This My PRIME With… features Dan Greenbaum, the Owner of The Gym at Prospect, located just outside of Denver, CO. Dan has outfitted his gym with a wide variety of PRIME equipment that covers pieces from nearly every category of the PRIME portfolio of products. In this My PRIME With… we dig deeper into Dan’s background, his passion for fitness and why he is a believer in PRIME equipment.
Without further ado, here is My PRIME With… Dan Greenbaum.
PRIME: Dan, you are the owner of The Gym at Prospect. Tell us about the gym and why you decided to become a gym owner.
Dan Greenbaum: I have always loved fitness. I was a competitive hockey player throughout my youth all the way up to college. When I was 13 years old, I asked my parents if I could get a personal trainer and a membership to our local gym as I wanted to get stronger for the upcoming hockey season. I literally remember as soon as I was done with my first personal training session I fell in love with lifting weights. As soon as I got into college I started bodybuilding, and my love for building muscle only got greater. In college I wanted to go into medicine, but fell so in love with the way muscles contract and how biomechanics worked, I decided to major in exercise science. While in college, I also found that I loved not only training myself but my friends. I decided to get certified as a trainer and started training clients while finishing school. As soon as I graduated from college, I started training full time and my dream was to be able to open a gym one day. As the years passed, I wanted to create a gym where I could offer the best equipment, the best training environment, and the best personal training, so that I could help as many people as possible. About 2 years after I graduated from college, I was working as a trainer at a local gym and met my wife, who was also just as passionate about fitness as I was, and she also wanted to create a gym with the same ideology that I had dreamed of. In 2011 we got the chance to make our dream a reality, so we went for it, and that’s how The Gym at Prospect got started.
PRIME: You’ve decided to add a very wide assortment of PRIME machines and accessories to your gym. How did you hear about PRIME, and what ultimately made you choose to bring in PRIME in such a big way?
Dan Greenbaum: Its funny, back at the first gym I ever trained at they had a Strive bicep curl and a Strive lying hamstring curl machine. I remember back then how much I loved those two pieces. Fast forward 20 years. As I love learning and trying to continue to educate myself as much as I can, I found Ben Pakulski and his MI40 gym. I knew right away that Ben was it, he was THE guy that I wanted to learn from and he knew how to create the best facility. And of course, we all know BPak loves his Prime equipment. I eventually began working with my strength coach, Joe Bennett…he is my yoda! When he uses pieces of equipment, it’s for a reason and a purpose! So, that gave me all the reason I needed to go with PRIME.
PRIME: On the personal side, tell us a little bit about your own fitness goals. What has your fitness journey been like to date, and do you plan to take in the future?
Dan Greenbaum: To piggyback on what I mentioned above, since college I have competed as a bodybuilder, which I absolutely love. I enjoy the process, seeing how my body can change from week to week, all the way up until a show. But I would say my main fitness goals now continue to be to create the best, and most systematical and muscular physique that I can. I love to learn, and I will continue to learn how to better structure my diet and training, and how to pick better exercises for the way my body is built, as well as work on how I execute those movements.
PRIME: For people reading this that might be struggling with plateauing, what advice would you give them to keep raising the bar?
Dan Greenbaum: Really what has helped me is understanding what each muscle does, what its function is, and constantly relearning how to execute specific movements correctly. I think what has also helped is a better understanding of how to fit my body to machines and exercises instead of the other way around. Too many people get attached to the thought that there is one magic exercise or workout program that is “the best” at getting results. Instead, you need to learn what works best for you, and how to actually execute each exercise correctly.
PRIME: OK, you can pick 3 training partners for one week, they could be anyone in the history of the world, who would they be and why?
Dan Greenbaum: This answer is going to sounds really boring. I would choose Ben Pakulski, Joe Bennett, and Tom Purvis. Even though Joe is my current coach, I cannot think of anyone I would rather spend a week training with. He knows my body, he also knows how hard to push me and where I need the most work. Since I live in Colorado and he lives in Tampa, I have not got a chance to train with him in person. I do send him videos of all my exercises and he gives me weekly insights on how to perform them better and also calls me out if I’m not working hard enough. I would train with Ben for the same reasons: the knowledge, and just learning my limits without just pushing weight from A to B. I would want to train with Tom Purvis to learn the biomechanics behind each movement. Like I keep stating – I love to learn, and who best to learn from than Tom himself.
PRIME: Last question, for anyone considering bringing PRIME equipment into their facility, what makes PRIME the right choice for strength equipment?
Dan Greenbaum: The reason I choose PRIME is because too many people only train in the mid-range of each exercise. For the majority of my members, they don’t really even know the difference among the different points of a range of motion or even understand what a strength curve is. I wanted to be able to offer my members a better workout experience that would allow them to train through all ranges of motion. All they needed to understand is how to set the CAM on each piece of PRIME and go. This has worked perfectly! Some of my members want to know the “why” behind the settings, but the most common thing I hear after members go through each piece is “whoa, I really feel like this exercise hit the whole muscle!” For me, this is great. As an exercise science nerd, I understand why PRIME equipment offers such a more complete workout for the trained muscle and can give my clients better, more effective workouts.