About Us

About Us

At Mekanix, we create well-rounded fitness experiences through our premiere coaching, programming, and tight-knit community.  We are Texas’s only gym focused on calisthenics, a time-tested form of bodyweight training that provides superior strength, mobility and flexibility training. Calisthenics provides a powerful pathway to exploring your body’s physical (and mental) capabilities and a lifetime of physical fitness.

Our Mission

Help our athletes achieve greatness through fitness.

Please continue reading to learn more about:

• Our Core Objectives
• Our Values
• Our Story – A Message from our Owner

Our Core Objectives

1. Provide high-quality instruction. It seems almost anybody feels qualified to provide exercise, nutrition, and wellness guidance these days. We are committed to providing high-quality instruction and education, grounded in education, science, and experience, both through our own personal journeys and the journeys of the athletes we coach.
2. Deliver and promote excellence. Are working out to hang out, or do you have a goal in mind?  We promise you’ll have a great time, but our first emphasis is on promoting excellence across the board: in our instructors, in our training, in our community, and most importantly … IN YOU!
3. Establish and grow healthy lifestyles. We want to inspire you to take your same commitment to fitness inside the gym, outside the gym.  At Mekanix we help our athletes establish and grow healthy lifestyles.
4. Fuel your ambition. Having a great physique and maintaining optimal health is an amazing achievement in life. It’s also a great springboard for sitting down and deciding exactly what you would like to achieve in your life, in terms of career, business, goals, creative projects and building a fulfilling lifestyle in general. You’ll be feeling so good on our programs that you may be surprised how creative you feel and just how much energy you have to spur those long held goals and dreams into action.
5. Foster and grow a vibrant community. ​Community is a staple in our fitness philosophy at Mekanix.  We strives to develop a community of like-minded individuals who support, encourage, motivate, and assist one another in reaching their personal goals.  In fact, the communal aspect of Mekanix is a key component of how we produce such exceptional results for our athletes. Our members enjoy community events such as lunches, speakers, Saturday socials, and much more!

Our Values

1. Excellence We expect excellence from ourselves and we want you to pursue and achieve excellence as well.
2. Passion We are passionate about we do. We hope you are, too.
3. Challenge Growth Mekanix challenges growth: physically, mentally, and emotionally.
4. Community We value community: our instructors, our athletes, our family, our friends, our supporters, our neighbors.
5. Discipline Every one of us has the opportunity to achieve greatness through disciplined progression towards a goal. The magical thing about discipline is that flexing that muscle in one area of your life helps in all areas of life.
6. Self-awareness We believe in understanding who you are and what you can achieve, not just physically but mentally and emotionally as well.

Our Story – From Our Owner

Lessons learned from a life in fitness

I’m 38 and I’ve been passionate about fitness my entire life.  I played soccer growing up, spent most of my evenings in high school and college rock climbing, played rugby @ Rice – just to name a few things I’ve tried.  In my early 20s after college, I used to work out a few hours a day: weight lifting, running, and playing sports. In my mid-20s I started a consulting business, and as that business grew, working out a few hours a day wasn’t realistic anymore.  Plus, lifting weights for hours and hours each week got boring.

In my quest to find something more interesting and efficient, I tried CrossFit.  I enjoyed it and gained respect for committed CrossFit athletes, but I also noticed that a lot of people at the gym (“the box”) were getting injured.  And, I had a few very close calls myself doing heavy Olympic weight lifting. I realized it really wasn’t a goal of mine to dominate lifts like the snatch and clean and jerk.  I was in my late 20’s by this point and my priorities had shifted to training in a way that would keep me strong and healthy and also allow me to train for a lifetime. If God so graces me, I plan to live to a very active 100+ ?

My quest for the right fitness regimen led me down a lot of different paths.  My journey led me to bodyweight exercise and, in particular, calisthenics. Calisthenics captivated me for many reasons:  it allowed me to get stronger than I ever was before, it’s safe, it’s made my body more mobile, it’s fun, and it has captivated my imagination for exploring my body’s capabilities.

Options to practice in Houston were limited, though.  I found various meet-ups and lone instructors but they offered sporadic and inconsistent guidance.  There were online courses and training videos from great instructors, but it was hard practicing alone and even harder not having instructors or peers in the same room as me to ask questions of and get pointers from.   I found a few gyms that specialized in other types of training and had some bolt on instruction here and there, but it was clearly an afterthought and not a place for consistent training of the highest caliber.

I decided to create a place that would not only fill my needs but also serve as a hub for the Houston community.  Thus, Mekanix was born.