Running a gym has fused the best of both worlds for Jonathan Bishop – his love of fitness and the joy of helping others.
Bishop is the owner of Join & Develop Fitness Centre and Health Shop in Fairfield, Tudor Bridge, St Michael. It specialises in positive vibes, detoxing, skin care, cardio and weight training.
He has been able to pull some of the best results out of his clients, who include West Indies cricketers, entrepreneurs, nurses, doctors, lawyers, Banks Calendar girls, designers and a host of others.
The walls are filled with photographs that chronicle the before and after of many “projects”, as he termed them.
“I don’t do this because I want to make money; I do this because I am passionate about health. My main policy is health is wealth.
“You can have all the wealth in the world but you cannot afford health,” Bishop said while assisting some of he clients who were training nearby.
He said he started his first gym, located at Abundant Life Assembly, about 20 years ago. At that time he was an A-class builder in carpentry, masonry, painting and tiling; doing his gym was a little thing on the side that he did not take very seriously.
About ten years into the gym, leadership of the church changed, so he moved to Tudor Bridge. The new location wasn’t a financially sound spot and just as he began to give thought to shutting the business down and going back to making money by building houses, one of his clients introduced him to some available land on the current location, where he set up shop eight years ago.
“When I was going to give up on this, it was easy to push on because . . . of my building skills and that caused me to save my business,” he said.
“I used to work at the other gym from like five in the morning until ten at night, then come down here, clean and build this building ’til four in the morning myself; sleep for an hour, then back to work for 5 a.m. I did that for a whole year,” Bishop explained.
“I was at only marl fill down here, ain’t had a cent on the bank because every single cent I had was going straight into the rent [at the other location], and I could have given up.
“It could have discouraged me but I was determined and passionate. Just getting off the ground, I knew, was stress but it was something I knew I had to do.”
The former track star and pupil of Parkinson Memorial
Secondary School wanted his gym to promote health and wellness in a society with an increasing incidence of chronic non-communicable diseases.
Now he is willing to work 24 hours a day if it means he can change the mindset of at least one person.
His policy is to make training a priority rather than an option.
Experience has taught him that people go to the gym to fix things. For example, when Crop Over is fast approaching, a mass of people head to gyms, fitness clubs, the Garfield Sobers Sports Complex in an effort to lose a pound here and a pound there. But Bishop stressed that when people made fitness and training a priority, they had no reason for short-term goals.
“I like to see a person transform. I take my results so seriously; that is why I am so persistent. I don’t see training as just going in a gym and working out, I see it as a way of life,” he said.
“That is why I am so passionate about this and I make sure I live as an example. I live, eat, sleep and breathe gym and living healthy. I spent the last ten to 12 years researching different herbs and healthy organic foods, oils.
“I do this basically to push health, for people to live a longer and more productive life,” he added. (SDB Media)