Filling a niche

Travis Davison doesn’t wear shoes at work. Or socks, for that matter. And much of the time he runs around in tie-dyed pants that anywhere else would look like pajamas. But for Coach Davison they’re part of his daily uniform.

Not much more than two years ago, you would have found him in heavy steel-toed boots with perhaps a hard hat on his head and a hammer in his hand. But that was before the housing downturn when builders were in high demand.

When the economy stymied the housing and real-estate markets, Davison and his wife Kisa, a real-estate agent, fought back the only way they knew how — with bare feet braced on the ground and minds focused on the future.

The Davisons launched Straight Blast Gym in a tiny space in downtown Kalispell in December 2008. Travis, one of only a handful of Brazilian jiu-jitsu black-belt holders in the country, had been teaching mixed martial arts here and there for fun since bringing his wife and four small children to Kalispell from Portland a few years ago. A 10-year veteran of the self-defense sport, he honed his skills on the side as a way to take his mind off work.

But when work became scarce for both himself and Kisa, they found themselves falling back on their passions — martial arts and yoga, respectively.

The two launched Straight Blast Gym with an eye on the soft economy. They looked for a small space that wouldn’t have a lot of overhead and committed to only a six-month lease. Somewhere around month five, it was clear they needed a new space. Word had gotten around and they quickly found themselves at capacity.

No big deal. They simply found a new, larger space nearby and signed another lease. Another five or six months passed with steady growth and again the couple found themselves at capacity.

The trouble this time was that they had still had six months to go under their one-year lease. So they appealed to their landlord, explained how successful the gym was becoming and the need for more space. The building’s owner looked around and offered this solution: simply swap spaces with the business on the other side of the building that had more space than it needed.

With its high ceilings and industrial feel, the offered space easily sold the Davisons.

“It’s just the perfect building for a gym,” Travis said.

And so, just past its one-year anniversary, Straight Blast Gym has moved into its third location at 30 Fourth Street, where it finally has the space to host more than one class at a time.

Straight Blast Gym isn’t your typical health club. There are no cardio machines, no treadmills, no ellipticals, no soap operas on TVs perched high in corners. They don’t have a lap pool or personal trainers.

What they do have is world-class leadership from the Davisons, along with Flathead Boxing Club co-founder Phil Moore and physical therapy with Kat Ingall of Mindful Motion.

The gym offers cardio and strength training along with general physical fitness through boxing, mixed martial arts, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, yoga, physical therapy and massage for all ages. It also provides a social network for those involved.

Sure there’s grunting and there’s definitely sweat, but the feel of a traditional health club stops there. On cold days, Travis pipes in the island beats of Bob Marley, on other days he explores different musical styles, but there is always music to provide exercisers rhythm.

Straight Blast Gym is focused on something they call “functional fitness.”

“It doesn’t look like traditional martial arts,” he said of his approach to the sport.

That means focusing on skills people can use in real life, whether it’s for self-defense or simply self-awareness. Many of Kisa’s yoga students are there to recover from physical injuries. That was what originally brought her to the practice years ago.

“People don’t want to walk on a treadmill and watch soaps anymore,” Kisa said. She believes that fitness is evolving to learning the unique things our bodies can do and studying the limits we can push ourselves to rather than just going through the motions.

It’s a rare thing for a newly launched enterprise to be growing at the rate that requires expansion three times during a calendar year, especially during a recession.

The Davisons have a number of theories to support their success. One has to do with the tremendous popularity surge of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and the following growth of mixed martial arts. Prior to the launch of the fight club in 1993, most fighters practiced only one specialty. Few crossed into mixed practice. And from just 300,000 average viewers in 2006, roughly two million tune in for UFC fights now, according to a recent ESPN article.

Kisa thinks this is a dual result of the relative newness of the sport and also a backlash to traditional professional athletes who constantly fill headlines with their increased criminal activity off the field. It’s not that similar things don’t happen within martial arts, she said, but so far it’s been less publicized.

“The last decade, we’ve been a greedy society,” she reasoned. “It’s all consume, consume, consume.

“I think when the economy fell we were suddenly left with just ourselves,” she continued. That has resulted in growing numbers within the health and fitness industry. “It’s a natural evolution of us becoming more reflective of how we’re living.”

Another draw to the gym is the lack of initiation fees and contracts.

“We wanted to give as many people access as we can,” Kisa said. Because there are no contracts to force people to keep coming, the instructors have to provide the best environment they can to keep their customers wanting to come back. That means staying true to their teaching.

“We’ve grown based on people’s confidence and satisfaction,” she said.

“And we have a niche that people aren’t filling,” added Moore, who is also active with the therapeutic boarding school Montana Academy. “We’re able to reach people on the fitness level that other gyms aren’t doing.”

Straight Blast Gym offers the only indoor boxing ring and yoga rope wall in the Flathead Valley. The next closest boxing ring is in Missoula.

While the official grand opening of the new space is still a few weeks off, the gym opened at the new location Monday and classes are in session. Following the grand opening, Kisa and Moore will launch a series of joint “bootcamps” in February focused on core strength, cardio and conditioning as well as a new children’s yoga program.

“This isn’t a job to us,” Moore maintained. “It’s our passion. It’s our hobby. It’s what we love.”

It took a serious downturn in the housing market to make Travis realize that a mere hobby could provide a life, and a happier one than he had before.

“If it weren’t for the bad economy, we’d probably still be doing jobs we didn’t love,” he said.

Reporter Erika Hoefer may be reached at 758-4439 or by e-mail at ehoefer@dailyinterlake.com