This isn’t your parents’ antique shop anymore. Look what’s moving to J Street
The old two-story Graham-Rice Furniture building at 1511 J St., home to the Antique Emporium for two decades but sitting empty since December 2015, has been whipped into shape to now help people get and stay fit.
Its new tenant is the Tru-Fitness personal training studio, which will have a soft opening within a couple of weeks and a grand opening April 4, owner/trainer Jake Keidel said Wednesday.
Keidel, 31, grew up in Ceres, has been a personal trainer for 10 years and opened Tru-Fitness in 2014. He’s had much smaller locations in Modesto and Turlock — just 1,200 square feet when he first started — and right now operates what he calls his boutique training studio in a space in the Shops at Lincoln School shopping center on H Street.
As he picked up new clients, sometimes because other places closed their doors, his current space was getting crowded, he said. Keidel set his sights on the J Street site, and worked six or seven months with the owner to reach agreement.
“It’s been a mission, a journey,” to get the place ready for Tru-Fitness, but aside from the storefront and its soon-to-be-gone, old-timey awning, there’s no trace of the Antique Emporium left.
In the H Street space, the business has had eight trainers, and it will grow to 10 with the move of just a quarter mile. But more significantly, the much bigger J Street spot is allowing him to offer memberships in addition to personal training sessions, and to offer a hybrid gym with CrossFit, boot camp, power lifting and bodybuilding all under one roof, Keidel said.
Keidel himself is a bodybuilder, who won the 2017 overall title in the National Physique Committee’s USA Championship Men’s Classic Physique competition. But he posts little about himself on the Tru-Fitness website and Facebook page, he said, because he doesn’t want people to mistakenly think it’s about bodybuilding, which is just a small part of the business.
“Ninety-nine percent of our people are just everyday people who want to be healthy,” he said this week. His business is for all types of clientele, he said, from the 75-year-old who wants to get up off the couch with less difficulty to the 15-year-old struggling with extra weight and a lack of confidence.
On the current Tru-Fitness site, which Keidel said will be replaced as the new location opens, he wrote, “As a kid, I struggled with weight. I wasn’t very confident in myself and didn’t like the way I looked. That is when sports came into play. I was always into some type of sport throughout the year. Baseball, soccer, football , basketball, I played it all. In high school, I was a three-sport athlete. In that time, I fell in love with the weight room. So heading into college baseball I decided to hang my hat, and take working out more seriously. Years later decided that being a personal trainer was the career I wanted to pursue.”
Tru-Fitness is for people who take their health seriously, he said. It’s not competing with the fitness centers that offer $10 monthly memberships. “We’re a pricier location, but you pay for what you get,” he said, adding that monthly memberships are $100. “A lot of gyms are cheaper, buts it’s because you’re walking into broken equipment, overcrowded environments, not a positive environment, not clean facilities.”
Rather than a flood of members drawn with cheap prices, Keidel said he’d rather have a smaller number where “we all know each other because of the community we’ve created, who can trust one another in the gym — ‘Hey, man you left your phone’” — rather than worry that someone is going to steal from the lockers.
Downtown is a great place to grow his business, he said, because it has so many businesspeople and city and county employees who will be able to work out before or after work or, during the day, “ walk a couple of blocks, get in a quick 45-minute workout and go back to work.”
And downtown is glad to have him, said attorney Bart Barringer, a partner in Mayol & Barringer Law Offices and a Downtown Improvement District board member. “I am thrilled,” he said Thursday upon learning Tru-Fitness is moving into the emporium spot. His law practice is just a block and a half away, he said, and having the J Street building vacant and frequently vandalized has been a shame.
“I think anything that removes blight — and I don’t blame (the building owner) a bit for boarding up the windows after having them broken so many times — is great for downtown,” he said. “And having a tenant for the space is great for the J Street corridor. This really brightens my day. It was vacant for much too long.”
