“As soon as you walk in [to a regular gym], someone is redirecting you, saying, ‘You’re in the wrong locker room. You’re in the wrong restroom,’” says Dillon King, a transgender man based in Louisiana. “You’re not there to make anybody else uncomfortable. But … it makes you realize, [you are] in fact making somebody uncomfortable just by being here.”
King is not alone in feeling this way. For all the good they can do for our health, gyms tend to be spaces that create rigid boundaries around expectations based on gender. And in the face of harassment and discrimination, many gender nonconforming people choose to simply stay home.
After years of uncomfortable experiences at the gym, King decided to create one where people like him could feel free to pursue healthy lifestyles — without judgment. And so he and his wife founded Flambeaux CrossFit in 2016 in Metairie, Louisiana, just a few miles outside of New Orleans.
Flambeaux doesn’t use gender categories to differentiate its equipment or restrooms, and emphasizes that all fitness levels, backgrounds and gender expressions are welcome.
The gym has become a center of fitness and community for queer people and their allies. “It seemed [before] that most of our get-togethers were at clubs, nightclubs, going out, staying up late, drinking always,” King told the SunHerald. With Flambeaux, the Kings have created a welcoming space for the LGBTQ community that also connects with their passion for fitness and healthy living.
“It’s more than a gym, it’s like a family,” says Flambeaux member James Husband.
Watch the video above to meet King and the team, and to learn more about Flambeaux.
More: This Nonprofit Offers a Lifeline to Transgender People — Just as They Need It Most
Tag: fitness
6 Social Impact Apps Designed With You in Mind
There’s an app for just about anything these days. And whereas sometimes it feels like many of them lack any real reason for being — like these, um, “wonders” of technology — there are several that serve a very legitimate purpose, which is to drive social change.
And just as technology has become personalized and accessorized, the ways in which you can donate your time or money is equally as diverse and seemingly tailored just to you. Here are a few choice apps to put on your radar, whatever the type of mission-driven person you are.
FOR THE SEE-AND-BE-SEEN CROWD
GLOBAL CITIZEN: Probably best known for the insanely packed festival it puts on in New York’s Central Park each year, Global Citizen rewards users for taking action on such issues as global hunger, poverty and climate change with free concert tickets.
Past performers at Central Park’s Great Lawn have included big names like Beyoncé, The Killers and Stevie Wonder. Coldplay’s Chris Martin, the festival’s curator, reportedly has his sights set on Johannesburg for another musical celebration later this year to honor Nelson Mandela, who would’ve turned 100 years old in 2018.
By simply tweeting a message of action or signing a petition, users earn points and are then entered into a lottery to win tickets to Global Citizen’s network of worldwide festivals and concerts.
WE DAY: The WE movement began life as a Canadian nonprofit and eventually grew to international status. Through after-school programs designed by WE, students are encouraged to take measurable actions on issues ranging from cyberbullying within their community to improving access to clean water in developing countries.
After a year, students who participate in the program are invited to attend a We Day festival, where they might catch appearances by bold-faced names like Kelly Clarkson, Selena Gomez and Andre De Grasse.
But for students who don’t have a WE Schools program, the WE Day app allows them to earn festival admission through volunteer work. So far, the organization has galvanized over 1 million youth to volunteer more than 27.6 million hours.
FOR THE GYM RATS
CHARITY MILES: Sponsored by Johnson & Johnson and Humana, Charity Miles tracks how many miles you walk, bike or run, and then donate to charities of your choice.
Bikers receive 10 cents per mile to donate, while joggers and runners get 25 cents per mile. There are dozens of charities to choose from, including The Wounded Warrior Project, Stand Up to Cancer and the Alzheimer’s Association.
While the amount you can raise for any one training session is small — completing an Ironman triathlon would only donate a bit over $15, for example — the more you exercise, the bigger your impact.
MAXIMUSLIFE: Thrive on a little friendly competition? MaximusLife allows you to enter fitness challenges and compete against friends, all in the name of raising dough for the causes you most care about.
The platform pairs with your wearable devices to track your exercises, along with your sleeping habits, and rewards you points that corporate partners will accumulate and donate on your behalf. Participants can take on daily challenges to increase their points as well as join a team to up their rewards.
FOR THE INSTA-OBSESSED
EATWITH: Sampling food from different cultures is a sure-fire way to expand your knowledge of the world and better your relationships with people who are different from you. (It also makes for envy-inducing vacation posts.) In fact, culinary diplomacy has even warranted its own field of study at the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy.
The Eatwith app allows you to search dinner parties, food tours and cooking classes by location and matches you with local hosts who will serve up one-of-a-kind meals (and experiences) right in their home. The result is an authentic cultural adventure that just can’t be replicated in a restaurant.
FOR THE CONSCIENTIOUS CONSUMERS
FORWARD: Spring has officially sprung, which means that for many people, clearing out closets, garages and dresser drawers tops their to-do list. But instead of relegating household items and clothes to the curb, adding to the growing 12.8 million tons of textiles dumped into landfills each year, Forward lets you offload goods and do good in the process.
