Having just made a new rule for her business, Stormie Barnes is facing the prospect of breaking it later this year.
The owner/operator of Storm Strength & Conditioning said she decided March 11 to take only female clients. She said in a phone interview earlier this week that she's grandfathering in three men who were already working out regularly at Storm.
The three male clients she has are great, she said, "but I'd been thinking about this for a long time.
"I've heard from women who were uncomfortable at public gyms," she added. "I saw an opportunity to cater to women looking for a place where they can work out and be comfortable, without added stressors no one should have to worry about."
But Barnes, mother to two daughters, said her third child is due in July. It's a boy, she said, which means the male trio might have company.
"I guess I'll just bring the little guy to the gym with me," she said.
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According to Andee Richards, who said she started working out at Storm in January, Barnes made a good call in going women-only.
"It's about women empowering other women," she said. "Everybody's got a different journey, and it's not a competition. We try to build each other up.
"I'd been to big gyms but never worked with a personal trainer. I felt a little intimidated but was immediately relieved. Stormie's so down-to-earth and easy to talk to. She makes an hourlong session go by really fast," Richards added in a phone interview.
Barnes said she first thought of personal training as a career at Soddy Daisy High School, where she was a senior on the cheer team that went to Dallas in January 2015 and won a National Cheerleaders Association national championship.
"Personal trainers came to school and trained us," she said. "Seeing them in their element, realizing that was their job, was really cool. That really put me in the direction of personal training."
Barnes said she cheered during her first two years at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga but decided to stop because she wanted to focus on earning her exercise science degree and her family, including husband A.J. and their daughter, Brynlie.
"I'm the first in my family to graduate with a bachelor's degree," she said. "I needed that example for my daughter."
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Barnes said she graduated UTC in 2019 and had a personal-training gig lined up at a Chattanooga-area gym -- until the pandemic hit in March 2020. She said she opened Storm Strength anyway, as an online business, and generated almost 200 clients from Boston to Florida.
Later that year, Barnes said, she accompanied her husband as he looked for a building suited for the fishing-tackle business he wanted to launch. She said that when they arrived at 5730 Highway 58, "my heart stopped."
"When I walked into that building," she said, "I knew it would be my gym."
The couple landed the building, said Barnes, who added that she kept her online training going full-bore while renovating the Highway 58 space that's also home to A.J.'s Lake Chickamauga Tackle & Outdoors. She said she opened Storm's doors in January 2022.
"When you walk in, the first room is an open space," she said. "We do strength and aerobic training in there. The back room is more intense -- heavy bags for kickboxing, a speed bag, squat rack, rowing machine, medicine balls. Girls wanting to really build muscle usually go to that back room for heavy lifting."
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Barnes said she gave birth to a second daughter, Riverly, just before graduating from UTC. She added that while her son is due in four months, she doesn't plan on slowing down until he arrives.
"Women were meant to have babies," she said. "There's a stigma associated with motherhood, that it prevents you from doing what you did before, but I'm not going to let motherhood keep me from being physically capable of doing what I want to do.
"What I want women to understand is that you don't have to look a certain way. You might not have the same body you had in high school, but how about a better body? I tell my clients it's not just about appearance -- it's strong, not skinny," Barnes said.
Contact Bob Gary at bgary@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6731.