Transcription of Kim and Tim DeMado for the show Whole-Body Learning #185
Here in the studio today with us we have two individuals that I have quite a lot of interest in talking to because they’re doing things that I love, personally love and also love to see my friends and patients and family members doing and that is getting people’s bodies moving. This is Kim and Tim DeMado who are owners of Athletes Training Solutions and Triple Jump Fitness which is a children’s fitness center in Portland’s Bayside neighborhood but also so much more. You actually are doing lots of different things on lots of different levels to help people stay fit. Thanks for coming in and talking to us today.
Kim: Thank you.
Tim: Thank you.
Dr. L. Belisle: You both have been pretty active in your own lives for a long time. I know that Kim you were trained as a gymnast when you were younger.
Kim: Exactly.
Dr. L. Belisle: Tim you went to Springfield and you have a degree?
Tim: A master’s degree in physical education.
Dr. L. Belisle: This is something that you both feel really passionate about. Tell me about that. Why this? What was it about being physical and helping other people to get to their best level of fitness that appealed to each of you?
Kim: I think being a gymnast and then I spun into the love of being fit and running and being involved with gymnastics was a good correlation of staying flexible and strong and fit and we evolved from kids on up into the adult field.
Tim: I had an extensive coaching background from when I was younger aside from playing background. Initially when I was going into graduate school, I was thinking of going the route of more sports management, athletic administration, be an athletic director at a school, but my true passion was always more in the anatomy and physiology should we say, the training piece, the nuts and bolts of what makes people excel and how they use their bodies and I decided that was the route I was going to go. I like to say combine my passion for physical performance with my ability to coach because at the end of the day if you’re going to be successful as a trainer I think you need to be a successful coach or a successful teacher, good at both of those.
I feel in some ways couple of my, maybe some of my biggest skills I can apply to the industry.
Dr. L. Belisle: Both of you chose to come to Maine. Kim you are from [Shelburne 00:40:06] Vermont and Tim you are from Connecticut. Why Maine?
Kim: From Burlington, I went on to school down in Massachusetts, but wanted to stay on the water side and found the love of Portland. It was a smaller Boston area and at that time I was actually managing Portland athletic clubs adult fitness programs and later on started some gymnastics there. Some of the kids programming as well as the daycare and that’s when our first business or my first business started as Tumble Kids which was in Falmouth for ten years and got a very nice offer to go to Bay Club so put all the equipment in storage but still was missing that piece and that’s pretty much where we said, “Let’s take the adult and kid piece and keep it here in Portland and bring it to the community.
Dr. L. Belisle: How about you Tim?
Tim: Well I had a long-term [affinity 00:41:09] and connection with Maine because my folks owned a house, summer house north of here, so pretty much my whole life I came up here in the summers. I lived in Boston for a number of years before I moved here, grew up in Connecticut and then moved to Boston. A lot of my initial experience in this industry from a managerial and a training side was in Boston, but I knew I always had a goal to want to get back to Maine and I felt if I was really going to be able to distinguish myself in this industry it wasn’t going to happen in Boston. It was going to have to be in a little bit smaller market, a little less saturated. I made that move in 2004 and here I am today.
Dr. L. Belisle: I love the model that you have that not only are you doing children’s fitness, but you really bring it up through the ages so it’s almost like you could bring your whole family down to Triple Jump and anybody could really get involved. Why did you decide to do that and not just specialize in, well Kim you could specialize in Tumble Kids originally or Tim you could specialize in adults. Why bring them all together?
Tim: Well like you said we have an overlying family based fitness theme and I think the health fitness industry there’s a lot of competition. There’s many places you can go for an option for on one on one training, small group training, boot camps, performance enhancement for your middle or high school son or daughter but what we chose to do and a niche we wanted to create was still having some of those needs and wants that we deliver those but also that we also had that specialty with what I like to say gross motor skill development for the young kids.
Really it’s seen through gymnastics but at the end of the day it’s really more about body awareness and like I said really trying to enhance youngsters gross motor skills, anything from anywhere from six and a half months old right up to twelve. Then from their you start with the performance training for your middle or high school son or daughter and then we also have the adult training whether it’s semi private one to two people or one on one or also we call more small group six to ten people. In order to really try to distinguish ourselves and create a unique selling point, we wanted to create this image of being able to satisfy a fitness need for all those, well really those three levels, hence the name triple jump fitness.
It’s really based on where you are in life. You’re jumping from one of those areas to the next, not to mention if mom is in one of our small group classes and her fourteen-year-old son is doing sports performance training for his basketball team and he’s fourteen and maybe his younger sister is seven years old and she’s in one our gymnastic classes. We have something, we have an offering for all of those different age groups.
Dr. L. Belisle: Kim your philosophy is, your fitness philosophy is anything is possible, mind over matter, say you can do it and you will, say you can’t and you probably won’t which I think is so great because it ties in the whole mind/body connection. I mean we talk about the physical, but we all know that there’s something about the mind that can keep us from doing things or can actually propel us forward.
Kim: Right talking from the children’s aspect I think the number one thing I hear so often is I can’t. What I try very hard to help children become confident and help with their self esteem and realize that you can. It may not happen right at this moment and there’s goals that we can set trying to keep the competitive piece out of it but really focus on where you are and sometimes when you go to a more competitive gym and I see children who can be turned off because I don’t have that particular [move 00:46:02]. I’m not as flexible as that girl or whatever. That’s a big huge piece when I’m working with the children, I’m sure Tim is when he’s working with the older kids as well but it’s just amazing.
The first thing they’ll do when they go across the Bounce [Beam 00:46:22], “I can’t do it,” “Well let’s see if we try,” and I have to set up little strategies with each individual. [As we know 00:46:25] kids are so different. It’s been a great opportunity for kids to explore their bodies, not just physically but also just from their mindset.
