TranscriptKevin M.: Mixing It Up With The Fitness Community is a podcast created by Fit Mix that introduces you to local health and fitness individuals along with their stories.Kevin M.: Episode five. Lawrence Herrera with the Performance Ranch. Lawrence has trained some of the best fighters in UFC history. He has taken that knowledge and now trains non-professional athletes. Let's listen in and learn more.Sara Y.: Hi, Lawrence. Thank you for joining us today.Lawrence H.: Thank you for having me. It's great.Sara Y.: So the easiest question of the day. Tell us about your gym. What do you have to offer there?Lawrence H.: Well, so the Performance Ranch is a training facility that's a coaching-based facility. Anybody who comes in has some sort of plan or a workout of some sort that's all based on the person's goals and the movement screen that we see. Every session, whether it's a class or a small group or private partner training, you know, they're all they're all coached. Again, the difference is, is just how much coaching you actually want based on the package that the client decides on. But we've had really good success with it. We've only been open for a little over two and half years now. December of 2017 was our official opening date. I've been doing this for almost 20 years now. I've helped out other gyms and things like that. But yeah, that's the kind of the gym in a nutshell.Sara Y.: So how did the Performance Ranch get started. You said you've been in this business for 20 years,why did you decide to go off on your own and open Performance Ranch?Lawrence H.: Well, it was it was a unique situation. Probably close to seven years ago now, I started training one of my more famous club clients, which is a Cowboy Cerrone, the ultimate fighter guy. I started training him at a different gym. Him and I just formed more of a friendship than anything because I was with him several, several times, you know. I don't know how many hours if we add them all up now, but it's definitely a long time of both training him. We had talked about it even after about a year of training him at the other place. We've kind of talked about, 'hey, would you ever want to do this on your own and have your own place?' And I was like, 'you know, that's kind of a thought of mine.' I was a partner at the other gym, but besides that, we were more on board of of working together and trying to develop different things for fighters because if you know him at all; he has a training facility at his house. So, yeah, it's really, really cool. The BMF Ranch, he takes in fighters there. He helps train them there. We wanted more of a commercial space. So we decided to open up our own gym and fast forward. You know, at that point, it was four years down the road that we decided to sign our own lease and do our own thing. So that's how it started. You know, we were kind of directed at the initial time, whereas helping fighters out and training fighters and those types of rounds. But a lot of my clients tell was normal, everyday people who just had more of a fitness goal than than anything. So it kind of developed into that. And that's the way we we started. It was more of an idea and we acted on it.Sara Y.: So why do you make the transition from training fighters to now your everyday person?Lawrence H.: Well, the reality is and obviously there's four big fighting gyms in Albuquerque. We're lucky for that. I was fortunate when I started with fighters. I was training UFC top fighters from the very start. I never had a chance to even train the amateurs or the up and comers. I was in the thick of it from the very start. So when we started doing that, we realized there's not that many UFC fighters in Albuquerque. If there are, I've trained most of them. Probably close to 15 or 20 of them here in town. But other than that, the reality is we have to keep our doors open and they don't have fights of all the time. So we're only training them for a certain amount of time every camp. We knew and I was already training regular people anyways. When I started talking to them about my idea, they are like, 'I want to go there. I want to train there.' So. 'OK, well, great! Let's just do that then and we're going to bring you in on a training basis of that's sort.' I would say 90 percent of our clientele is that every day average client like the average athlete type client that just wants to improve. We do have fighter classes. We do train some of them, but the majority is just our everyday athlete that wants to get better.Sara Y.: Yeah, for sure. Going off on that. What kind of classes do you offer at Performance Ranch?Lawrence H.: We have three different classes. Our most popular is our strong class. That's more strength training focused and strength training based. Your normal sets/rep/ rest time. Those kind of things. They're upper body focused / lower body focused type of classes. That's kind of our bread and butter there. And then our other one is burn. Burn class is more of a metabolic conditioning class. And that one, we use a lot of tech for that class. In tech, I say we use heart rate monitors. We use power meters. We use devices that have some type of metric to record and to monitor the effort of that client. So then we can always give them feedback later on either in that session, or sessions after that. Say 'look. You've improved your heart rate because of this or you've improved your power threshold because of this.' And we like to test and retest a lot. You just see where people are getting more fit. That a really popular one, too. The burn class. Then the other class, the third one is called Move. Move class is more active recovery based. It's very similar to yoga, but it's not long hold stretches. It's more taking you through ranges of motion that the joints can handle, but yet also trying to strengthen the joint in these kind of awkward positions. I would say, you know, working on the hip capsule a lot, working on the shoulder capsule as the experience we've had, we've seen a lot of people who come in injured are usually injured just because the joint itself doesn't move how it should. The ankle, the hip and the knee are the big ones and of course, the shoulder. So we just teach them how to teach those clients how to be better suited for that. That movement that's they're trying to do. But those are three classes that we offer.  Sara Y.: Very Cool!. Is that Burn Class the bike class? Because that's one thing I think is really cool about the gym. How there's road bikes connected to that software. Can you talk about that.Lawrence H.: For sure. So Burn is actually different than that. So I was wrong. There is actually a fourth class, which is our cycling corral. The cycling corral is a whole separate thing. People bring in their own bikes. We do have one spin bike in there right now. That's just the Watt bike? So somebody who doesn't have a bike could use the watt bike and get on that and do their workout. Yes. All the bikes and the trainers that are connected to the computer itself and the computer pretty much dictates the effort how hard that clients should go based on the client's thresholds. And we know the threshold because we test the client with a simple ramp test. The ramp test takes about 20 minutes max. You know, obviously, the more fit you are, the further you go into that test. But normally we see people ending the tests between 15 and 20 minutes or so and we can establish good numbers for them. Then we will retest them again in about four to six weeks after that. We'll see how they improved....

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