For 10 years, Alex Kain of A1 Health and Fitness (previously A1 CrossFit) has been helping people in Washington County get fit and stay health. This week, he and his sister Liz Dreher join me to talk about his background in fitness, how the gym got started, the journey over the past 10 years, and how you can have a great time at their 10 year celebration on Sunday, September 15th.
They joined me on today's show to talk about the gym, their journey, and the celebration. And with that, here are 15 minutes on A1 Health and Fitness's 10th anniversary celebration. With Alex Kane and Liz Dreher on Fifteen Minutes with Fuzz.
Alex, thanks for joining me today. Can you first tell us a bit about your background? How did you get started here into the world of fitness?
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And so like 18 years old, started helping out at Badger Middle School coaching, gymnastics and kind of kept going from there. I kept a, a job of coaching, all through college and. And post-College and, stuff like that.
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And through that and through connections met some people, in New Zealand and had an opportunity to go to New Zealand to coach and spent a total of about three and a half years there and then another year or so in Australia as well. So, and you were working with their national teams, or is that Yeah, so, they're basically, when they compete, they compete in the ICU or the International Cheer Union.
Okay. Basically, yeah, they created a national team that would go over and compete, and so I was put in charge of, well, like co charge or whatever. Sure. Of those two teams. So, helped work with those teams. I
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Yeah, yeah. So, I didn't spend a lot of time in the cheerleading world, uh, uh, growing up with my, my oldest daughter. Maybe my youngest daughter, who's outside this room right now, might, uh, get into it, but.
Okay.
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I mean, even high school, there's, there's competitive teams. But, yeah, it's a lot of, gymnastics, you know, tumbling across the floor, they even compete on a spring floor too, so similar to what you'd have in gymnastics. And then doing like, yeah, mounts and stunts and stuff like that, where you're lifting people up in the air and holding them up.
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Vincent, DePaul. Sure, so it
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years, so:
So I, I've always been into fitness and, and working out and stuff like that. And so, I had always done like barbell movements, you know, squatting, benching, deadlift, you know, traditional stuff like that. And, but then having a gymnastics background, I was very much into gymnastics type strength movements.
And so when it came out, I just, Like naturally almost kind of gravitated towards it because it took two things that I was kind of already doing and blended them together.
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Sure.
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I love everything about CrossFit. But I think for a lot of people, it's, it tends to be pretty extreme.
Mm hmm.
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It is too far over their head. And even from the standpoint of like, if you have a mother of three getting into fitness or wanting to lose some weight or whatever, you know, doing something like a heavy snatch or, you know, um, uh, uh, more handstand pushups, exactly. Yeah. It's Hands down walking. I mean, some of that extreme, like, high level stuff is just, there's no real need for it, too, you know?
, so, in a day to day application, it just doesn't really make sense.
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So keeping it new by bringing in different movements and stuff like that. But at the same time, you know, a combination of hit and, you know, hit being high intensity interval training versus like a more of a longer term, kind of longterm, not longterm, but longer in duration training versus a short kind of what you would call a sprint style.
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That's kind of how we shifted our focus to In terms of, like, fitness is like this big, there's a lot more to fitness than just working out, you know? And, realistically speaking, it comes down to what people are trying to achieve, you know? Are they, are they wanting to be, everyone has a different goal that they're working towards, and so You know, some people could be losing weight.
Other people want to get off their medication. Somebody wants to be able to play with their grandkids. Another person wants to just be better at weekend volleyball or whatever. So everybody has a different reason for why they work out. And so, we kind of, understanding that have like shifted to help people reach their goals.
And, And we're going people about how we can get there by creating a path and creating a road to reach that.
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Yeah
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I mean, a few other people, Kevin, Kristen, Amber, all lost, you know, in the vicinity of 50 to 70 pounds. Sure. And I would say our average client weight loss is, sits around 30 pounds. So yeah, helping people just live healthier lives.
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What's the, what's your. I guess method for getting them to that success.
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Are you looking to gain confidence in, in how you look? Are you looking, you know, for your clothes to fit better? Are you, you know, getting off medication? We had somebody just recently actually get off their sleep machine, which is huge too. And then even the amount of money that you save by getting off medications or a sleep machine is, is, is helpful.
But, it's, it's kind of like digging deeper into what their true goals are and then creating a. a path of how we're going to get there, like creating a road, you know, of this is how we're going to meet those goals. And this is, these are the steps along the way and what we're going to do.
We're gonna have a DJ to kind of keep the Hype Up and Going and Music, Gaining Grit, so Brianna is going to be there with Gaining Grit. She's going to be doing, I think, movement assessments and, and just kind of there to answer questions. I'll be there representing Celtic Nat Massage as well. Fresh Chef from Milwaukee, which is the company that Alex uses at the gym, for meal prepping.
Yeah.
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Yes, they have. Tons of, tons of supplements, sleeping aids, things like that, all really, really good stuff. Felicia, who's wonderful from Blue Luna, is gonna be there, and she just has a amazing presence to begin with, but she's gonna be bringing some product, clothing, yoga clothed, ointments. All kinds of really good stuff, so I'm excited about that as well.
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Yeah, definitely. And we'll be giving away some prizes and stuff like that too. So what she, what my sister listed off, like Gaining Grit, Blue Luna, we have, other stuff from Foxtown Brewery as well. We might have a few other vendors there, but basically, we'll be giving away, prizes. Like, bags of gifts and stuff like that to, for fitness stuff.
Yeah, fitness challenges, but just kind of to, you know, give back to the community. Sure. For, you know, we've been here ten years and it's been, it's crazy to think that it's been ten years already, but, yeah. Yeah. It's been. Those things go fast. They do. Ha ha ha.
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So getting to that, and as we wrap up here, sometimes for people who are getting started into, Wanting to make a change for themselves, these things can be kind of daunting and maybe, you know, it's something that is intimidating. So if somebody wants to make a change, what kind of advice can you give them, maybe when selecting what, what gym to start at or how to maybe take those first steps?
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And then that will definitely help with the making it not feel quite so intimidating. You know, for some people, the best road is maybe personal training where they're going to work one on one. Just to get more confident with themselves and with, handling weights before they step into like even a group setting or something like that.
So, think it's really important to, to have a conversation just, you know, if you're getting your kitchen remodeled, you wouldn't just hire anybody off the street and say, Hey, can you do this for me? You'd want to talk to them and find out, you know, what kind of products are they bringing in and what kind of like, how are they going to do it?
How long is my house going to be under, under construction? You know, it's same thing with, Fitness, you know, how long is this road going to take? Can we, can we set some goals? You know, how are we going to get there? Yeah, absolutely.
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The instruments that you need so that you can hit your goals, stay on your goals, and, and then live your goals. You know, it's, it's not, this isn't a week long. It's not a yo yo
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September 15th. Time again?
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So, I think a lot of our members have been sharing it and stuff like that, so they should be able to find it that way too. Perfect. Well,
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Always good to see them and always good to hear from you. If you have an idea for a guest for this show, let us Please feel free to suggest a guest. Go to fuzzmartin. com slash guest and fill in the form. That is fuzzmartin. com slash guest. If you prefer to just email instead of going to a website and filling out a form, you can do that too.
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Thank you so much for listening. Have a great week and I will talk to you next Tuesday, right here on Fifteen Minutes with Fuzz.
