Flagstaff Featured Business: BAM Fitness
The Flagstaff Region Featured Business is a monthly newspaper and web feature presented in partnership by Flagstaff County and The Community Press.
BAM FITNESS
www.bamfitness.ca
Before she became the owner of a successful fitness business helping to improve the lives of countless clients struggling with their health, Brittany MacMillan first had to slay her own health struggles.
“I had steadily started to put on weight and I steadily noticed that my mood was just terrible,” she explains. “I was very, very self-conscious about it. I beat myself up all the time.”
To help rectify the rising number on the scale, MacMillan tried drastically cutting back on how much she was eating.
“And then I noticed my relationship with food was just awful,” she recalls. “It was so strained – almost as strained as the relationship with myself.”
In search of a healthful and long-term solution to her weighty woes, MacMillan decided to get educated. In fact, she signed up for a personal training course and soon earned her certification as a personal training specialist through canfitpro.
Around that time, MacMillan – still focused on shedding excess pounds – started running.
“I started running because the first thing I learned was ‘calories in, calories out.’ I was still looking for the easiest way to burn calories,” she admits.
“So I started running and it worked. Then I started getting injured and wondering why.”
MacMillan soon came to the realization that there’s so much more to health and fitness than just losing weight.
“(Besides exercise,) there’s the nutrition aspect and there’s the mindset, and by harmonizing all three of those things, that’s when it became real,” she enthuses. “That’s when it became amazing.”
And that’s when BAM Fitness was born.
It was circa 2013 and MacMillan was on her first mat leave. She decided to offer some fitness classes in Hardisty, advertising them through Facebook.
“I tried it out and it was awesome,” she recalls. “I did that and I also had people come to my house and my little home gym and we would work out and I would put them through personal training. I did that for a few months until I went back to work at Enbridge in the oilfield.”
Once back at work, MacMillan continued offering classes but cut back on her personal training.
“I’d take on the odd consultation as they came in,” she explains. “If someone had like a bad knee, we’d work through it. I’d give them a little plan.”
Fast-forward to circa 2019, when MacMillan was nearing the end of her third mat leave. By then, the busy mom “hadn’t taught any classes or anything for two years.”
But she decided she was going to give it another go. She soon started teaching again and vowed that once she returned to work, “I’ll just see if I can keep it going once a week.”
This time there was no looking back.
“People kept coming and I got the love for instructing again,” says MacMillan.
And BAM Fitness started to slowly blossom. MacMillan ended up earning several more fitness-related certifications and then she started making plans to “escape my 9-to-5 job.”
It wasn’t easy for her. In fact, MacMillan calls it the “hardest thing I’ve ever done – hands down!”
But on March 4, 2020, she quit her day job to focus on BAM Fitness.
“Three weeks later, we were in a lockdown and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is not what I thought was going to happen,’” she recalls. “I thought I could have people come over and train in my home gym in my basement and be face-to-face and we weren’t even allowed to be near other people other than our family. It’s just been one crazy learning curve since then. I got really well-acquainted with Zoom and I got insurance to train online.”
Over the past year and a half, BAM Fitness has continued to evolve through the global pandemic.
These days, MacMillan is teaching Strong Nation, a martial arts-based HIIT (high intensity interval training) class both online and in-person a couple times a week.
“Everybody loves it and you get really strong, really fast,” MacMillan says. “It’s so much fun.”
In addition, she’s teaching private yoga classes and plans to soon start offering public classes online and eventually in-person when provincial health restrictions are once again lifted.
On September 20, MacMillan is launching Rise, a 90-day program she designed for busy women.
“What we do is from a mindfulness approach, we tackle nutrition. We start developing mindful eating right away from Day 1,” she says.
“Then we go into movement. So I’m going to meet them where they’re at. You may want to just do a steps challenge. Some people may want to develop their glutes and their arms. It’s just totally personalized personal training. We also add in things like meditation, mindfulness workshops, and little mindset challenges every single week.”
The program is designed to fit into any schedule. MacMillan emphasizes that it’s not just a weight-loss program.
“The weight loss, that’s a nice side-effect that just happens along with it. But what we really focus on is getting to know your higher self every day, getting to reconnect with that version of yourself so that you have clarity, it’s easy to find motivation and it’s easy to make good choices,” she adds.
“So we do some inner healing. We get to the root of these past behaviours and these past wounds, then we can move forward. Then things get easy.
“That’s when the beauty happens, that’s when it just flows and you’re in alignment.”
Besides personal training, MacMillan’s other certifications include YogaFit Level One, certified meditation and mindfulness teacher, Strong Nation certified instructor, and healthy eating and weight loss coaching.
Her goals as a business owner are straightforward: she wants to heal as many people as she possibly can through movement, mindfulness and using food as medicine.
“If I can do that and spread this knowledge and help people, then that’s going to make the region that much stronger one by one.”
Check out the feature in print in the September 15 edition of The Community Press – available for digital purchase anytime. Never miss an issue, become a SUBSCRIBER today!
The Flagstaff Region Featured Business is a monthly newspaper and web feature presented in partnership by Flagstaff County and The Community Press.
