Speed School in session

After going to the gym three to four times a week, month after month, 44-year-old Pam Augusta was ready for a new challenge.

“I wanted just a real nice change from the humdrum of working out on the same machines and always watching TV,” she said.

Her husband heard about a new nationally renowned workout program being established at The Summit Fitness Center in Kalispell, so she decided to give it a try.

Working out hasn’t been the same since.

Welcome to “Speed School.”

In a boxed-off corner tucked in the back of the center, a bright green Astroturf “field” has become the sight for the Parisi fitness school that started up just over two weeks ago. In that time, more than 130 adults and kids have signed up to participate on a regular basis — from a 70-year-old couple to 7-year-old elementary students to everything in between.

Augusta remembers heading into her first hour-long Parisi session feeling fairly confident in her fitness level. After a few “spider lunges” and medicine ball pushups, she found it to be just the challenge she was looking for.

“It was really tough. I had a lot of muscles sore afterward that I’d never used before,” she said. “I thought I was in really good shape, but then I found out not so. There were some muscles that were sleeping I guess.”

From the outside looking in, the Parisi classes look like another fitness get-together similar to boot camp-style workouts. But according to Phil Jackson, the Program Director and one of four certified trainers who teach classes, that’s not the case at all.

“Anybody can give you a hard workout. You don’t even have to be in the fitness industry to make a workout hard for somebody. That’s easy,” Jackson, 28, said. “It’s about having a purpose behind it and saying ‘this is why we’re doing this, this is what’s going to happen after you do it.’”

Jackson, who moved to Kalispell four years ago with a degree in health and physical education from Carroll College, became certified after visiting other Parisi sites across the country last spring. Within months, the ball got rolling and construction began on the new center.

“There’s nothing like this in the state of Montana, really, to this level, with this kind of backing,” Jackson said. “There are other sports-performance programs around but not with the backing and the

successful track record that Parisi has from NFL players to NBA, MLB, MLS. The list goes on and on. You name a professional sport, they’ve trained in Parisi.”

The program originated in 1992, when Bill Parisi began working with athletes on building their speed in New Jersey. Within five years, Parisi had established a training studio that caught the attention of the New York Giants football team, who hired him as a conditioning consultant.

From there, the Parisi workouts began spreading across the country with serious athletes jumping on board. Chris Simms, a quarterback for the Denver Broncos, started as an eighth-grader and vaulted into the University of Texas before becoming a professional.

Football players in particular seem attracted to Parisi training as the program has become a standard heading into the NFL Combine, which is where athletes are judged before the draft.

But professional up-and-comers comprise only a small portion of the participants. There are currently more than 50 Parisi centers across the country while others are being established in Europe. Adult students, such as Augusta, may have joined the program looking for a fresh workout. Others may be looking for recovery from an injury or just a way to prepare for ski season.

“It’s something different for everybody,” local trainer Laini Grey said. For each sport, the training might provide a different benefit. “But then for those who are like myself (I don’t play basketball), why is this important? Guess what, your legs are going to look really good. So there’s a reason. There’s an aesthetic reason for it and there’s a fitness or sport-performance reason for it.”

So what is Speed School?

“Total body conditioning but in a totally different way,” Grey said. “You’re not using resistance training, you’re using your own body weight. There’s a lot of hopping, a lot of movements that you probably did when you were a kid. So none of it is actually difficult, but because you haven’t done it for five, 10, 15, 20 years, it’s crazy, and it will wear you out and totally kick your butt.”

The franchise in Kalispell has a large following of kids who are either looking to get in shape for basketball tryouts or whose parents want a healthier after-school option.

Don Hanks of Whitefish brought his 9-year-old son Tatum in for a trial session two weeks ago because he wanted Tatum to be in good shape, particularly for Little Guy football.

“I thought it was a good workout and a good program to get him to improve his football skills because everybody knows that off-the-field training is the most important,” Hanks said. “He’s all about it. It teaches him balance, coordination and strengthens up his inner core.”

Tatum worked with Parisi trainer and former professional football player Da’Shann Austin, who joined the Summit team hoping to work with goal-minded kids exactly like Tatum.

Austin never had the chance to take a formulated program like Speed School when he was growing up near Kansas City, but he learned the basic, workman-like ideal behind the program.

Before dawn every morning, Austin’s father would drop off Da’Shann and his cousin David Allen at the gym on his way to work as a foreman at Ford Motor Co. The two teenagers had one big dream in mind — playing professional football.

The hard work paid off. Both Austin and Allen went on to play college football — even meeting in the 1998 Alamo Bowl against each other — and eventually achieved their dream.

“We put in that extra work to do what we had to do and it paid off,” said Austin, who lettered at Purdue University as a defensive back and return specialist before going on to play in the Canadian Football League for six years. “So that’s what I tell a lot of these kids and parents when I get a chance to sit down with them. I tell them that the hard work does pay off.

“We ask the kids what are their goals, and I want to know outlandish goals because really there’s no such thing as an outlandish goal. You get a kid that says they want to be a professional athlete and you get parents that kind of chuckle. You shouldn’t really chuckle at it, because you never know who the next pro athlete is in here, whether it’s a pro athlete or a successful businessman or woman. Building their confidence to me is the main thing that we’re getting out of this program. And setting little goals and achieving them I think trains kids to be successful in life.”

For information on The Summit’s Parisi Speed School, visit www.parisispeedschool.com or call 751-4518.

Reporter Dillon Tabish can be reached at 758-4463, or by e-mail at dtabish@dailyinterlake.com