Category: Business

Our gym exists to host our tribe. We all agree on our core fitness values: strength training, high intensity training, high protein. Those are the values of the Formosa Fitness tribe. If you want to join us, then you should agree with those. If not, we are not the place for you.

Having such a clear statement about what you stand for, and what you don’t, is rare these days. Most people don’t like such strong statements, another reason we aren’t for most people. It’s especially unpopular to draw lines between people and say we want this group, but not this other group. That’s “discrimination” and we all know that’s a dirty word these days.

Well we discriminate every single day. Do you eat food that fell on the sidewalk? Why not? Are you a bigot? The food didn’t ask to get dropped there, did it? How about eating at a restaurant where the cook doesn’t wash his hands? Who are we say that certain behaviors by people are more desirable than others? Isn’t that discrimination? Of course, it is. We discriminate everyday but we often don’t have the guts to call it that.

Formosa Fitness is a small gym. I’m okay with saying that. We don’t have the space to cater to everyone. Like what you see here? This is what we do:

We got one new guy a while back that complained on a local message board that we should give him 3 liters of free water every time he comes in. Why? Because he demanded it, that’s why. And if you demand something, you should always get it, correct? Well that’s what a lot of people think. He also complained that it was too hot — downstairs, where it is consistently cool. I just paid NT37,000 for the electricity bill in September BTW. We come to the gym to workout, not get comfortable. I told this gentlemen that we charge significantly less than the local 7-11 for bottled water and do this as a courtesy to gymgoers, but he persisted with his demands two more times. The last time, I told him we would not be giving him free water and if he didn’t like it, he could go work out somewhere else. As the chief, it’s my job to police the tribe. If we let people like that in, then those of us that want to train hard will find it impossible to do so.

This is the kind of thing most people don’t understand. Many of the local gyms give away water and towels because they RIP PEOPLE OFF so their profit margin is much higher. We don’t rip people off so our profits are much lower. Second, NOTHING IS FREE! Someone is paying for that! If my costs as the gym owner go up, then guess what? I’m passing that cost on to the gymgoer. No, I will NOT eat into our meager profit margins to cater to people too lazy to bring their own water from home or buy our reasonable priced water at the gym. Third, we don’t want the kind of people that demand “free stuff” in order to work out.

At the big local gorilla gym, men blow dry their testicles in the locker rooms.
People play on their cell phones on the equipment rather than train hard.
They join the gym just to play in the dirty jacuzzi. “Play” has many definitions, too.
There is a disco ball in the “weight room” at the fancy pants gym down the street.
And people get flashed in the showers.
THAT is the local gym culture that gives away “free stuff.” Is that what you want? Because that is the very opposite of what we do. We are against all that.

If I chose to go down that path for the business, we would go out of business! There would be nothing special about us in any way. We would have people laying all over the equipment picking their noses. We would have to have 20 treadmills for people to walk on while watching TV because that’s what “free stuff” people demand. We don’t have space for that and we are not that kind of gym.

We are a niche gym and our niche is strength, high intensity cardio training, and training with integrity.
The most important two minutes you’ll ever spend regarding fitness is right here. Watch this:
[youtube=http://youtu.be/j8JS3kqUTqM?t-A&start=105]
THAT is what we are about! BTW, Gym Jones are the folks that trained the cast of “300” and “Man of Steel,” etc.

We are not trying to be everything to everyone. We are not the Wal-Mart of fitness. So understand that we welcome everyone to join us, but if you do then you must agree to follow our culture and live by our fitness values. Hope to see you at the gym.

We have new items for sale! Get a free one hour seminar on how to use the equipment with most purchases! Details below!
Power bands in five sizes:
1. NT490
2. NT690
3. NT750
4. NT890
5. NT1090
full set for NT3600 — almost 10% off!
Get a free one hour seminar in how to use the bands when you buy a set! We have these seminars every month at the gym.

Gymnastic rings NT1400 for a pair — plus a free seminar in how to use them.

Heavy Duty Sandbags — NT1950 — get a free seminar in how to use the sandbags PLUS approximately 30kg of sand for free!

Soft Medicine Balls
2kg NT1300
4kg NT1600
6kg NT1900
8kg NT2200
10kg NT2500
Full set for NT8500 over 10% off!

For more information on the products or to sign up for the seminars, please call 2365-5223. Thanks!

I don’t like to toot my own horn but a new gym has opened up in Taipei and they’re telling people they’re the first functional fitness gym in Taiwan and the only place to have bumper plates, etc. We don’t need to lie about who we are or what we do because at this point we’ve trained literally thousands of people from around Taiwan in our fitness classes, private sessions, and seminars. I think our commitment to the local fitness community has been proven but perhaps we need to tell our story a bit so people know who we are and where we’ve come from.

