New Crossfit Gym To Open in Rockland (VIDEO)

It looks like a small garage from the outside, but just through its doors, you’re standing on 1-inch thick equestrian grade-flooring with ropes and rings dangling from the ceiling. The flooring is oriented toward the crossfit workouts at this new Rockland business.

Crossfit Momentum is located on Main Street in Nyack with access off of Catherine Street.

CrossFit is the principal strength and conditioning program for many police academies and tactical operations teams, military special operations units, champion martial artists, and hundreds of other elite and professional athletes worldwide, according to its website. Their program delivers a fitness that is, by design, broad, general, and inclusive. Our specialty is not specializing. Combat, survival, many sports, and life reward this kind of fitness and, on average, punish the specialist.

About Crossfit Momentum

Four partners made the collective decision to open Crossfit Momentum: Stephanie Vaughan, Matthew Apol, Brian Aherne, all from Nyack and Peter Sunden from Park Ridge, NJ.

“We were training together out of another facility and wanted to train a different way, our own way,” said Apol. “We put some numbers together, the pros and cons and said we could make it happen.”

All four have been working out together for more than a year and Sunden and Apol are also close childhood friends.

“Space was important. We wanted an open durable space,” said Aherne.

There are classes in the morning and evening.

“Right now we have just a program for adults, but we’ll open a crossfit kids program for all ages soon,” said Vaughan. “We want to start them off young so this becomes part of their lifestyle.”

Aherne added that there will be weekly open free workouts in the future as well as a scholarship program for community athletes.

About Crossfit

The CrossFit program is designed for universal scalability making it the perfect application for any committed individual regardless of experience, according to its website.

Current members range from age 18 to late 60s.

“We’re open to everybody. We offer people general physical fitness to training for triatheletes,” said Vaughan. “Crossfit is a program where everybody works out together in small group trainings. Instead of train-client with personal trainers, think of it as coach-team. You’re working as a team, pushing each other to get better. There’s strengthening, conditioning, skill training and it’s all highly scale-able.”

They’ve used our same routines for elderly individuals with heart disease and cage fighters one month out from televised bouts. They scale load and intensity; they don’t change programs.

“We take specialty courses and want to have an open source to share ideas and techniques,” said Sunden. “I just returned from a seminar (recently).”

The four partners take professional development seriously.

“Continued health education is important in our field,” said Apol.

The facility also records its members data and tracks progress.

“The confidence carries over to work and personal life,” said Vaughan. “Our members find that they can unlock and discover their potential in other parts of their lives after joining crossfit.”

“My life has been changed because of crossfit,” said Aherne. “People realize things they could never do. I thought I could never do a pullup before.”

“It also carries over physically,” said Apol. “We train firefighters, police officers, the military and they testified that crossfit has made them more efficient in their jobs.”

Grand Opening

Jan. 12 is the official opening date.

Open to the public, there will be an informational open house with workouts, small competitions, a bbq, prizes and sponsors. Gypsy Donut is providing coffee.

Check back with Patch for more details.