If you are not excited about this then you have lost the will to live…

So I can finally go public. This is the real deal ladies and gents. This will be the best facility any of you have ever trained in. We are going all out on this so I hope you can come along. The lifetime (or 5 years whichever comes first) memberships are halfway towards being gone. If you want one you’ll have to cough up fast. This is all taken from Will’s blog so that’s why I’m referred to in the third person!

From informedperformance.wordpress.com…

You may have heard some rumours circulating recently about me building a new gym and sports training centre? Well you should have heard them because I’ve started heaps of them and have been blabbing about it to anyone all over town who’d listen….the ones that I didn’t start myself were started by Barry who keeps a secret even worse than I do.

The new gym will be call ‘Informed Performance’ and it will be opening in May this year. I wanted to make sure I got it up here first before Barry tried to scoop me…after all Saturday is a slow day blog wise…I was hoping this announcement might boost my weekly blog readership average.

So this is the scoop…what is happening is that myself and Barry Oglesby of K.O Martial Arts are joining forces…we’ve come to the view that two brains are better than one…or in this case…that between us our two brains should at least be the equivalent of one.

The whole gang from K.O Martial Arts will basically be moving down the road to a much bigger and better facility and all of my athletes and clients on the north side of Dublin won’t have to trek to the many different venues where they currently train. We’ll also be opening the gym to new memberships as well naturally…this will be for both individuals and teams but more about that later.

The new gym will cater to a multitude of sports from Brazilian Jui Jitsu, muay thai, mixed martial arts and boxing to GAA, football, basketball, tennis, hockey and rugby and everything else in between for that matter.

The facility is over 700 square metres or over 7500 square feet…for those of you to whom that means nothing a basketball court is around 420 square metres or around 4500 square feet…to there will be plenty of room to swing a cat…or any other implement you want.

The gym will feature amongst other things a caged 150 square metre jiu jitsu and grappling area, a 150 square metre striking and boxing area, a competition sized elevated boxing ring, a fully equipped gym, 25 metres of track for speed and acceleration training and testing as well as over 120 square metres of field turf for sport specific drills, tackling, agility work, med ball throwing and general messing about.

The building is one thing…what you don’t see is all the stuff that’s inside it…the medicine balls, weights, viper belts, sleds, timing gates, force plates, punching bags, speedballs, tackle pads, sandbags, coffee machine, tyres, ropes, monkey bars, boxes, hurdles, ladders and on and on the list goes.

Barry and I are still fighting over the colour scheme…I’m thinking pink and fuscia?

What you are missing here is the view of the mezzanine…but use your imagination.

So as far as what is going on now….what is changing and what is staying the same?

1. K.O Martial Arts will stay K.O Martial Arts it will just be at Informed Performance.
2. I won’t be leaving the current gym and I won’t be abandoning those athletes and clients with whom I already work…so no tears and no temper tantrums please.
3. There will be a new website for the new gym at http://www.informedperformance.com (feel free to bookmark it now…you know you want to) and on that website you will find a link to this blog…which will be at willheffernan.com and Barry’s blog will be moving to barryoglesby.com…I was thinking about not mentioning this…specifically to Barry as I personally own barryoglesby.com…which as you all know essentially means that I own Barry…I couldn’t keep it a secret though…I thought it would be too cruel…he has such high hopes of interweb stardom. Now all this isn’t all going to happen right away but it is going to happen…just want to make sure that everyone is a part of the process.

So what about the stuff that is going to be different?
We’re basically going to go all out…it is the all singing, all dancing facility that both Barry and I in our separate ways have always wanted….only it is all in the same facility. What it is in fact is the place that Barry and I want to train in but want you all to pay for. The location won’t be fancy but we are pretty sure that anyone who sees what Informed Performance will have to offer will jump at the chance to join. The entire place will be a reflection of what both Barry and I are passionate about. That includes all of the sporting, fitness and martial arts stuff obviously, but also all the geeky nerdy stuff too. The entire gym will be a wireless hotspot which means we’ll be doing all sorts of cool stuff like having webcams on some classes, webcasts and webinars and so on, and we’ll be able to use all of the cool coaching toys that we’d love to use right now but don’t have the technology to. The blogs will be expanding because now you won’t just get to read about sessions…you’ll be able to watch them as they happen. You’ll be able to watch a MMA class…you can see a team testing…you can watch me sit around abusing people while Barry comforts them. In fact, I challenge anyone to come up with an idea or feature that is gym and or training related that we won’t have in ours…except for the stuff that we have thought about and decided was crap and won’t be putting in.

If you really want to know how good Informed Performance is….then just wait and see how many other existing facilities or facilities yet to be built copy the things that we do. This facility won’t just be a leader amongst Irish gyms but it will be something unique globally. This is something that many of you know that I’ve been looking to do for the last 5 or so years. The chance to go into partnership with Barry who shares so many of my views and aspirations was just too good an opportunity to miss out on. Thi
s will be the best sports training centre in the country bar none. Certainly there are other venues that have the bigger facilities and that have more equipment…but if you’re Irish…as I am…well I have the passport to prove it then I’d ask you to have a look where all the money that was poured into Irish sport and in the creation of all these facilities over the past years has got our country from a sporting performance point of view?

