It’s hard to believe that we have been changing lives for 8 years! Stretch Fitness started in March, 2013 when our CEO, Dawn Thelen, found her corporate job unfulfilling and wanted to turn her hobby of coaching people into a part-time career. She started by training clients out of her and her husband’s basement in a private 1:1 atmosphere, which also included online nutrition and fitness coaching for clients from all over the globe! When they made their decision to pack up their house and say good-bye to the Midwest winters and move south to Chattanooga, TN, Dawn decided to throw out her corporate attire of high heels, suits and nylons and trade them in for sneakers and tank tops full-time! Taking that leap of faith was scary to say the least with giving up a great paying corporate job, benefits and paycheck security and moving somewhere completely new, not knowing a single soul! But it had been her life-long dream to have a career in fitness. For the first 4 years of living in Chattanooga, she built an amazing in-person team of clients, training them in their 1,300 sq. ft. basement that had been turned into a commercial gym, but she always had that ultimate goal of a brick and mortar gym someday. With the ever-growing success of her online coaching business, Dawn decided to create an online training monthly membership format for all of those that weren’t local, but wanted to be a part of the Stretch Fitness team and train online with her. That is when the online training program, Sweat Club, was created. June 2018 to be exact! Dawn and her husband had huge goals of her being able to expand out of the house gym and into a physical gym, and then COVID happened and halted all the plans. COVID brought a whole new opportunity for Stretch Fitness and Sweat Club, including providing free live Zoom kids bootcamps, 3x/week for over 6 months, along with hosting live Sweat Club bootcamps via Zoom! Once gyms were able to open up again, she found that more and more people were wanting to train with her in person, so many in fact that she had to start turning down new clients and she knew right then and there it was time to shoot for the stars and go after her dream! After finding the perfect location for the gym, the construction of the Sweat Club gym began! Dawn, her husband and friends were responsible for constructing the beautiful gym you see today. For two months they worked 14 to 16 hour days building the gym, while still working their regular jobs and pouring all of their heart and soul into the place that would be responsible for changing lives and building amazing relationships. When you first walk into the Sweat Club you can just feel the love that was poured into building Dawn’s dream, and when you take one of the bootcamp classes or train with one of the amazing personal trainers, you will find out right away what sets the Sweat Club apart from the rest! Here, you won’t be just another person lost in a huge crowd of other members, you will be a part of the family! We still keep our bootcamp classes on the smaller side so everyone has the same kind of attention and focus that our clients have grown to appreciate, we even have our non-local clients still joining in for live Zoom bootcamps from all over the country to join in on the fun! We want to thank each and every one of you who have been a part of the Stretch Fitness – Sweat Club success over the past 8 years and we are so excited to share with you all that makes our family the awesomeness it has grown to become!
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