There's no reason to keep something that's not working If it's not satisfying. You all tell me about it and I'll either tell you why we keep it or why we're going to get rid of it. And most of the time because the mass majority of people in my life I'm very grateful for have common sense and when they bring me an idea or suggestion, I'm like you know what. That's a pretty good idea and I'm going to go ahead and make that change. So we do have benches being built to fit that space where those little I think they're footstools. To be be honest, didn't really think that through when we put those in there. I don't know either way getting fixed.

Speaker 1:

Next topic in that department hand soap in the bathrooms. As all of you guys know, I've come to the end of my agreement, starting in march, trying to end it sooner, but with Cintas we are parting ways all right. So current hand soaps that we have in there, little pumps. A couple problems have come up. Problem one some folks pump the lotion into their hand thinking it's soap. Okay, that's. That's a problem in itself. Probably too tired from the workout to distinguish between the two. Either way we've got lotion, hand soap and the two little pumpy things. Here's the issue the hand soap and lotion clog the hell out of the drains With that. The soap I'm going to be moving to that I've been testing at midtown works great, doesn't clog drains, cleans the hands and it works good. So I will be installing those and then we'll have singular bottles of standard lotion that looks like lotion, that is, lotion that used as lotion, that shouldn't be confused as hand soap ever again.

Speaker 1:

And with those two brilliant changes I mean this is this is brilliance of my brain, hard at work here. With those two changes, the clogging of drains should no longer exist, because I've had to solve it a couple times and that is what's causing the drains to clog because lotion goes down, the drain gets stuck, water doesn't run long enough to eat through it, to get it moving long enough, and I don't want water running all day. So, and then the other soap that's in there. It's very sticky and it does collect on the drains. I had to bore out one of the drains the other day to do that. This isn't just a sow thing. When we've had this soap in the past at Midtown, it was the same issue. So the foam soap that I did switch to goes down the drain nice and smooth, doesn't stick to anything and doesn't clog the drain. So call that a win-win all the way around.

Speaker 1:

I think that's the end of the operational updates. I am curious if there is a member in the gym who listens to this, because a couple of you do, which I appreciate. But if there's a member in the gym who listens to this, because a couple of you do, which I appreciate. But if there's a member in the gym who listens to this and who has thought maybe they would like to be on some podcasts and weekly updates and have some member owner coach conversations, bringing me and the community member insights to things, asking me questions that I can answer, and just have an open dialogue with some members via the podcast. And no, we don't need to exactly always come in, do it in person. It's cool when we can, but I have software that actually does a great job in a remote situation.

Speaker 1:

So in that circumstance, let's say, you, whoever's watching this decide like, hey, I kind of want to be on that, talk with derek and give my insights, feedback, thoughts, ask questions, so forth. What would happen is, when we record this, there would be another video right here beside me and we'd capture the whole conversation together, just like we do here. So pretty cool. If there's anybody interested out there, hit me up. I think it could be fun, I think it could be insightful. A lot of members bring me great feedback, thoughts and ideas and if you got something you want to talk about from your story at Double Edge your fitness journey, your health journey, to insights, thoughts and things that you've seen, or questions. For me, I think it'd be cool, so I'm throwing the idea out there. All right, don't get me wrong. Talking to myself into this is, you know, I love it, truly love it. But being able to have a conversation with you know, members of our community, and to share those stories, ideas and thoughts, I think it would be cool. With that, met with marketing agency this week. Good Giant, we're going to start working with them. It's going to be fun, get my head wrapped around it, because they're going to apply structure to me when it comes to content creation, ideas, thoughts, consistency when it comes to educational pieces, when it comes to a lot of the marketing stuff. But really they're going to give me guides, templates and structure to create consistent content, and a lot of that is my desire to bring more educational stuff.

Speaker 1:

A lot of times when I do create something or talk about something educational, it's really on a whim. It's either I'm reading something currently that I feel I want to share, a couple members ask me about something, so I get inspired to make educational content. The reality is a lot of that stuff just comes to my brain throughout the day, throughout the weeks, and then I just make something and then nothing comes up for a couple weeks and I don't make anything. A lot of that is driven from coaching classes, talking with members, people at the gym, seeing what questions are being asked and so forth, but it's not consistent into where I'm having something that maybe you guys can look forward to and whatnot. If there's things you wanna learn about, if there's things you want more information on, and so forth, always, always, always, feel free to let me know what those are.

Speaker 1:

I will do the research, I will dig through the weeds, I will sort out the good from the bad to the best of my abilities and try to get you guys the most current, accurate health and fitness educational content that I possibly can. I love doing that, but I also don't always know what people want and I'd rather create educational information that interests you guys, because that is why I do this. I like learning for myself and I'm constantly listening to podcasts and reading newsletters and keeping up with current trends in the health fitness longevity space and you know, as I get through that, for my own consumption and my own knowledge, I do like to share that with you guys. So that's where a lot of it comes from. They're going to help me apply structure to my brain when it comes to that stuff, but also you guys giving me thoughts and feedback on what you want to learn or what you got going on, or if you read something and you're not sure about it, shoot it to me and I will. I will do the legwork. One, I enjoy it and, two, that's my job as your coach. I'm here to help you. So please, please, please, please, share that stuff with me. All right?

