FXBG Neighbors Podcast
Fredericksburg Neighbors Podcast
FXBG Neighbors Podcast
EP #64 Strength Beyond the Gym: Honor Bound Fit's Mission
From a trailer loaded with workout equipment to a thriving fitness community, Honor Bound Fit has transformed the Fredericksburg fitness landscape with purpose and passion. Founded by former Marines Keith Linde and Rich, this isn't just a place to build muscle—it's where veterans reconnect with purpose, where strength training meets character development, and where faith boldly intertwines with fitness.
What makes Honor Bound Fit unique? While many gyms trap members in the "human hamster wheel" of endless cardio and calorie counting, Keith focuses on building muscle for longevity. "We wanted to slow it down and focus on building actual muscle that will give you longevity so when you're 80, you can roll in the grass with your kids," he explains. This approach particularly resonates with their primary demographic—women over 40 who discover the transformative benefits of proper strength training in a supportive environment.
The gym's core values extend beyond physical fitness. "The obstacle is the way. Growth is found in suffering," reads one principle prominently displayed on their wall. This philosophy permeates everything they do, from challenging workouts to monthly "rucking" events that culminate in their signature "Guidon 22"—a grueling 22-mile ruck with 22-pound packs that raises funds for veteran support organizations. The event powerfully addresses the sobering statistic of 22 veterans lost to suicide daily while creating meaningful community connections.
Don't let the dumbbells, kettlebells, and bumper plates intimidate you. Honor Bound Fit welcomes everyone from complete beginners to experienced athletes. Their approach emphasizes consistency over intensity, recognizing that small, sustainable changes yield the greatest long-term results. As Keith puts it, "Don't be intimidated. If you're not used to a gym, you don't know what to do, we will work with you." Ready to join a fitness community that builds both strength and purpose? Visit honorboundfit.com or find them on Facebook and Instagram to learn more about this veteran-owned gym that's changing lives one rep at a time.
Keith Linde
Honor Bound Fit
Keith@HonorBoundFIT.com
+1 540-737-8337
45 Centreport Parkway, Fredericksburg, VA, United States, Virginia
This is the Fredericksburg Neighbors Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Dori Stewart.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to another episode of the FXBG Neighbors Podcast, where we share the stories of our favorite local brands. I'm excited to introduce you to my guest. Today. We have Keith Linde joining us with Honor Bound Fit. Keith, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:I'm excited to get to know you and to get to know your business. So let's start there. Share with us a little bit about Honor Bound Fit.
Speaker 3:So Honor Bound Fit is a group training facility. We're located off of Centerport Parkway in Fredericksburg. We host group classes and have open gym and really try to focus on building strength and fitness overall to improve our members lives not just in the gym but also outside of the gym. We do a lot of character discipline tie-ins where we talk about consistency and motivation talking about but also outside of the gym we do a lot of character discipline tie-ins where we talk about consistency and motivation, talking about things about living of high moral virtues that could be being a better spouse or parent, being a more spiritual person. We're very bold in our faith and we don't shy away from it. Along with that, the physical benefit you get from working out in a communal setting with friends that can motivate you and support you, along with getting outside of the gym and doing good for your community, is really what we stand for amazing, amazing.
Speaker 2:So tell me a little bit about the journey. Uh, how did the business come to be? What is your background?
Speaker 3:uh, so me and myself and the other owner, rich we're friends at quantico when we were Marines back in the early teens and got out and been lifelong friends ever since Since then. This last year Rich brought up, asked if I was ever going to pursue my dream of launching a gym and you know, I said no, no, now is not the time. And a few weeks later I got back to him and said yeah, let's, let's do it. And we hosted our first workout in 2024 on Memorial Day at Black Rifle Coffee. They quickly became good friends of ours and we hosted many workouts in their parking lot. We hosted workouts at Brooks Park, 511, tactical Downtown and Cornerstone Church. That was last year. All of our gear was on a trailer. We'd pull up and host free as in a parking lot, just trying to spread health and fitness and get a community going to do good things. From there we got into our place in Centerport in September and have been running classes ever since and just growing and doing good things.