How it works: Simply upload a pic of the thing you no longer want and choose a charity. If someone decides to take it, they’ll “buy” it via donating to the charity of your choice. And if that’s not a win-win, we’ll just go back to sticking our smartphones in our mouths.
What I Know About Fitness
This post is paid for by AARP.
The High-Energy Activity That’s Healing the Invisible Scars of War
Jeremiah Montell, a Navy petty officer with 17 years of service, takes out his frustrations at his UFC gym. “He can knock the heck out of a boxing bag,” says Lynn Coffland, founder of Catch a Lift Fund, a nonprofit that funds a gym membership or home workout equipment for 2,500 post-9/11 veterans, including Montell. In the past year, Lynn witnessed as Montell lost 70 pounds, stopped taking medication and began crafting homemade American flags — all signs of healing.
Lynn has seen firsthand how physical activity and healing go hand in hand. Her brother Christopher J. Coffland, a fitness enthusiast always heading out to “catch a lift” — his term for hitting the gym — enlisted in the Army one month before he turned 42 years old. Dropping him off at the airport, Lynn asked through tears, “What do I do if you don’t come back?” After cracking a joke, Chris got serious, saying, “I probably won’t come back, but I’ve had a great run and I’m ready to meet Jesus. If I can put myself in the place of another man that has family back home, I will.” In 2009, two weeks after being deployed to Afghanistan, a roadside bomb killed Chris and injured two other Marines. As Lynn pondered how to memorialize her brother, messages from people who’d lifted weights with him in boot camp started flooding Lynn’s inbox.
“There was no program that the VA had set up yet for fitness,” Lynn remembers. “Every active-duty service-member has to be physically fit…Many men and women I talk to, they say [exercise is] their happiest memories. If they’re on base or out in another country, they work out. They have lots of laughs, a lot of friendship and bonding. They come home, and everything’s different. They don’t even know who they are anymore, they say. We get them back to that very basic core that they know existed, which was fitness.”
Catch a Lift Fund started by gifting gym memberships to three veterans in February 2010. The soldiers could pick any spot they wanted: 24-Hour Fitness or Crossfit, a place with pilates machines or a pool. Recovery and reintegration started almost immediately.
To find more participants, Lynn’s father wrote letters to every Veterans Administration hospital nationwide. Today, the group has a waiting list of more than 300 veterans. For those who find a gym stress-inducing, or those in rural areas, the fund pays for home systems.
“The culture has taught them that you have to push through,” but trauma “never goes away,” Lynn says. “You have to work on it so it stays at bay. Through fitness, through friendship and camaraderie, that’s how they’re healing.”
Meet the Oklahoma Mayor Who Reengineered His City to Help Citizens Lose a Million Pounds
“This city is going on a diet,” Oklahoma City mayor Mick Cornett declared while standing outside the elephant exhibit — of all places — at the zoo on New Year’s Eve of 2007. “And we’re going to lose a million pounds.” It’s not every day that you hear a politician talk this way. But for Cornett, his city’s struggle with obesity was deeply personal. Prior to his bold announcement that December night, Men’s Fitness magazine had published its annual list of the country’s most obese cities, and it included OKC. “I didn’t like being on that list,” Cornett said in a TED Talk. He got on the scale and then entered his weight and height in a Body Mass Index (BMI) calculator. Much to his disbelief, he clocked in as obese. It was then that Cornett realized that not only did he need to make a change. His city did, too.
MORE: Too Much Sitting Isn’t Just Bad for Your Health. It Wastes Energy
“I started examining my city, its culture, its infrastructure, trying to figure out why our city had a problem with obesity,” Cornett said. “I came to the conclusion that we had built an incredible quality of life — if you happened to be a car.” OKC’s city limits are about 620 square miles. People live far away. The highway system is extensive, so citizens can travel from place to place easily, if only by car. Neighborhoods had virtually no level of walkability. In fact, some recently developed inner-city neighborhoods had schools and homes, but no sidewalks connecting them. In order to help the citizens get healthy, the city needed a redesign. Cornett got right to work. City officials continue to build new sidewalks, are redesigning streets to be more pedestrian friendly, and adding 100 miles of bike trails. They’ve built senior health and wellness centers, developed designs for a central park and a downtown streetcar, and are in the final stages of developing a state-of-the-art venue for the sports of canoeing, kayaking and rowing on the river. In turn, young athletes from all over are flocking to OKC.
