Strength and conditioning for athletes with intellectual, developmental, and physical disabilities.
No separate room.
No special hours.
Why we exist
Seventeen seconds, one sentence, a floor full of people training. Damon didn’t set out to make a statement about the fitness industry. He kept meeting athletes with nowhere to train and families who had quietly stopped asking — and the gyms weren’t coming. So he built the floor himself, first in Lafayette, then Baton Rouge, and kept building it wherever the athletes already were.
Who trains here
Here to train. Down syndrome, autism, cerebral palsy, spinal cord and traumatic brain injuries — and everything in between. The youngest athlete on the floor is five. The oldest is seventy-five.
Some athletes are lifting heavy. Some are working on standing up out of a chair. Some need a coach's hands the whole session, some need ten minutes before they're ready to start. The session gets built around the athlete, not the other way around.
You won't find weight machines on this floor. Free weights make an athlete control the movement, and control is what carries over into getting up, getting out, and getting through a day.
No separate room.
No special hours.
No one turned away.
Walk in, meet a coach, see the floor. No workout, no commitment, no pressure. Bring your athlete or come on your own first.
How they move, what they love, what sets them off, what's worked and what hasn't. We listen before we program anything.
Everyone begins with a coach to themselves. Group comes later, if and when your athlete wants it.
The coaches
Fitness is the easy half. Empathy, communication, pacing, knowing when to push and when to sit down on the turf and wait — you cannot hire that off a certificate. It's the part we train hardest for, and it's why families stay.
The paper matters too. Every coach holds a nationally recognized training certification plus an adaptive specialization — and nobody runs a session alone until they've put in weeks of shadowing and supervised coaching on this floor first.
In his own words
Damon on what actually changes in the first thirty seconds — a coach’s face, tone and demeanor, and what it does to somebody who arrived intimidated. Nobody books a second session because the programming was clever. They come back because somebody looked happy to see them the first time.
A parent
Laina Lambert on her son Ridge — born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, three surgical repairs, a stroke, and then aging out of the physical therapy his school provided. She closes on the line that says it best: the environment is everything your child needs. Two minutes covering every stage a family goes through — the diagnosis, the therapies, the aging out, the searching — and where it finally landed. If you watch one thing on this page, watch this.
A parent
Shannon Barres on what her son gets that isn’t strength — leadership, mentoring, being integrated into the community. And the part most places forget: other people need to learn how to socialize with them too. Jonah has been coming for years, and what keeps them coming back isn’t a workout. It’s goals, leadership, and a room that expects things from him.
On the news
Damon in the studio for the Baton Rouge launch, talking through what an adaptive floor actually is and where the idea started back in 2014. A minute and a half, and none of it is us describing ourselves.
My son, Daniel, has a C6 incomplete spinal cord injury and works with Garrett. Garrett has been incredibly encouraging, kind, compassionate, and knowledgeable. Absolutely worth the time and commitment.
Stephanie Humble
Not only is Owen getting stronger, he genuinely looks forward to every class. The coaches create such a positive and motivating environment, and his confidence has grown right alongside his strength.
Rainey
The minute you walk through the door you're greeted with the sweetest welcome. There is always a positive vibe and smiling faces. This place is doing amazing things for so many people.
Jade Foreman
There are plenty more where these came from — the reviews on Facebook and Google are public, unedited, and worth reading.
The Hero’s Journey
Athletes earn a shirt at 100 sessions, another at 200, 300, 400. It is the blue shirt you keep seeing in the photographs on this page, and it is earned one week at a time. A simple idea doing a hard job: showing up, counted and celebrated, until showing up becomes who you are.