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WBOC LEADING LADY
MANDY WEBB
Making fitness goals effective and achievable Alyssa Dearborn
A
s businesses of all kinds begin to fully reopen after the pandemic, Mandy Webb and KW Fitness of Fayetteville are welcoming back clients. For Webb and the other personal trainers, encouraging healthy living has never been better. “We fortunately have a business model where it’s always been private or semi-private, so our personal training sessions are by appointment only.” Mandy replied when asked about how her business had to adapt to the past year. “We didn’t know how people would take to virtual training. We heard a lot of really great feedback from our clients that it gave them some sense of normalcy, that they had an appointment to look forward to, but now everyone’s glad to be back in person. We still have a handful of people who are virtual because one client, for example, has cancer and she can’t really be around people. So that has helped us having virtual training because we never would have been able to accommodate her with her cancer.”
Many clients at KW Fitness are happy to be working with their trainers again in person, though, since Webb’s work fills an overlooked need in the fitness industry. With about 80 percent of her cliental being women over the age of 50, many feel that KW Fitness caters to their unique needs. “I think the biggest thing is KW Fitness is really great for people who are intimidated by going to a gym. They go in and they look at equipment and they don’t know what to do. That’s why people have gym memberships but don’t use them. It’s a comfortable atmosphere. Everyone’s starting the same way. We have some people who come to us because they like to exercise but just want to be challenged and pushed a little, but we have a lot of people who come to us because they don’t know what they’re supposed to do. They need guidance and want to be safe.” Webb wants people to know that the environment provided at KW Fitness is not just for seasoned athletes who are training for a big event. The programs are applicable to anyone of any body type.
July 2021
“A lot of people think a personal trainer is for someone who wants to be a bodybuilder or do a physical competition.” Webb said, “But most of the people who come here are people who just want to have a better quality of life. They want to be stronger, have less pain, better mobility, better balance, also to lose weight, and to just have more independence in their later years. We have clients in their eighties that come to us and they are strong and they’re able to be independent.” “One of our clients,” she explained, “she turns 80 in October, and she went to a high school reunion last year or the year before and it scared her because two of her friends were on oxygen and another needed a walker. And she’s like, ‘I don’t want to be that person. I want to be keep doing this as long as I can.’ And she’s not, you know, lifting heavy, crazy weights. She’s just moving. It’s really changing her life.” A major part of KW Fitness’s brand is teaching their clients how to set goals and more importantly, how to re-evaluate those goals. Some of these goals,
she explains, go far beyond the surface goal of weight loss. “We’ll have people who sit down and first come to us and say, ‘I want to lose this much weight.’ But having just that one surface goal isn’t enough to keep people going. So we often dig deeper with them, ask them why it’s important. We ask, you know, ‘Why do you want to lose 20 pounds?’ Is it because your doctor said so? Because you’re not going to be motivated to do that. What is your underlying reason? And when they dig deep and get emotional about it, it’s a lot more exciting to stay on track.” “We have a lot of people who have grandkids and they say, ‘I want to be able to be around when they graduate’ or ‘I want to be able to be on the floor and play with the grandkids and get up without hurting myself.’ Those types of things are more exciting to work toward a goal than just that surface level goal.” When clients discover their underlying goals, they discover to look beyond the numbers on the scale. Webb and the other trainers at the company teach The Summer, Food & Entertainment Edition