I’ve worked out since about the age of 16 in gyms and have gotten really fit several times (six pack and all) since then. Several years ago, I let my job at the local newspapers get to me. I was sitting in a chair for 10 hours a day and getting off work at 12am. By the time I got home, it was around 1am and I’d sleep in till late morning. Going to work at 3pm left me little time to work out.

I went on a trip with my wife down south and she took a pic of me coming out of the water of the pool. The pic shocked me since i didn’t recognize myself. I had a gut that hung down and shifted the other way when i walked. It was like a counterbalance to every movement i made. i weighed myself and my weight had crept up 10kg. I was totally shocked by this since I’d always been in shape and had ignored what sitting in a chair so much everyday had done to me.

I vowed to get in shape again and did circuit training with basic bodyweight exercises. I got really good results and the fat started coming off. I then read The New Rules of Lifting that talked about a new way of lifting weights based on the six basic motions of the human body — this is called functional fitness. I re-started my gym membership and threw myself into this new way of working out since it seemed so interesting. It worked really well and was totally different from the bodybuilding workouts I’d done before. More fat came off.

I quit my job at the papers since it was killing me and started looking at opening a personal training studio instead. I imported kettlebells using our own money that we had saved up. I did this because the functional fitness community was raving about kettlebells and Taiwan didn’t have anything like that. Well to make a long story short, they were everything they were cracked up to be. This type of functional fitness took even less time than what i was doing before and was aimed at fat loss. i went to Malaysia to get certified in kettlebells and added to my personal training cert, I then opened Formosa Fitness.

We started in an office that i shared with the workers from another company. The owners had their pingpong table in a large room that i offered to rent and they charged a cheap price and seemed kind of amused by the request. I had been teaching martial arts to a few folks and I told them we’d be switching over to pure fitness and most of them agreed to stay and continue. They formed my first core of students.

From there, word spread and we grew and grew. It didn’t always grow quickly and there were a lot of bumps along the way, but the general trend was upward. i saved the little money we made and used it to buy new equipment. Most everything we made was put back into the business and we eventually grew into our second space. This is where Formosa Fitness really bloomed. We were down a back alley that was dark and damp but people sought us out and we loved them for it. Our group classes grew and so did my personal training clients. Word was spreading quicker at this point and my schedule filled up. I started our own Kettlebell Taiwan certification by this time and was certifying other trainers with the kettlebell. Through the cert, I met a trainer named Abram that seemed to “get it” more than some of the others and he came to work for me as my first trainer. I was able to take my first vacation in two years after that!

About a year and nine months ago, we moved into our third and current location. Again with the money we saved up, I invested back into the business and responded to what my customers said they wanted — a bigger gym with more equipment that they could use to train themselves. They had “graduated” from personal training and classes because I TEACH people how to exercise instead of just leading workouts and these folks had “gotten it” and wanted to pursue their own fitness path outside of class. So we took a HUGE leap of faith and opened our current location. I made a massive personal investment, going against the current trends by buying with cash all of our equipment. Our business model also changed since the members I talked to had no problem paying just a little more for the open gym concept.

Not long after opening, i was honored to write the forward to the Chinese edition of The Four Hour Body by Tim Ferriss. We also taught a series of seminars that brought 20 new people into the gym every week for 4 months. I had taught seminars to the public before but we ramped them up to meet the demand and hundreds have joined us since then. i also taught seminars in Kaoshiung and Tainan. Our team expanded to four trainers and we trained them to led the seminars on their own.

This was the largest seminar i ever taught with over 70 people. I also have certified nearly 200 personal trainers in Taiwan in my kettlebell system. I even taught 10 of these 8 hours-a-day certs in 11 days once. It took me nearly a week to recover from that! But it was worth it because I really want trainers and people in general to succeed in fitness.

Since then, we’ve released two fitness DVDs for people that have to work out at home, we’ve sponsored our own fitness competition that we’re running every year, we’ve sold a  lot of kettlebells to satisfied customers all over Taiwan, we’ve been featured in every major news outlet and TV network, we’ve held seminars for the internationally famous trainer Steve Maxwell who has visited us twice and brought new fitness techniques to Taiwan, we’ve hosted Southeast Asian Olympic lifting champion Lewis Chua for a lifting seminar, but more importantly, we’ve reached tons of people that we couldn’t have reached otherwise and helped them get fit and healthy. We’ve racked up many testimonials from them and we’re honored by their kind words. Here are just the ones in English, the Chinese ones are listed on a separate site because putting them all together would be too long.

Despite false claims being made, we brought functional fitness to Taiwan many years ago and our body of work stands as testament to that. It certainly hasn’t always been easy and I wondered several times if we would survive the many setbacks we had along the way. But with the support of the local fitness community and people like you, Formosa Fitness has blossomed into what it is today and we thank you so much for that! Without your support, we wouldn’t have made it this far and we plan to continue servicing the community with the highest level of service and equipment that we can provide.

