Our Vision for 13615-149 Street
Re-opening after moving gives us the opportunity to stop and evaluate our business. What parts of CircoFit are good? What are our values? What do we need to do moving forward to thrive?
The following goals and intentions are at top of mind as we prepare to open in September.
1. Be a Kickass Place for Training Aerial Circus
This comes down to three things: space, gear, and community.
When looking for a new location, height and beam placement and structure were our first priority. The taller the space, the more you can do! Our facility is 24' tall, and we currently have 5 points on pulleys (for swapping out gear), one static trapeze, and 3 hard point ropes. We hope to convert 2 more points to pulleys by 2022.
Our new space is larger, so we'll be acquiring more gear over the next few months. Our wish list includes a port-a-pit, mirrors, and adding stainless steel swivels to every point. Once we can afford more hardware, we can start using our 14' tall mezzanine space for loop, hoop, sway pole, and other short apparatuses.
But of course, a space is just bricks and lumber and concrete and steel. It's not enough to fill it with cool circus equipment; we need our cool Circuslings back! We are excited to get back to board game nights and sharing laughs and introducing cool people to their new best friends.
In 2019, we created a Code of Conduct to help protect our community and keep it free of harassment. We will do everything possible to keep our space positive and friendly.
2. Facilitate Full Body Fitness
Aerials is NOT a balanced workout. Aerial circus is great for making you strong from the belly button up, but it doesn’t work your legs or provide much cardiovascular work.
Are you a boxer or kick boxer? We will soon have heavy bags! Herman will be offering HIIT classes and private/semi-private kick boxing coaching.
Are you a power lifter or olympic weightlifter? Our new studio has 4 floor mounted squat racks. While we hoped to outfit each with a barbell and a set of bumper weights in time for opening, we've unfortunately run out of funds. Once we have these ready to go, we'll increase our opening hours for those who like to lift weights before work or at lunch. (We hope to one day install a key card system for 24 hour training access! But priorities. Weight plates, benches, and olympic platform first.)
In the meantime, these racks are great for stretchy band work, pull ups, muscle ups, leg lifts, and rings/TRX style workouts.
Also coming soon, mirrors and a ballet bar in our mezzanine space.
3. Don’t Price Our Members Out
We want make sure all of our returning members can afford to return! Our goal with reopening is to continue to offer a membership option in the same price range as lowest membership tier from pre-Covid.
This also ties into the previous goal: if you can only afford one gym membership, we want to ensure that our facility gives you everything you need.
(Future goal: we hope to find a way to offer sponsored membership in the future.)
4. Pay Our Coaches Well.
Our coaches are an important part of what makes CircoFit great. It has always been our mandate to pay them as much as possible.
Our memberships are changing to be more transparent about our costs: the facility fee goes towards our operating costs, and each instructed class has a monthly coaching fee going directly towards the cost of paying our instructors. Classes with less than 4 people will be postponed or cancelled to ensure our instructors make at lease what they did per class in our old space.
By separating the facility fee and the class fee, we can more easily bring in guest instructors and let them decide their own per student rate.
5. Circus Independence as the Destination
We designed our silks and rope curriculums with this final goal in mind: creating athletes who can train safely on their own, with the ability to responsibly explore and workshop new skills.
Aerial circus is constantly advancing, and our curriculum will never be able to keep up with what's emerging in the world. It's unfair to limit strong, skilled students to only learn what we've been taught. Our curriculum will teach you the foundational skills and building blocks, and as you get more advanced you will learn how to collaborate and explore alongside your fellow Circuslings.
Obviously, we still need to ensure safety in our gym, so there needs to be a balance. Please leave the teaching to the coaches, and allow the upcoming Circuslings to go through the curriculum as intended. Before we give you permission to train without supervision, you will be expected to show proficiency in intermediate and advanced moves, an understanding of wrap theory, and a dedication to the pursuit of good technique and strength. Also remember that learning requires repetition, so please don't expect to do something once and move on forever.
Here's the overview of the different Silks levels to demonstrate the progression:
BEGINNER SILKS: Learn the foundations of aerial silks and rope: climbing, foot knots, straddles, and hipkeys. Learn poses using all of the foundational positions, build your endurance, and finish by learning your first drop!
INTERMEDIATE SILKS: Learn single rotation drops in all directions, all types of butterfly entrances and exits, and continue building your endurance and repertoire of poses.
ADVANCED SILKS: Multiple rotation drops, multi-directional drops, advanced poses, dynamic rolls, open drops, and learn to reverse engineer and explore or create new moves safely.
6. Get Back On Our Feet and Lower Our Debt
After a year and a half of restrictions, being forced to move, and having to meet new City code requirements, we now have over $100,000 of business loans.
It could be worse, but servicing this amount of debt as a scrappy little business is going to be challenging. As our tradespeople finish, we'll be playing the cashflow juggling game for the next few months.
How can you help:
Get a membership!
Spread the word about our workshops.
Encourage your friends to try a workshop or get a membership. Bring your roommate, spouse, friends, workmates out to our open house and bring-a-friend nights.
Support our fundraisers.
Consider pre-paying your base membership.
Lend us your gear! We are especially in need of bumper plates, barbells, and heavy (+45 lbs) hex dumb bells. Once we have more of these, we can increase our open training hours and get non-circus members who need a squat rack or an Olympic Lifting set up. Please see our wish list for other items.
Suggest CircoFit as corporate team building for your workplace.
Give us a 5 star review on Google and Facebook. These make a big difference for our visibility on google. Help people find us!
Thank you for your continued support. We can't wait to see you up in the air in our new home.