Speaker 3:Part of our mission was really to connect, really try to target veterans and try to connect them with the community and connect them with their purpose. Again, we talk often about when you get out of the military. You lose that tribe that you had, that you were around all the time, and you kind of lose your sense of purpose. You don't really know how to fit into the rest of society sometimes, or you don't know how to find a group or to find something to do when you get out. We want to provide a place for people, for veterans especially, to show up and belong to something and also help find their purpose and get them back on the right path if they had fallen on hard times. That also extended to first responders, emt, fire, police because they are such a vital role of this community as well.
Speaker 2:I love that. I love that. It's so nice to see that you're creating a space for veterans, and so you've been now in your physical location for a year. Congratulations.
Speaker 3:We hosted a big Memorial Day party. You know, one year strong. There's some stats, something like 90% of gyms don't make it through the first year. So we made it a year, we got there and now we're just going to continue to grow and spread good word through Fredericksburg.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. That's a big milestone. So tell me this your gym focuses on strength training, but you mentioned some other things too character things like that. So talk to me about I imagine it's not just physical, it's mental too. So dive a little bit deeper into the benefits of your gym compared to maybe others.
Speaker 3:Yeah, aside from the health benefits that strength training brings to someone increased bone mass, increased muscle density you have a buffer against illness If you really focus on building muscle and for a long time, especially women have been targeted on the Pilates class and the lightweight and like the HIIT and all the cardio, and all you're doing is living this human hamster wheel of in cap. You know, calories in, calories out, burning, burning, burning. We wanted to slow it down and focus on let's build some actual muscle that will give you the longevity so when you're 80 you can roll in the grass with your kids.
Speaker 3:Um, now the the character aspect of it. You know we have our core values printed on our wall, we wear them on our hearts and we believe that if you want to have live in an intentional life, if you want to live a moral life, you have to think about it, you have to have conversations, you have to discuss and debate kind of some of these principles that that guide us, some of our character developments. One of our core values is the obstacle is the way growth is found in suffering, and what it really means is that that thing you don't want to do, that thing that you're really afraid of doing, be it homework, be it, you know, cleaning out the garage or showing up to a workout. That thing you shouldn't, that you don't want to do, is probably the thing you should be pursuing to yield the best gain and growth for yourself and for your family.
Speaker 2:I love that and I understand that strong muscles equals life longevity, and so how do you balance pushing people and challenging people with you know potential injuries or things like that? Talk to me a little bit about that.
Speaker 3:Right, talk to me a little bit about that, right? The funny thing is, majority of my clientele is actually women over the age of 40, which is great because they're finding a place where they can lift. But with age, you know, comes a little bit of injury risk and it's more about showing up consistently than having super intense workouts. Now you want to push the intensity and you want to pursue hard things, but the consistent effort over days and weeks and months, that's where your biggest results are going to come from. So small changes of showing up to the gym, cleaning up your diet a little bit and getting a little more sleep, drinking a little bit more water, those small things will build a huge changes. So if you're sore and you're tired, yeah, come in, maybe do one set of the program workout, or come in and just have a mobility day, or you just don't go to full intensity, manage that fatigue over the weeks and months as you make gains across the board.
Speaker 3:Um, so, really big on the injury prevention and a lot of it is is the mobility aspect that I tie in. Um, spend a lot of time working on shoulder mobility, you know, internal, external rotation, all these things that if you're not a gym goer it may not make sense to you, but getting people to focus on can you squat to full depth? If you can squat to full depth in your forties, hopefully you can still do that in your eighties. There's only one way to do that and that's the mobility, the strength and just the consistent effort, cause if you don't use it, you lose it.
Speaker 2:Amazing. So you've built a lot of trust in what you do with your clients. It sounds like you have a lot of expertise in that, so they feel safe pushing themselves working out with you. That's amazing. I love that.
Speaker 3:I definitely hope so.
Speaker 2:Yes, so clearly it took a lot of hard work to get your business up and running and you've hit this big milestone, being in your physical space for a year. So what advice would you give someone who is thinking about starting their own business and taking that leap?
Speaker 3:Pray, pray and pray and work, work hard, but pray first. Like I said, we're very bold in our faith and if you're not a spiritual person, totally understand. Find time to connect, to think, to meditate, get off your phone and start brainstorming ideas and then follow through on the ideas that seem to be working best for you. So you know the the number of ideas we've had. Um, one of the things that we also do at our gym is we do what's called rucking Um. Rucking is any you know, urban backpacking, basically put on some, put some weight on your back and go for timer distance. We start every year with six miles in the spring, um, and then every month we do a group ruck and we add a few miles onto it.