If you’re not on the list, you’re not getting in!
We’re satisfied that we’ll have something for everyone, and the people we don’t have something for…well we don’t want them to come anyway. This will not be a gym in the sense that many of you know it. There will be nobody walking in our doors to train who isn’t doing a programme, be it for fat loss, strength, conditioning, martial arts or a sport in particular. Everyone will have a programme designed for them and will be consistently assessed and tested to see if they’re achieving what they set out to achieve. Nobody will be wandering aimlessly around the place wondering what to do next. There will be no arseholes doing 12 sets of deadlifts and tying up a power rack for 2 hours in the process…when it comes to training…you aren’t smarter than us. To make sure progress happens and because we get a kick out of it….every 6-8 weeks there’ll be a testing day. We are going to try to humiliate, impress, astound or amaze each other…I want to make this a BBQ day…but that’s just because I’m an Australian, Barry thinks I’m full of it..but we’ll see how it works out.

How much will it all cost?
It will be about as cheap as we can make it while still maintaining our champagne lifestyle. Membership will work a few different ways because Barry and I love everybody…just some people we love more than others.
These are you’re options:
If you’re a visiting superstar or gun slinger just passing through town…you can pay €20 a visit….we’ll be sad to see you leave…but your money will cheer us up afterwards.
For people living hand to mouth collecting aluminium cans to recycle to raise money or staying in the country illegally and looking to stay under the radar…you can pay cash…the amount will be €89 per month payable on the 1st of every month in advance.
For those of you who are upstanding members of the community and have an established identity and access to a bank account…the amount will be €79 per month payable on the 1st of every month by direct debit. It’s not €79 for martial arts, and then another €79 for the gym, it’s €79 for everything.
If you really want to screw Barry and I out of money then you can join for a year and pay €799…I just got my calculator out…that’s €65.58333333333333333333333 a month…you can see now why we set the prices the way we did…Barry and I really don’t trust each other that much and it would of only been a matter of time before one of us put a virus into the computer to skim off all those fractions of a cent…much like Gus Gorman the character played by Richard Pryor in Superman III…I’m sure the outcome of such a scheme would have been hilarious. What we’re trying to say is that no matter how you pay…it’s a bargain….have a look around…and then try to tell us that it isn’t.

But what about a special once off offer I hear you ask?
As a part of the launch, we’re going to offer 15 people a once off offer of a €1,000 lifetime membership…well let me qualify that…it is either for your lifetime or for 5 years…whichever comes first. That’s pretty unbelievable, and it bears repeating…€1,000 for 5 years….I say 5 years because I bet any of the people that jump at this off will be just those types that will hang on in their till the bitter end of life…long after they should of had the decency and coutesy to have died gracefully. It’s not quite as unbelievable as what your membership of Informed Performance will entitle you to. You will have unlimited access to any class and all classes that run in the gym. Be it any of the martial arts, fitness, strength or fat loss programs. We were initially concerned about pricing it that low as we felt that it might further deflate the economy, but we’re willing to take that risk. If you’re interested in taking up one of the 15 places on the 5 year or the ‘preferably shortened lifespan plan’ as I like to call it…you had better get in now as we’re not expecting these to last long.

Classes
The Martial Arts timetable will be expanding and will have some new additions. But more than that, the whole gym will have a timetable that will give a member a massive choice. There will be Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Muay Thai and Mixed Martial Arts just as K.O Martial Arts always has…we also have plans to add more…specifically some fighting based classes for fitness along with women only classes for kickboxing and self defence. Outside of the fighting area we’re going to have a heap of speed, agility and acceleration sessions along with and a multitude of other things like strongman training, kettlebell training and kids classes both martial arts and fitness based…so what do you think about that?

A space and place for Personal Trainers as well
We’re also going to do something unique for those people who are already in the industry or who are looking to get into it and want to grow their personal training business. In an era where gyms are letting their staff personal trainers go, or extorting them for large amounts of money, we’re offering personal trainers who want to use our facility for their own means the opportunity to use our gym as their own. As well as all the top class equipment we will also have an open plan office space for personal trainers to use as a place to do all the work they need to do outside of their face to face work with clients…you know what I mean…posting of the global interweb…everyone knows that is the most important side of their business anyway. In fact, the whole facility will be set up for wireless broadband which means you can get online and communicate with future clients right after training a current one. The cost is going to be €20 per client per session…the same fee that anyone visiting Informed Performance would pay…that’s right…€20…what we are going to do though is to cap the cost at €1000 a month. We actually want you to be successful…more than that….we want you to be so successful that you’ll probably make more money than us…that way we can feel OK about being bitter about how unfair life is and despise you for it when you are not around.

But what about a special offer for personal trainers?
As with the membership special offer…we have one as well for personal trainers. At the moment, we’re opening this up to just two personal trainers…for them….if they pay €6,000 you can get access to the facility for our first year of operation…that’s it….everything else you make after that is yours. If you’re a personal training currently working in an existing facility you know as well as we do that we don’t need to justify that price…you’ll know how good a deal that is for a gym, unlimited access to clients, an office, wireless internet access and a really good coffee machine.

MAYDAY!
We’re opening our doors on the 1st of May. Now of co
urse this is Ireland and solicitors basically run the country so we’re opening our doors when they say we can, but we’re shooting for the 1st of May anyway. So if you’re pondering renewing your gym membership, ponder a little or a lot and then if you have any sense…you’ll come and join us.