You started coming to the gym for a reason, what is it?

Did someone say something to you? Did you look at yourself and ask how things got to that point? Did you just not know what to do and needed help? Were you nervous about being safe and wanted a trainer? Did you want to be part of a community of people with similar goals and challenges? Was it something your doctor said? We used to do these at Kean University every year for football and there were some fascinating stories. None of us were there for the scholarship. We didn’t play at Alabama or Ohio St. so there were no financial benefit, no illegal money from boosters, no state-of-the-art facility, and nobody even knew us around campus. It didn’t even help with getting girls, we were forced to try to develop good personalities for that. We all enjoyed the game enough to play in college despite not having any financial reward or national television coverage. My “Why” for playing college football is way different than why I am in the fitness industry. Your “Why” for coming to the gym may be completely different than why you get up for work in the morning. Maybe it’s not. But I think it’s an important question to ask yourself. I don’t think I would have ever really understood what motivated me until I was asked to tell my story. I could have been utilizing that time to do many other things, including improving my personality to meet more girls! My “Why” for starting Pratt Performance is “To Improve Confidence and Quality of Life.” Cool. Original. I must have really thought outside the box for that Mission Statement. What is more important than the words are the reason that they were chosen. I grew up incredibly overweight. I weighed around 240-ish pounds through middle school. Side note, I was also a world-class rapper with bleach blonde hair, but that’s for another day. No matter how sick my rhymes were, I couldn’t get a girl to go beyond kissing me on the cheek when we played spin the bottle. And like every other overweight kid in middle of all time, I was called fat any time someone was incentivized to make everyone around us laugh. Luckily I played a lot of sports and I was relatively athletic despite my bodyweight. I’m sure this helped balance out the lack of confidence see-saw just a bit. I was introduced to the gym in seventh grade. I was quickly obsessed. This was my escape from Fat Pratt. Since I was bigger, I was already stronger than just about everyone. There was no looking back. Some kids may have had some high-quality fat joke material but they couldn’t come close to what I could do in the gym. The confidence that I gained in the gym is what I want to give to others. I remember my Dad saying the gym can be an intimidating place, especially if you don’t know what to do. He gave me a classic bodybuilding workout which made me feel confident in that I was doing the right things. In the business that I am in, I see people walk in every single day that lack confidence. To be specific, they lack confidence in the gym. They don’t feel great about their body. They think everyone is judging them. They know they should work out. They want to. But they’re