State College Personal Training Business Opening Its Own Gym

After a decade of partnering with other area gyms, a State College personal training business is getting ready to open its own fitness center.

MBI Fitness expects to open its new facility at 2101 S. Atherton St., in the Hills Plaza within the next two months, owner Adam Goldberg said. The location was previously home to Power Train Sports and Fitness, which closed its State College area gym in 2024.

Goldberg launched MBI — which stands for Mind and Body Integration — in 2016 with a philosophy of tailored training that helps clients improve physically and mentally. Starting out on his own, Goldberg’s clients received complimentary memberships to Anytime Fitness.

The business has expanded to include a team of trainers and since 2020 has provided clients memberships to East Coast Health & Fitness.

Now, MBI clients will have their own dedicated gym for training.

“What kind of makes us different is our model has always been that our clients get a complimentary gym membership included with the price of their training. We break down that barrier of needing to sign up for the gym first and then get into a long-term contract with the gym prior to getting into personal training,” Goldberg said. “You just start with us as the trainers and we include the membership to the facility within that cost. What will be kind of cool here is this will be the first time where we’re able to have the facility be completely dedicated to our own training clients.”

MBI’s new space will not sell public memberships like a traditional gym would. Rather, memberships to the new fitness center will be part of the personal training package.

Members will be able to use a remote access system to enter the gym during business hours, even when they don’t have training sessions scheduled.

“Let’s say somebody wants to train with us twice a week. They would also have access to the facility to come in on their off training days and utilize the program we’ve developed for them to work out on their own,” Goldberg said. “So it serves as a gym membership as well, but only for our training clients.

“With East Coast, the way it’s always worked is people pay to train with us and they get a complimentary membership to use the gym. But obviously, at East Coast we’re sharing the gym with all of their membership as well. This will be the first time the facility is specifically just ours.”

MBI has been renovating its new 6,000-square-foot space from top to bottom since early this year. It will have plate-loaded and cable-loaded machines, free weights, dumbbells and “all the stuff that you’d expect in a commercial gym,” Goldberg said.

New rubber flooring has been installed, along with a new 27-yard turf strip that is about three-quarters of an inch in height and is “a little bit more like what you’d expect in a sports facility,” he explained.

The facility will have three bathrooms, two of which will have showers, and will offer towel service.

“It was a larger space that was open and lent itself to the ability to be creative in how we wanted to make the gym floor specific to the needs of our clientele,” Goldberg said. “I think the space was the part that was useful. But I would say we really renovated that place a lot, so we’ve changed a lot of things in there. We really redid everything.”

While continuing personal and semi-private training, Goldberg and his team are hoping to add some small group training with the larger space available to them.

That team has grown as MBI has evolved.

“Each trainer on our staff has some of their own specialties,” Goldberg said. “We have trainers that have certifications in joint mobility, we have certifications in golf fitness and certifications in nutrition. We have a good spread of specializations within our team. When people come and reach out for training, there is a high likelihood we’ll have someone who’s worked with whatever the goal they’re looking for is or with whatever need they may have.”

Understanding a client’s history and goals have been key for MBI. Trainers perform an in-depth assessment, starting with an initial consult to go over goal setting and relevant injury, medical and exercise history. They conduct movement screenings to test for muscle imbalances and tailor the best baseline movements for clients to start with.

An InBody scale, meanwhile, measures body fat percentage, muscle mass and other metrics for tracking progress.

“We get those metrics right at the beginning so that we’re able to reassess about every month to see how our clients are progressing,” Goldberg said.

MBI also uses a mobile app that has instructional videos and the ability to track sets, reps and rest periods, and integrates with devices such as MyFitnessPal, Fitbit, Apple Watch and Withings scales.

“What’s nice is, depending on how inclusive the client wants to be, our app can compile all that data into one screen, so that we’re able to assist with all those things, whether it be fitness, whether it be nutrition, whether it be sleep quality, or their performance in the gym itself,” Goldberg sad. “It’s pretty nice that we can be kind of evidence-based when it comes to making recommendations for people. If it’s outside of our scope on what the recommendation needs to be, then we’re able to, hopefully, help facilitate finding somebody else that is licensed to do those things.”

After 10 years of working from other gyms and wondering if the time would be right to make the leap to his own, Goldberg said he is looking forward to bringing all of his team’s services to their new dedicated space.

For information about MBI, visit mbifitness.com, and for questions about services or the new facility, contact Goldberg at adam@mbifitness.com.