Ryan and Erin Larose are like most parents, they want what is best for their children.

That’s why they started their sons Owen and Nolan Larose at PowerStrength.

Erin had trained in the adult fitness program with great success, when she found out about the high school athlete and youth ‘Little Beast’ groups, she was intrigued.

“Once I got here and started training, I loved it so much,” Erin recalled. “And I told my husband, ‘I don’t want this to end’ and he said, ‘Then just keep doing it.’ And I realized after being here, because I didn’t realize initially, that there was a kind of a kid/student program. My kids were younger at the time. And I told my husband, I said, ‘Man, I think our kids should do this. I think there’d be a lot of value for them.’ And he said, ‘Okay, let’s get them started with it.’ And they got going and he saw the benefits I was having and saw the benefits the kids were having. And he was like, ‘I want to do this too.’ So we’ve all gone here as a family for a number of years now.”

The Little Beast program at PowerStrength is designed for kids in 5th-8th grade and teaches the fundamentals of hard work, coachability, and resilience. That is where Owen got started first, and later Nolan as well.

For the Larose’s it was about giving their kids the tools they would need to be successful as they grew. Owen was particularly reserved when he started at PowerStrength.

“We wanted to give him the opportunities to take advantage of something like this,” Ryan said. “This is a pretty special place. Erin and I both work out here. We both very much love the atmosphere, the culture, the trainers, all of that. But to have an opportunity like this, it just didn’t exist when we were growing up, at least it was very limited. And so we just really wanted to give him the most opportunities if he was willing to take the next step and take advantage of that.” 

Owen was unsure what he was in for when he came to PowerStrength for the first time.

“I just remember the first session, I had no idea how to squat properly or anything like that,” Owen said. “A trainer helped me. The first session was all just dialing in that form and getting it locked down and then eventually moving up from just doing kettlebells to doing barbell work and getting help with that. It just kind of really helped me dial that in because I had really never been exposed to that before PowerStrength.” 

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ATHLETIC ADVANTAGE

The early years were paramount for Owen, building the knowledge and setting the tone for what was to come.

He eventually moved up to the high school athlete program and eventually joined PowerStrength’s most advanced training program, Premier, where serious athletes are around other serious athletes, training together for 3 months. This is where most make the biggest jump in their development, and Owen did. He saw an impact as a baseball player and an athlete.

“I have improved immensely, even in my first Premier,” Owen said. “I went from being ‘he’s okay’ hitting and exit velocity wise to ‘okay, this guy, he’s maybe hitting the ball pretty hard.’ I gained weight, I went from 190 to 225 in my first year of Premier, put on just a ton of weight, a ton of muscle, I saw immense gains in every single aspect of my lifts, just huge gains in every single aspect of it.”

At 6’4” tall, adding weight was a big goal for Owen because it was something he had struggled with in the past. He was able to get bigger while still becoming faster and more agile.

“Oh, he’s so much quicker, his bat speed is quicker, so much more power,” Erin said. “Just more coordinated on his feet, he’s a taller kid so sometimes being sleight of foot isn’t his biggest gift. But we’ve seen all of that improve his footwork, all of it, speed. 

“We could not have ever dreamt he would be this strong or agile of an athlete you know four or five years ago,” she continued. He’s just superseded anything we could have ever hoped for him. And also so many other avenues than just the pure strength piece.”

Despite putting in the time at his high school weight room, Owen remained dedicated to coming to PowerStrength, sometimes he would train 5 days per week.

“There’s just a lot more here, we don’t do a lot of speed stuff (at high school), it is kind of ‘let’s lift weights’ and all that stuff. This is a lot more about becoming more athletic with speed and agility. And you just tell them ‘I squatted today, my legs are a little sore,’ and they’ll work around it and give you more of a complete full body workout and stuff like that,” Owen said. 

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CONFIDENCE JUMP

Owen made tremendous strides athletically with his training, but the biggest growth came in his confidence.

Being part of Premier made such an impact on him that he wrote about it as part of the college application process.

“It’s been a huge difference,” Owen said about how PowerStrength has impacted him mentally. “I always go back to when I wrote my college essay. It was a prompt about an event that changed the aspect of your brain and life mentally. And I wrote about when I came into the first Premier session and just the atmosphere, it just felt different, it just was different. And that whole, just experience, it’s like that whole David Goggins stuff, which a lot of people think is cliche and stuff, but I think it’s kind of legit. It’s just like callusing your mind and making you kind of immune to hardships and stuff like that and helps you really work through stuff when stuff gets difficult.”