Speaker 1:

Last part of this I want to chat about is goal setting and reflections post-chat for myself. So you guys that follow me or keep up with whatever I'm doing or training for particularly, I use various benchmarks throughout the year to give me kind of a training focus. Obviously, like most of us, my training purpose is to be healthy and fit, but I do like pushing my body and training for specific things and I use various workouts and things we do around the gym and so forth to line up a training goal with an event that's coming up. So Chad was the most recent one. I made the goal a while back that I was going to do Chad this year at 65 pounds. The goal is to do it under an hour. Did Chad 65 pounds, met my goal under an hour? Let me tell you, it's taken me a full week to recover from that. It hurt Muscles, general fatigue, my joints. I threw my hip out a little bit and, yeah, so it was. Last week, took it easy, recovering and now I'm starting to reflect on the next block of training.

Speaker 1:

And you know the repetitive, mundane wake up exercise for our health can become just that repetitive and mundane. Having goals and purpose to your training, I think, is important. I think it is important. It helps keep the sword sharp. If you will, now you push forward towards a goal, recover, you come back, we set a new one. And I'm personally reflecting on the next objective, if you will, for myself, and I'm just curious if you guys have evolved your thinking around training in that paradigm. If you will, Training for something specific, whether it be in the gym, outside the gym, using your fitness for other things, and using these kind of benchmarks to promote optimal levels and higher levels of fitness.

Speaker 1:

It's easy to get stagnant in our training and that's not necessarily always a bad thing. Maintaining a level of fitness and pushing forward and progressing to become fitter, that is, you're not just going to be on a constant. What do you want to say? Upward trajectory with health and fitness? Right, we train three days a week. If we're progressively overloading properly and by that I mean following our percentages with our strength work, pushing our respiratory rates and our rate of perceived efforts we are going to continually make progress.

Speaker 1:

At a certain point it becomes one of these deals of like how much progress am I going to make and where do I start walking that tightrope? Am I able to recover from the, the continued progression, if you will, and I think the body and mind come to a point that taking a season of maintenance is okay and allows that. So currently I hit some strength numbers uh, the bench press, back squat and deadlift that I was pretty excited about. My goal with that, for me personally, was to be over 1,000 pounds. I ended up lifting 1,125 pounds between the bench press, back squat and deadlift. For me in my long-term health, how I'm thinking about that is I want to strive to maintain a thousand pounds or better until age 50 and then reevaluate once again where my body, where my life at, what are my goals at that juncture of my life, and I think that's a good benchmark for what do you want to say? Core strength to be able to use as a metric, an objective metric moving forward when it comes to cardio respiratory kind of work.

Speaker 1:

I test my 2K row every year, making sure that my aerobic capacity is up. I'm also looking into opportunities for us to test our VO2 max in the gym. It's a very interesting topic to get some of the traditional VO2 max testing equipments very, very, very, very, very expensive, and I'm also trying to digest through proxies for testing VO2 max, because these data devices like Apple Watch gives you an algorithm driven VO2 max calculation. I don't find it to be accurate at all. I also can't say it's inaccurate. I'm just speculating here because it says I have a pretty low VO2 max and I not egotistical here, but I tend to believe my VO2 max is pretty good. So I do want to find a, a way, a system or a device or some more proxies as far as fitness tests to evaluate vo2 max for folks, and what I'm getting at here is I am building a comprehensive list of strength, aerobic mobility tests and goals that I believe should be achievable but should help us plan not really plan, but set our goals towards achieving when it comes to living a long, healthy, fit lifestyle, having some objective benchmarks that we should be able to achieve and if we're not quite there yet, it gives us a goal to pursue and I want these to be.

Speaker 1:

There's going to be probably some crossfit elements to them, but I want to be simple in execution. Objective data that can be a guide for our members. As far as what should I strive to achieve? Uh, like, being able to do five unbroken pull-ups. Being able to do 20 to 30 push-ups. When it comes to muscular endurance, should I be able to complete a 2K row under eight minutes? Should I be able to hold a zone two heart rate for an hour? Should I be able to deadlift two times my body weight, back squat one half times my body weight and squat one and a half times my body weight and bench press my body weight? Again, there needs to be objective proxies for these, because body weight always isn't the most accurate tool for people to assess their strength in various lifts, although I do firmly believe you need to be able to carry your own weight. So using percentage of body weights as a metric is. I think there's value in that, but I don't think it should be the only one.

Speaker 1:

This is consuming as I'm blabbering on here. This is consuming a significant amount of my thought lately and I've been taking a lot of notes and journaling, essentially using myself selfishly I guess not selfishly, I don't know what the right word is but I've been using myself as a benchmark standard and trying to set a standard and then, based on the numbers I'm doing with these, what are reasonable, achievable but not watered-down versions for us to strive to as a community to achieve. That's all driven around long-term health fitness and I want to try to build that out decade by decade and both male and female, of what those look like. I'm really hoping to roll this out in the beginning of 2025. That's one reason I've been doing these various tests and so forth so that we can roll out some exciting forth. So that we can roll out some exciting I'm going to say objective benchmarks for everybody to be striving for and be able to set goals towards achieving as part of your fitness journey. And some of these are going to. A lot of them are going to be strength and endurance kind of goals, but we're also going to have body composition, blood work management goals, because all this stuff is objective data that ultimately influences your long-term health, health span, vitality and so forth.

Speaker 1:

So, yeah, that's kind of the update, for the day Went a little long, but that's okay because I know that you guys love it and, as you're driving to the gym multiple days trying to get through this 30-something minutes of blabbering on, just know I love you and I appreciate you, excited to get after another week with everybody and let's just keep kicking butt. Love you guys and I will see you. Many of you in class. All right, stay awesome.