We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Micah Ninteman. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Micah below.

Hi Micah, thanks for joining us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

I think typically several gyms or fitness centers several of them focus on more aesthetics rather than health and functional fitness. It’s rare nowadays to walk into a gym or fitness center and not see that there are no mirrors or scales in the facility. In my facility, you will not find either. We also don’t do any type of 6 weeks or 30 days weight loss challenges because I believe that it should be a life-long term challenge we are chasing not a short one. So at my Gym, we focus solely on being functionally fit and having strong healthy bodies, and although aesthetics will come along with that consistency and hard work, it’s not our primary focus.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am the owner and head trainer of DropZone Athletics. I have been personal training and coaching for more than 6 years and have a Bachelors in Kinesiology and am certified through the American Council on Exercise.

The name and concept of my gym have a few meanings behind it, the main meaning is we just wanted to provide a place where people could Drop in for their daily workout, Drop all the stresses and worries that come with life, and just be able to get into the zone and just for one hour focus on themselves without all the noise of life around them.

My philosophy of fitness and training is, that losing weight can be done through diet and diet alone. But in order to feel strong, confident and as tough as a Spartan, well, that is built through working out. With enough exercise and proper changes in your diet, you can achieve weight loss and lower body fat percentage and muscle gain comes soon after.

Micah feels that the most important thing about being fit is being able to partake in all the activities that you love doing, outside of the gym, with ease and confidence. This can range from carrying all of your groceries or laundry in one trip to playing with your children without getting tired before they do. Or maybe it’s about being more intimate with your husband or wife and feeling confident about yourself. Or about smashing that local 5k or Spartan Race. Maybe its taking your already established fitness to the next level! It’s called functional training because it should make you functional!

And lastly, one thing I pride myself in at our facility is it’s a judge-free zone and we can take all levels of fitness from the 10-year professional to somebody coming in for their first work out ever, all classes can be scaled!

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

The best thing I would say we do with our social media is focus solely on the athletes and not the coaches. I think too often you see coaches or personal trainers trying to show off how to fit they are as compared to how hard our athletes are working. So we love to bring photographers in and take pictures during a few select workouts that way we can feature them on our page. As a fitness coach, I think it should be a given that we are already going to be in good shape (or we would hope so at least) so that should be a given and start giving more spot lights to the members. It’s all about them in the end anyways..

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I mean I would say just opening my first gym in January 2020 right in the middle of a pandemic so resiliency in itself. We really felt like God was opening this door for us and the time was right so we took a leap of faith and open it up when lots of gyms were not even allowed to be inside. But I knew how important fitness is to our health and couldn’t just sit back and see people being denied access to increasing their physical and mental health at the peak of when it’s needed. And not only that but being profitable and the whole gym staying healthy during our first month to open was a blessing itself

Contact Info:

• Website: www.dropzoneathletics.com
• Instagram: @dropzone_athletics
• Facebook: Dropzone Athletics
• Youtube: Dropzone athletics