Two years ago, neighborhood resident Laurie Stein, already a mother of one son, gave birth to twins. Always a health and exercise nut, she found the demands of motherhood made getting to the gym all but impossible.
“The first year of their life, I was at home,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do — other than walk. I needed a way to work out at home.”
Then her friend Kelly Jarvis decided to get her personal training certification. Tired of her more sedentary lifestyle, Stein decided she’d join her, and that led to inspiration.
“We decided there was such a need for in-home personal training for women, because of kids and how hard it was to take them to the gym,” Jarvis says. “We bring the equipment, and they can bring their kids. We sometimes bring our kids, too, and all of them play together.”
The women named their new business Muscle Moms (musclemoms.com). It fills a great need in the neighborhood, Stein says.
“I think there are a lot of other people like me who have the same problem trying to get to the gym and juggling the kids, all the other stuff a mom has to do, getting to the store, driving carpool, their schedules,” she says. “How are you supposed to get a gym into all that other stuff?”
Jarvis, a lifetime Lake Highlands resident, agrees.
“They don’t know what to do; they get embarrassed about working with equipment.”
With Muscle Moms, women don’t even have to leave their homes. Maintaining separate clients, Stein and Jarvis bring the equipment to their clients’ homes and teach them how to use it. Although they’ll use exercise machines already in the house, they mostly bring in smaller items good for weight training and aerobics: stability balls, bands, dumbbells, medicine balls, balance boards, jump ropes and boxing gloves.
“What people don’t understand,” Jarvis says, “is you can get just as good of a workout without the big machines.”
The completely word-of-mouth business started up in January and now boasts a clientele of around 20 women. With its manageable size, the women are able to offer a variety of workout options and everything is highly customized. Some people have personal training sessions once or twice a week, while others may require less regular services. Individual sessions generally cost around $60 an hour.
Less-expensive options include an eight-week program — after the first session, the client can work independently, checking off the exercises completed on day-by-day printouts and receiving emails and encouragement along the way — and a Muscle Mom training session with a group of friends. This latter option makes clients “more accountable to their friends,” Jarvis says. “They are more likely to get a good workout.”
The business partners have found their services are well received, in part because of the understanding women have with one another, Stein says.
“We like to work with women because women know women’s bodies. We know the problem areas because we have them.”
