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

DJ, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

I come from a fitness background and have worked in gyms since I was a teenager. During those years I suffered from crippling drug addiction and alcoholism and it reflected poorly, as you might expect, on my work. . In active addiction I had numerous close calls with death and jail. I overdosed multiple times and was in several car accidents falling asleep at the wheel. Fortunately no one was injured. When things came crashing down, I got sober at the age of 21 and relocated to Delray Beach, Florida for treatment for substance abuse. Sobriety gave me a sense of having a new lease on life and it became my purpose to be of service to others in recovery. I noticed quickly that this too reflected on my work. In addition to having countless opportunities to work with newly sober individuals and show others that it was possible to achieve sobriety as it was taught to me, I was able to translate that purpose to the health and fitness field and show others a better way of life.

When the pandemic started, I lost all of my jobs at a string of gyms around Palm Beach County. My wife, Amanda who is also a personal trainer, and I had already built a gym in our home for training clients. In addition to gyms and other businesses closing due to the Pandemic, clubhouses and meeting places for the recovery community were also closed and the sobriety of many suffered because of this. Amanda and I decided to use our equipment at the house to host free group workouts for people in the recovery community as a platform for people to reconnect. I thought of my experience in early sobriety of how vital the community and fellowship aspect of it was to me staying sober. It was our way of trying to help. From the first workout we hosted in 2020 that had maybe seven or eight people in attendance, it quickly grew to 30-40 people within a matter of months. With the help from our friend, Christian Vann, we hosted these workouts every other week. We called it LIFT: The Obsession. It was outdoors in the middle of the day in south Florida heat in my front and backyard and must have looked insane to passersby, but people kept coming back!

After a while, inspired by other organizations like Recovery Through Repetition and Temperance Training, we thought we could expand on what we were accomplishing and established LIFT: The Obession Inc., a Non-Profit organization dedicated to the advancement of resources for people in recovery. We made it a donation-based workout and the contributions we are able to collect go toward funding newly sober individuals to become certified trainers and group fitness instructors.

While LIFT: The Obsession found its footing and grew, it occurred to Amanda and I that this class concept was widely enjoyed. By this time we had returned to our jobs as trainers to local gyms and the atmosphere was very different. We understood that small businesses were struggling due to new Covid regulations, but the cash grab-vibe of the day-to-day operations made us feel like we weren’t having fun anymore. The LIFT: The Obsession community gave us all of the encouragement we needed to go out on our own. We opened LivWel Strength & Conditioning in October of 2022 and we have seen nothing but rapid growth since the day we opened. It is a class-based gym in Delray Beach. We took the class concept developed for LIFT: The Obsession and improved it with adequate equipment and great coaching(not to mention a facility with air conditioning out of the south Florida heat!).

Our concept revolves around weight lifting, but more importantly, slowing things down and performing fundamental exercises with weight that will actually challenge people with proper form. But most importantly, it revolves around the community atmosphere that we tried to replicate from LIFT: The Obsession and make it accessible to the public. Things are going phenomenally. Members are seeing results and are plugged in with other members and making lasting relationships and establishing accountability for one another. While LivWel takes up probably 100 hours a week from both Amanda and I in our first year in business, we never fail to remember what made this possible; LTO(LIFT; The Obsession). We continue to host our donation-based workout to serve the recovery community every Saturday at 11am available for everyone and continue to strive toward giving back to the newly sober.

DJ, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is David “DJ” Welliver. I was born in Fairfax, Virginia. I grew up loving to be the center of attention and making people laugh. After a string of consequences in my teenage years, I attended an alternative high school which had a vocational program that allowed me to work a job instead of attending school on Fridays. I got a job at a boxing gym as a front desk associate and sold memberships. I was good at selling memberships! I love people and have always found it easy to connect with others and I think it made me a good salesman. I thought for a time, in high school, that a job in sales would be my future. Until a scheduling mishap at the boxing club occurred in which teenaged me was the only staff member present to teach a class. I instructed a group boxing workout with no preparation, training, or credentials and, from what I’m told, knocked it out of the park. I had the time of my life and everyone in class loved it. Over the years I leaned more and more toward one on one personal training as it paid better, but I never stopped coaching classes. I am known as “the dancing coach”, because I am known to shake my backside from time to time. I am a product of corrective exercise and overcoming every injury and limitation you can think of through lifting weights with proper technique and improving mobility, and because of this I am forever a student of exercise science and learning more to benefit my clients. But the ego in me always keeps me coming back to group exercise where I can be the center of attention and bring my coaching knowledge to a group setting and connect, correct, challenge, and congratulate on a large scale and put as many smiles on as many faces as possible.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

As I said, I come from a fitness background and had done well for myself where I’m from in the Northern Virginia and DC area. When I moved to Florida, I quickly learned how little my past experience meant to building a clientele here. I didn’t know anyone and no one knew me or what value I had to offer. I was very humbled, which is probably something I needed, and had to start from scratch. I spent about seven years working at a string of gyms all over Palm Beach County rebuilding my “brand” and getting to know thousands of people across a 30+ mile radius through group exercise for far less money than I was used to. It took many long days of waking up for work at 3:30am and finishing up work at 9:00pm to build a following that was ready to jump with me. But when we started offering the LIFT: The Obsession workout and posting about it on social media, much of that following jumped on it right away. Then, in turn, resulted in a great number of people who were ready for the LIFT Program more than just the couple times a month we hosted LTO and we had 100 members within days of opening LivWel.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

My business partner is my wife, Amanda! We met working at the same gym in 2016. She got away from the fitness world for a while and worked in an orthopedic office, but after a couple years of her draining herself in an office, I pushed her to get into coaching. I knew she would be great, and even then she blew away any expectation anyone could have had. She had a massive following at the group exercise clubs she was working at and I insisted she not feel pressured to come with me when I opened LivWel. She was so successful in blazing her own path and I didn’t want to take her from that. But when I was started building the club, she jumped with me without hesitation. And now she is our greatest asset at LivWel. Her personality can be that of a mom when it comes to members that may need more love and attention, but she can also be pretty ruthless and take someone down a peg that might be lifting more than they should and needs to work on their form. Outside of that her energy is unparalleled and commands the room in a way that creates structure in the most fun possible way. It’s a sight to behold when an entire room of 24 people look wildly exhausted yet have ear-to-ear smiles they can’t wipe off. And I have to admit, a lot of the dance moves I’m known for were learned from her.      

Contact Info:

• Website: https://livwelstrength.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/livwelstrengthandconditioning/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/livwelstrengthandconditioning/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@livwelstrengthconditioning2082

Image Credits
Samantha Lynn