His parents can see every day the difference that PowerStrength has made for their son. 

“He is just able to go into environments more now, I see it,” Erin said. “He’s just so much more confident in the way he looks and also has confidence just in himself that he maybe was lacking before. So I see him much more sure of himself in environments that he’s not comfortable with. We hear it from his teachers that he’s very involved in the classroom and things like that. And I think all of that just really comes from things like PowerStrength.”

“It has been almost a complete transformation,” Ryan added. “He was a very quiet kid before. Always bigger height-wise, but as he’s gotten to be stronger as he’s gotten to be more agile, faster, etc. You really can see sort of his self-confidence just blossoming. He’s going off to college here in a couple of months. And it’s exciting to see where he was when he started this program and where he’s leaving the program to just see the growth that he’s made over the past couple of years. And really, it’s the whole body, the strength side of things is a given he grew exponentially in terms of his strength, and speed and size, but really just the mental side of it and the self-confidence that he walks around with now, he didn’t have that a couple of years ago. So it’s been a great gift.” 

Owen finished up his senior season of baseball and graduated from Lowell High School, next up he will be attending Michigan State University in the fall.

Going off to college will test his ability to balance newfound independence with academic responsibilities, it will force him to navigate social dynamics and adapt to a more self-directed learning environment.

“The culture here really focuses on discipline,” Ryan said. “And I think that the discipline that he’s learned over the years in terms of nutrition and staying active and focusing on all the right things and being a leader, etc, and that’s going to help him exponentially as he moves into college. He’s going to be going to a big university. He’s going to be one of 10,000 freshmen that are showing up on orientation day. All those types of things are just going to make him, from a social standpoint and everything else, I think he’s really going to succeed because of that.” 

Premier is all about athletes getting bigger, faster, and stronger, but it also teaches life lessons. The expert coaches push the athletes to be better, and it has proven to benefit them well after their high school playing days have come to an end.

“I think it’s just working through tough problems and just hardships and stuff like that, overall,” Owen said. “Not stopping when things get hard and pushing yourself and complacency kills, the whole thing here is not being complacent with where you are and just continuing to push to strive to be the best version of yourself.”

Erin believes that Owen is in a position to thrive both in college and beyond.

“Oh, just so proud of him, so thankful, immensely thankful for PowerStrength, because we just could have never dreamt this for him,” Erin said. “And to see there’s such great role models here, he likes to come here, he loves the trainers, he loves the people he trains with. It’s all of those things that it’s just really great to see that, we believe as he gets older, this will serve him well down the road because he’s learned a lot about nutrition, he’s learned a lot about how to work out appropriately, safely. So as he goes out on his own in college, when he hopefully wants to keep in shape, he’ll know how to do it the right way.” 

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“MONEY WELL SPENT”

Ryan and Erin have seen firsthand the benefits of training at PowerStrength. The strength and speed are important, but the lasting impact created makes it difficult to put a price on its value.

“I would say it is money well spent,” Erin said. “I don’t regret one dime of anything that we’ve ever paid to PowerStrength. We feel like we’ve gotten way more bang for our buck than anything. The long-term knowledge that our kids have been given to workout safely in the future, learn about nutrition for more than just the parents because a lot of times we don’t know, I hear some of the things that I’ll maybe tell my kids but they’ll come home from PowerStrength with the same information, but they’ll remember it from from PowerStrength. I would encourage anyone to do it. I think it’s just been a great program for our kids. They’ve become better athletes, better people and we just love it here.”

“It truly is an investment in your son, your daughter. The opportunity that exists of what they do here, the programs, and all of that. It’s really hard to put into words,” Ryan said. “I’m kind of struggling with what the benefits are because they’re so intangible, physically you can see what they are, but a lot of the intangibles are what I think is money well spent, and I can’t encourage you enough. We recommend it to anybody that we possibly can to come here because there’s nothing else like it in West Michigan. There’s really nothing else like it that I’ve seen in a lot of other parts of the country, but it’s a pretty special environment.”

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GET STARTED AT POWERSTRENGTH 

5th-12th grade athletes of all sports and abilities can sign up at PowerStrength – while spots remain. PowerStrength currently has 4 facilities in West Michigan – Alpine, Kentwood, Jenison, and Plainfield – with a 5th facility in Holland coming in late fall 2024!

Multiple training sessions are offered throughout the day and into the evening during the summer, specific training times vary by location. 

Visit https://powerstrengthpro.com/athlete/contact/ to learn more or click below to schedule your assessment and get started.

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