New Health and Fitness Club Comes to Parsippany

If you’re looking to shed pounds in time to achieve the beach bod you’ve been dreaming about this summer, goPeformance & Fitness may have exactly what you need and more.

After only a couple weeks of opening its doors, goPerformance & Fitness has already sparked the interest of the Parsippany community, as well as those from neighboring areas. With its convenient 24-hour availability and extensive specialized training programs, goPerformance & Fitness is a premier facility for anyone looking to change the way they work out.

GoPerformance & Fitness is a unique brand originally founded in Nashville, Tenn. Since then, the new-wave franchise fitness facility has spread to four other locations within the U.S. Parsippany’s goPerformance is the first to surface in the Northeast and the only one that serves New Jersey.

The Parsippany facility is run by owner Ryan Leffel and general manager Kevin Robinson. The two work with a team of four trainers to provide members with dynamic workouts in small class settings.

“We include group training, which is a big part of our business,” said Robinson. “You still have the instruction of an instructor with about four to 10 people, which is still manageable from a trainer’s standpoint. So you still kind of get that individual attention.”

Though group training is dominant, goPerformance also provides other services including one-on-one, semi-private and boot camp training.

For each of the small groups, the staff focuses on a different aspect of training each day.

“Monday’s a power training day, Tuesday’s a core day,” said Leffel. “Wednesday’s a strength day, Thursday’s an endurance training day. Friday’s a wildcard, so the trainer gets to choose what type of workout to do, and Saturday’s a cross-training workout.”

All workout classes are 30 minutes long and open to all members, as well as for first-timers interested in checking out the sessions before committing to a membership.

Before a newcomer gets started, he or she undergoes a fitness evaluation for an assessment of strength, flexibility, endurance and body composition.

“There are a few reasons we do [evaluations],” Leffel said. “The first reason is anybody who gets involved with the training program here, we want to be able to do an intelligible design program for them. We want to be able to get you in here and actually be able to design a workout for you, based on what your strengths, weaknesses and goals are.”

“The second reason we do it is because we use it for reassessment purposes,” he continued. “Every 30 days we’ll reassess and we’ll see where you are. If you did 12 pushups during your fitness assessment, you might get 25 a month later. So we can actually start to track progress of the members and see how they’re improving and we can see what they still need to work on.”

Because of goPerformance’s result-driven mission and caring support staff, the facility already is getting positive feedback from the community.

“Our small group training has been, I’d say, very successful,” said Leffel. “We have people coming in, in the mornings, evenings and afternoons. The small group trainings have been keeping trainers plenty busy. The past week or so we’ve been getting a lot of phone calls [and] a lot of e-mails, so I’m very optimistic about our future here.”

The clientele at Parsippany’s goPerformance & Fitness is also widely diverse.

“We’ll have a conditioned athlete in the class and then we’ll have somebody in their late 50s/early 60s,” said Leffel. “So we don’t have one particular client; we really have a lot of variety.”

“We have a vast population of people-all ages,” added Robinson. “We’re actually starting to incorporate a youth program, or a more athletic-based training program, for high school kids. We have older population here, all of our workouts are scalable so you can find yourself in a group class with someone younger or someone a little bit older. We scale it so that everyone can do the class and do it safely.”

Patch asked Mandy Bernstein, a trainer who has been working for goPerformance  since the Parsippany facility opened, about her favorite part of the job.

“I love changing people’s lives, having the everyday person come in and be able to do things they’ve never been able to do before,” she said.

“Yeah, it’s fun. I like beating people up,” laughed Bernstein. “I like pushing people to their limits.”

Bernstein works six days a week from anywhere between 5:30 a.m. and 10 p.m.

“You have to love what you do,” said Bernstein, “and then it doesn’t feel like work.”

For anyone interested in what goPerformance & Fitness offers, stop by to check out their free seven-day consecutive trial training program, or visit http://www.goperformanceandfitness.com/.

GoPerformance & Fitness is located at 76 Route 46 West (Suite 2).