ALSO: Improving Americans’ Health Begins with These Three Numbers
While officials were busy redesigning the city, Cornett opened the lines of communication about the obesity epidemic. As the national media trickled in, the conversation grew louder. The city’s weight-loss-tracking website, OKC Million, gained members by the thousands. The pounds lost started adding up. The topic of obesity was no longer taboo. Churches started running groups, schools refocused on health and fitness, and workplaces created weight-loss competitions. In a city once dominated by cars, the humans were finally making moves, and not surprisingly, the benefits extended well past getting healthy. OKC boasts one of the strongest economies and lowest unemployment rates in the nation. “We seemed to have turned the cultural shift of making health a greater priority,” Cornett said. “And we love the idea of demographics of highly educated 20-somethings, people with choices, are choosing Oklahoma City in large numbers.”
In January 2012, the city reached its milestone of one million pounds lost — five years after Cornett stood in front of elephants and put his city on a diet. On a media blitz in New York City, Cornett stopped by Men’s Fitness — the same magazine that spurred this initiative five years prior. But this time, Oklahoma City wasn’t on the list of the nation’s fattest cities. It was on the list of the fittest.
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A No Brainer Job for Ex-Drill Sergeants: Motivating the Rest of Us
Valetta SuRae Stewart of District Heights, Md. served for 23 years in the Army, and left worried that the only skills she had to offer the civilian job market were “breaking things and killing people,” she told Lenny Bernstein of the Washington Post. But then she realized she’d developed an extremely valuable aptitude as a drill sergeant: She knew how to motivate people to lose weight and get in shape. In November, Stewart earned her certification as a personal trainer, entering a field that’s in high demand thanks to a Salute You Scholarship from the American Council on Exercise.
The program granted her $700, one of 226 scholarships it’s given out to veterans in the past six months, and G.I. Bill benefits helped her study at the National Personal Training Institute. Salute You has certified nine trainers including Stewart, and sets up vets with interviews at fitness centers with the overall goal of using veterans’ skills to fight the obesity epidemic. Stewart is now completing an apprenticeship at Atlas Fitness in Washington, D.C.
Stewart plans to become an all-around wellness consultant, a path that was inspired by her work as a hairdresser between stints in the military. When you fix hair, she told Bernstein, “You learn very, very intimate things about people. And everybody was broken. This one had heart disease; this one’s mother had just died from cancer, this one had high blood pressure. . . . That’s what sent me to nutrition.”
MORE: This Partnership Encourages Vets To Become Farmers
The Next Revolutions in Health and Fitness Are Tiny, Nearly Invisible and Absolutely Amazing
These revolutions are going to be tiny. Some of them are almost invisible. But technology is bringing major changes to health and fitness, from daily workout trackers to crucial preventive techniques. Workout trackers are about to get even more amazing, with devices that track not just your speed and incline data, but extreme data like G-Force. And webcam personal trainers will take some of the cost barriers and time commitment issues out of daily workout routines. Meanwhile, fitness equipment isn’t the only thing that’s getting easier and easier to bring into your own home; medical devices are coming there too. Checking, recording, and analyzing your vital signs will be possible with a wearable sticker so thin it’s basically a “tattoo,” and online methods of sharing information with your doctor will transform doctor’s visits and annual physicals forever. But can you imagine a small implant that can predict a heart attack within three or four hours before it might happen?
Yoga for Youths?
Yoga isn’t just for grownups anymore. In Detroit, Danialle Karmanos came up with a plan to fight the childhood obesity epidemic by establishing a yoga program for young kids. She’s working with physical education instructors and other pros to build a network of volunteer yoga instructors for the Work It Out program, which brings yoga classes to kids at underserved schools in the area. She started in 2005, formed a non-profit organization in 2008, and since then has brought yoga to more than 3,000 kids in and around Detroit. The lessons of the class go far beyond basic stretching. Kids are learning breathing exercises, so they’re coping better with stress and anxiety. And they’re also developing healthy eating habits; 69% of students are already reporting changes in their diet.
What Are America’s Most Walkable Cities?
It always sounds so simple. An activity as basic as walking can help with so many health issues, from losing weight to lowering one’s risk of heart problems. If the nation gets moving, even just 20 minutes a day, we’d find ourselves feeling stronger, more energized, and less prone to disease. So why doesn’t everyone do it? For some major cities, it might be because the neighborhoods just aren’t “walkable” enough. Josh Herst founded Walk Score to put some data behind the idea of walkability, so now cities can evaluate how much they’re doing to help encourage citizens to get into a walking routine. Now, top cities like New York, San Francisco, and Boston can show off their walking cultures, and car-dependent cities–like Nashville, Jacksonville, and Charlotte–have the opportunity to review in-depth analysis of the walking cities’ success stories.
CrossFit Competition Builds Community for Recovering Veterans
CrossFit is widely known for high intensity and fierce competition. For veterans in and around Boston, CrossFit Middleton is building a community for veterans. Whether they’re facing physical injuries, mental hardships, or emotional challenges, this CrossFit center isn’t just a place to work out, it’s a center for healing. Returning home from combat and working to re-integrate in their domestic lives, the veterans who are missing the chance to work out and train with their band of brothers can fill that void with the family they find at CrossFit. Together, they push through pain, both physically and emotionally, in what has become a “sanctuary” for returning heroes.