Chatter fills the yellow room as students settle onto their mats, which form a semicircle around the seated instructor, Jay Martin. At 9:03 a.m. exactly, Martin, an extremely fit, energetic man with a shaved head, jumps up and belts out a warning that today’s class will be “heavy on the weights and light on the yoga.” He then sits down with poise. The classroom grows silent, and the meditation music and running water become audible for the first time.
      The class spends the first 15 minutes doing yoga, where people slowly inhale and exhale as they stretch. But the classroom is soon filled with huffs, puffs and grunts as Martin picks up the pace, switching from yoga poses to yoga-style weight training exercises. Martin cheers everyone on by intermittently shouting, “Excellent, excellent!” with the fervor that a football coach brings to his team’s games. Despite the shift in workout from relaxing to rigorous, the classroom mood remains the same, as students and instructor literally smile through the pain.
      It is Martin’s experiences with both Western and Eastern traditions that allow him to create a class as unique as the 75 minute Lifeforce Fit class. A certified yoga instructor, Martin also has a background in more traditional Western athletics such as weight training, track, and football, in which he participated throughout college at the University of Colorado at Boulder. And unlike most fitness classes, his can’t be categorized simply as yoga, aerobics, or weight training, since they incorporate all three.
     Martin’s first experience with yoga five years ago changed his life forever.  He exclaimed, “15 minutes in, I was like, I should’ve been doing this 15 years ago!” The instructor of his first class, Glen Tippin, now teaches yoga at Martin’s LifeForce Fitness Project studio in Eugene.
     Martin started the Lifeforce Fitness Project in 2005 after he and his family moved to Eugene from Littleton, Colorado in 2003. He and his wife lived what he referred to as “the perfect life” in Littleton. Martin loved his job as a high school teacher, where he taught history, civics, economics and sociology. He and his wife had two young daughters and a home to call their own. However, Martin admits that they were ready for a change, although it came quite unexpectedly.
     One day, Martin was mowing his lawn when he ran over the water meter and broke it, setting off an entire chain of events. Cussing and yelling, Martin finally said to himself, “You know what, I’m done.” When his bemused neighbor heard him, he asked what was wrong, to which Martin replied, “Jason, I’m going to sell this goddamn house and everything that goes with it.” Later that night, he talked to his wife about selling the house. Within a matter of months, they had sold it, using the money they made to buy the RV they had always wanted and to tour the country.
     The family visited different parts of the country for some time, but Martin remembers that the whole family loved Eugene upon their first visit. While there, Martin’s wife applied for a nursing position at Sacred Heart Medical Center, which a few months later became the reason for their move to Oregon. After living in Colorado for 35 years, Martin now happily calls Eugene home.
     Although Martin, who received his master’s degree in education from the University of Phoenix, doesn’t teach high school anymore, he is now able to teach in a new way. Through one-on-one personalized training sessions, Martin helps people to get into better shape and to reach their fitness goals.
      “I try really hard to get people outside,” Martin says, so instead of training them in a gym, Martin’s sessions are “totally customized to what they might really be interested in doing.” He takes clients biking in the wine country, as well running and rock climbing.
Martin pushes his clients to work harder than they likely would if they were exercising alone. His teaching and coaching background is obvious, and it’s hard to miss Martin’s strength, endurance, and power while he conducts his classes.
     “We’ll keep doing this until I get tired, and I haven’t done this in a few days so it might be a while,” he shouts to his students while doing a leg exercise. The students, some of whom are visibly exhausted, whole-heartedly attempt to keep up with Martin, who seems incapable of getting tired. On the rare occasion that he does start to tire, he smiles brightly, sharing his soreness with the class as if to say that if he is feeling it, they must be getting a good workout.
     Martin’s class is an all-over routine that focuses on strength, cardio, flexibility, toxicity reduction, and tension release. The students range from their mid-twenties to their mid-sixties, but all participate equally. They do sun salutations and cat-cow, two traditional yoga Asanas (poses), and they utilize tools such as dumbbells for bicep curls and exercise balls for abdominal exercises. At one point, the entire class walks barefooted outside of the studio and onto the sidewalk. Martin then has everyone, dumbbells in hand, do lunges for about 100 meters and back, the entire time clapping and yelling, “Excellent! Superb job so far!”
     The name Lifeforce Fitness Project stands out like a sore thumb in the realm of gyms, which are normally given names such as Anytime Fitness and 24-hour Fitness. To Martin, the name of his studio is particularly meaningful. “I really like the concept of Lifeforce, chi, prana,” he says, so that had to be a part of the name. But Martin couldn’t leave it at that, since a non-profit organization in Washington already had it. “I had to make it original.” So, he added the word “Fitness” for clarification, and “Project” to suggest that the people who enter the studio are taking on a project, something new and exciting.
     “Who’s in charge, mind or body?” Martin shouts at his profusely sweating students. Clearly the fittest person in the room, Martin remains nearly silent in comparison to the rest of his class, which intermittently bursts out “oooh weee’s,” between a long set of leg lifts. Martin continues to encourage students to disassociate their minds from their bodies, and to get rid of their egos. This is one of the many aspects of Martin’s philosophy that sets him apart from his personal trainer counterparts, and one of the reasons that he has such a loyal group of students, each and every one that he calls by name.
     The class ends with savasana, or corpse pose, and again, the classroom becomes devoid of any sound other than a musical chanting coming from the speakers, the running water, and the easing of air breathed in and out rhythmically. Martin lies flat with his students, sharing with them the moments of pure relaxation after an hour’s worth of breaking the body down piece by piece. Finally, Martin and his students sit up, stretching from one side to the other, and place their hands together in front of their hearts. Martin’s eyes remain closed, and he whispers, “Namaste,” a word that signifies the utmost respect to whomever it is spoken. Finally, the students’ heads bow in unison, and every voice comes together with one last word, “Namaste.”