Dr. L. Belisle: I can attest to the work that you do because I used to bring my daughter over to your studio and it was in Falmouth and she was not a gymnast. She was not a dancer. She had other interests, lacrosse and soccer and things like that but she really enjoyed being at your place. She really enjoyed working with you in particular because she felt like there was an openness to it. You weren’t saying, “You have to do this or you have to do this.” You were saying, “Let’s see what we can do.”
Kim: Right.
Dr. L. Belisle: Do you see a relationship between people who pay attention to their physical fitness and also have some passion for life, some success in their lives, do you see that there’s some crossover there?
Tim: One of the biggest things I think whether it’s another area in your life, one of the biggest things is that you have to be consistent. You have to have some goals initially and then you have to be consistent in trying to reach those goals. I’d like to say physical fitness or training can be a microcosm of that. The programs we have whether it’s the young children or the teenagers or the adults, it’s systematized training. We usually have them in different phases of training, not only through the programming but then being consistent with the programming. That’s how they start to see gains and make gains.
I really feel that’s one of the keys to why people come back. Just to touch on a point that Kim was talking about, one of the most unique things about training for I think any age whether it’s the little guys or the kids and even especially the adults is taking somebody who may not feel they have the ability to do something and you’re able to prove to them that they can. There’s something really to be said for that because from the standpoint of self confidence and feeling better about yourself, I think there’s nothing better.
At the end of the day, I know it costs money but it can go a long way towards your overall self esteem and self confidence that you’ve been in a systematized program for a while and you’ve kept at it and you’re able to physically do something that maybe three months down the road you never thought possible. There’s something that very rewarding for people with that.
Dr. L. Belisle: You both have experience with this. I know Tim you have prepared full scholarship athletes for Maine for their collegiate playing careers. Kim you have a running club. You’re a two time iron man finisher yourself. You’re a triathlete. You’re both examples of showing up every day, doing the work, having the discipline, putting your mind to it and really being able to meet goals that you’ve set. What’s the difference between what you have to offer and some of the other local sports club have to offer, fitness clubs.
Tim: I really am very passionate and have done a lot of trial and error over the years with my program design. You can create a situation with training where it can become a regular part of your life just like brushing your teeth is. However, that doesn’t mean that you have someone come in or a group of people come in and you’re going to wing it or they’re going to be doing the same thing over and over again. You have to have some kind of method to your madness and have them in some kind of system that is progressive whether it has to do with altering volume and intensity with exercises, whether it has to do with exercise difficulty.
The human body is an amazing thing. The thing about the human body is at the end of the day, it wants to adapt because it’s thinking survival. It’s thinking about balance. You almost have to try to counteract that. You have to keep it out of balance so you’re able to continue to make gains. I’ve had actually a fair amount of clients who have been with me since I moved here over ten years ago. I’d like to say that a lot of that is we’ve created a situation where it’s become a necessity in their life but they really like the programming, they like the phases I move them in. They like the fact that there’s just a lot of things that are specific to what their needs are.
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Dr. L. Belisle: Kim you were saying that you have a Facebook presence and you had an open house and two hundred and fifty people showed up as a result of a Facebook post. It sounds like you’re building a great community.
Kim: What was amazing when the structure was just starting I mean somebody is looking in the window and sees our Facebook page and calls me and says, “I want to have my son’s birthday party there.” I’m went, “I’m not even open.” She goes, “I know, but I looked in the window and I saw it on Facebook,” and I had no idea there was so many moms, new moms, new moms, new moms. It’s been amazing the different moms groups that have been renting the space or utilizing the space or meeting at this space. I think that myself knowing as a mom and I’ve been to a number of different places, it’s comfortable because it’s all in one level.
They can actually sit and relax where you’re not on three floors trying to find your child or you want to talk with a friend and just have a social time because sometimes we need that as adults because it’s been kid time. Facebook was amazing or still is amazing.
Dr. L. Belisle: Tim how do people find out about Triple Jump Fitness?
Tim: I think we’ve done a lot in terms of there’s been a lot of good word of mouth. We’ve had some good success with what we’ve done with Facebook. I think one thing we’ve seen a lot of positive experiences is the fact that we really we are trying to deliver a product to a couple of different markets there. You could have a mother or father who comes in with their son or daughter to have them even in one of the open gyms or one of the gymnastic space classes. Then they find out. They might not have even known before they see what we’re doing there and from the training end maybe that would be a good fit for them or possibly even their older son or daughter who is an athlete, a young athlete.
Dr. L. Belisle: For people who are listening who would like to learn more?
Kim: We do have a website and that was part of the we had two websites and two Facebook pages and two accounts and two tax returns. It was when we started working with [Summit 9 00:56:04] and [trying creating 00:56:05] once that merged together December 31st is when we launched the new name and started the new year 2015 with the new name same building, same coaches, same philosophies but it’s a great way for I didn’t know. I’m going to tell my grandson or I’m going to tell my sister or I’m going to tell … and it’s been much easier to manage but also show people that there at one point it was just a Tumble [Tikes 00:56:35] website or a Facebook page, now it’s interacting together.
Dr. L. Belisle: What is your website?
Kim: It is triplejumpfitness.com.
Dr. L. Belisle: Well it’s really been a pleasure to speak with the two of you. You’re doing great work getting people out there and motivated and helping them reach goals, helping them feel better about themselves, mentally, emotionally, physically, helping them socialize, bringing good business to the Bayside area.
We’ve been speaking with Kim and Tim DeMado who are owners of Triple Jump Fitness. I really appreciate your coming in and I really appreciate all the things that you’re doing for the Portland, Maine area.
Kim: Thank you.
Tim: Thank you very much.
Male: Thank you.