The story doesn’t end here because it’s still being written. I’m off to the gym to train myself and teach a few people now. Hope I can see you there some time.

The largest gym in Taiwan recently sued the “consumer protection agency” and unfortunately, they lost. Full story here.

Now right up front, I don’t agree with the gym’s policies and I would never go there. The dispute was apparently over the fact that if you buy a personal training package, you couldn’t get a refund for that package in the future nor could you change trainers. I see why they don’t offer a refund — they deeply discount the package if you buy more/stay longer. So now customers can get the benefit of the cheaper price for agreeing to stay longer without fulfilling their end of the bargain by….you know….actually staying longer. The second part I agree with — people should be allowed to change trainers within reason. I don’t know why the gym wouldn’t agree to that but maybe they have their reasons.

The reason this bothers me so much though is that we’re about 5-10 years away from being able to run any kind of small business, and it’s nonsense like this that’s making it happen.

When is ANYONE EVER personally responsible for ANYTHING they do? When? Someone chooses a gym, walks in the door (no one dragged them there, did they?), takes a tour, decides to join, SIGNS the contract, etc. I don’t see any slaves in this equation. No one was forced at gunpoint to do anything. If someone doesn’t like the gym policies then it’s bizarrely simple — GO SOMEWHERE ELSE!!!!

As a society we get further and further away from any hint of personal responsibility and there will be consequences that people don’t realize. We expect to be saved from every bad decision we make but the person at fault is never, ever us. It’s someone else.

The problem is the idea that “the customer is always right” but they aren’t. The customer is always right, right up until it’s bad for business. And who makes the call whether or not that’s bad for business? The business does, NOT the customer.

Now we love our customers but about once a month we get a request or even a demand that is simply beyond what we’re willing or capable of doing. Satisfying this customer simply isn’t worth the trouble. Example? I traded 25 emails with a guy wanting to buy a product so he knew what he was getting and then he wanted to send it back after he got it because it wasn’t what he expected. I said no. When I take my time to send 25 emails then I’ve gone way beyond any reasonable expectations of me as a business owner.

A friend in the swimsuit business recently closed shop after a customer bought a swimsuit, wore it the beach, got sand it in, then demanded a refund because “it was dirty when I got it.” This stuff happens but it shouldn’t.

And here’s the thing — we business owners need to start telling the customer this. When people make unreasonable requests, I push back. Unreasonable demands need to be called out and customers that are more trouble than they’re worth need to be shown the door. We make the vast, overwhelming number of our customers and clients very happy. The rest shouldn’t be allowed to ruin it for everyone but with a government and a society that tells them nothing is their fault, they have the political power to do it.

People need to start taking personal responsibility for their actions and they need to be called on it when they aren’t. A business should make it’s policies clear but when it does, you either accept them or you’re free to go somewhere else. Telling business owners that “you’re not the boss, I’m the boss” is absolutely unacceptable and will make a lot of small businesses go bankrupt. We aren’t large, faceless corporations with large staffs. But the same demands get made on us because many people believe “the 40 hour work week is the modern form of slavery” and if you have a business then “you didn’t build that, someone else made that happen.” This kind of thinking is totally ignorant of how difficult it is and how much work and personal money a business owner puts into the business. We try our best to make it look effortless and we want to be stoic about it all, but believe me, the risks are huge and it’s a ton of work. We try to hide it because it’s unseemly, even unmanly, to complain about how difficult it is. But when people with a huge sense of entitlement make unreasonable demands that might threaten the business, then we need to openly talk about this stuff.

Modern people are used to being endlessly courted and pandered to and there are serious political and societal consequences to this process. Before you sign your name on a contract, think about what you’re agreeing to and if you do agree to the demands of the contract, then be a man or a woman and uphold your end of the agreement. It’s really that simple.

I highly suggest you pick up a well-known general personal training cert like the NASM CPT. NASM is a very dynamic, and forward looking cert. Their info is very good and up-to-date.
Beyond that, I highly recommend you pick up a second non-traditional training cert in something you’d want to be your specialty. Something like kettlebells via me, Steve Maxwell, or the IKFF, would work nicely. Other good specialist certs are Monkey Bar Gym with Jon Hinds and Tactical Athlete with Jeff Martone. I recommend these guys because they are all ethical, no-nonsense guys that have great material.
You need a specialty cert because the CPT certs are usually good, but basic and largely theoretical. The CPT cert would be necessary to get a job. The specialty certs are mostly practical and will show you how to actually get good results with clients. Having both would put you ahead of other beginning trainers.
If you plan to just train people as a side business on your own, only the specialty cert is necessary.