Speaker 3:This this Saturday, the 20th I don't know when this exactly airs we have a 15 mile ruck Coming up in October. We go 18 miles to our culminating event in December, which is 22 miles, called Guidon 22. That event is a fundraiser for Heroes Bridge, which is a veteran support organization in Manassas, but that one is 22 pounds over 22 miles, targeting a. The statistic that was most known about 22 veterans a day remove themselves from our population. We wanted a place where veterans can connect, do something that they're familiar with, but it's also great for anyone of any age to walk for time or distance with a little bit of weight on your back builds grit, builds determination. It's challenging, but you're in this, this community, together, and that was just an idea that we came up with from our past, from our experience. We ran with it and it's been wildly successful and it's a way to give back to the community along with it.
Speaker 2:I love that. I love the higher why of that and the community aspect. So, all of your members, that you all get together and you do this is something that you all do together.
Speaker 3:And we'll have between 20 and 30 people on our rucks. If you check out our Facebook page or Instagram, there's videos of the events and just that, but it's. We're all together, we ruck, we have rest along the way, we have a safety vehicle that's there in case there's any injury which we haven't had one yet, you know knock on wood, but yeah. So we get together and it's free for the public. We post the events on Facebook. We've had a lot of other people show up and just do the RUC, even though if they're not members of the gym. But it's just a really good environment and really good community we belong to.
Speaker 2:Very cool. I love that. So clearly you're very busy in the business, so my question is when you're not working, what are you doing for fun?
Speaker 3:I spend a lot of time with my fiance. We've been hitting theme parks like crazy this year. We were down in Disney recently but it's really that quality time with the friends. I'm much more of an introvert, even though I am coaching in front of people all day. So when my time's off I like to be kind of secluded, but most of my time is caught up here in the gym. So when I'm not, I spend time with with my fiance and my mom and my friends and just try to you know, you know ground myself um church, clearly, with church groups, um and Bible studies and things like that. So I'm also staying grounded with God. Even if I'm busy doing things in the gym, I try to set time apart to really connect and work on that relationship as well.
Speaker 2:Nice. That's so important. So what is something that you wish the listeners knew about? Honor Bound Fit.
Speaker 3:Don't be intimidated. It looks very much like a CrossFit style gym. We have dumbbells, kettlebells, bumper plates and a big rack in the middle. But don't be intimidated, come in. It doesn't matter if you're a complete newbie or if you're experienced. Don't be intimidated or don't be arrogant. You know like be willing.
Speaker 3:One of our, one of our core values is talking about. You should be an eternal student, willing to learn from anyone because someone might know more than you. The same thing I learned from my clients all the time. I have clients that have been or are personal trainers, that work out with me and we go back and forth. So don't be intimidated. If you're not used to a gym, you don't know what to do. We will work with you. We'll guide you through the workouts. You're with people that are, that are pursuing the same goals as you, and then, if you do have a lot of experience, come learn something new. Maybe it's something I haven't tried before. Some of my clients they talk about how you know. Yeah, I worked out all the time, but I've never done this kind of stuff and it's nothing crazy. It's just a different approach on some of the same principles that everyone already uses.
Speaker 2:I'm really glad you shared that, because I know a lot of women are very intimidated when it comes time to finding a gym, so thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it. Yeah, so if the listeners want to connect with you, visit you, learn more from you, where can they find you?
Speaker 3:We are. Three main ways are honorboundfit. com On there you can sign up to join a class or just to get more information. We also have our Facebook and Instagram, honorbound Fit. Those have reels and videos of people working out. We're doing our own social media and we're not the best at it, but hey, capcut helps us out a lot, so don't be too harsh on the quality of the videos, but we're just trying to spread the word and that's the best way to get ahold of us. The website, facebook and Instagram.
Speaker 2:Nice, Keith. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today and sharing Honor Bound Fit with us.
Speaker 3:It was my honor, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Fredericksburg Neighbors Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to fxbgneighborspodcast. com.