The LMI Fitness Mission
After 9 years as gym owners, our mission has changed.
When I opened LMI Fitness in 2013, my mission was simple: feed my family.
As we evolved, my mission was adopted by a team and became more complex. We wanted to introduce real fitness to Aurora. We wanted to be counterculture. We wanted to stomp out the myths around fat loss, performance, and health. Our mission, for a while, was hard to iterate.
But my friend Andre put it like this:
“If you care about somebody, you have to care about their health. And if you care about their health, you have to care about the community around them.”
So we built a caring, supportive community. We planted seeds, nurtured, pruned, and grew in a hundred different directions. It’s been amazing. But if you ask any member of the LMI family, “What’s LMI Fitness?” you’ll get a different answer. So here it is, the LMI Fitness mission, 2022 edition:
The LMI Fitness mission is to enlarge the lives of 1,000 people in Aurora.
I care about this city. I moved here and chose to stay more than 20 years ago. 14 years ago I started working as a fitness trainer in South Aurora.
When I opened my own gym, I chose the name CrossFit Banshee and had the desire “to educate and inspire,” because that’s what a gym does. Since we have kept CrossFit Banshee but put it under our company LMI Fitness. LMI stands for Like Minded Individuals.
I don’t have to bring every single resident in Aurora to fitness and health to succeed. Because Aurora is a great big town, we can change the city by enlarging the lives of 1,000 citizens. They, in turn, can ask their friends to go for a walk or share a healthy meal recipe. All of the like-minded individuals we find can be the city’s catalyst for health.
Why “enlarge”? Because our brand of fitness is more than life-extending; it’s life-broadening.
If you cut out processed carbs and sugar and start doing squats, deadlifts, and presses, you’ll live longer. But you’ll also live better. You’ll stay independent to an older age. You’ll have strength and mobility and the will to live right up until the end—you’ll practically be your own pallbearer.
You’ll be younger for longer. And while you’re young, you’ll do more things.
You’ll find yourself doing a 5k. You’ll play more pickleball. You’ll ride your bike 100 km to raise money for people who won’t. You’ll get down on the floor with the kids, up on your feet to dance, and over the walls of diabetes and depression. You will go, you will see, and you will conquer. You will live a larger life.
The LMI Fitness mission is to enlarge the lives of 1,000 people in Aurora. What’s yours?
Inspiration provided by Chris Cooper at Catalystgym.com.
