FORT COLLINS — The warm-up at involves mendin’ fences.
Really, participants are just mimicking digging a fence-post hole by doing standing crunches on a spring-loaded pole. It’s the same for another warm-up exercise: picking up a saddle. There’s no horse, but the movement is squats with light weight.
What really ropes people into the rodeo spirit of the gym — which is in a strip mall on the south side of Fort Collins, not a ranch — is the unbridled enthusiasm of “Cowboy” Ryan Ehmann, who wears a cowboy hat as he trains. Also, he hollers “One in the door! Two in the door!” when folks walk in and rings a cowbell to elicit whoops from participants mid-workout.
Sound gimmicky? Hold on there, pardner. Consider this: Participants wear heart-rate monitors so the trainer can keep them in the appropriate training zone. There’s a nutrition program. And the workout on the fences (yes, there are fences) blends full-body movement and strength, balance and flexibility with high-intensity interval training.
“Very effective,” said Rachel Halphen, still sweating post-workout on a recent Tuesday evening. Halphen, 29, lives in Loveland and was going to the original Cowboys Gym there; the lease is up on that space, though, so Ehmann’s moving it. Halphen now goes to the new gym in Fort Collins, where she works.
“It’s not boring, and they keep you accountable,” she said.
In some ways, accountability is at the core of the story of Cowboys Gym. Most recently, that push for accountability came from .
Earlier this month, Ehmann appeared in an episode of ” that Michaels is hosting on Spike TV.
The entrepreneurs are competing for a $100,000 grand prize to launch their fitness concept or product. The winner will be revealed in the finale at midnight on Dec. 8.
In Ehmann’s recent episode on “Sweat Inc.,” one of the people he’s supposed to train disappears, and Michaels hauls his fence out to a Dumpster. It looks like disaster for Cowboy Ryan.
“When she took my fence and threw it in the trash, then she stripped me outta my rodeo (gear) — my boots, my pants — and put me in the spandex, that was the same day Matt didn’t show up as well. So that was a brutal day for me,” Ehmann said.
Michaels demands the workout that turned him into a rodeo success. Initially, he balked. “Fourteen years ago, when I was winning championships, I came up with my own rodeo boot-camp routine that I did, and that’s what gave me the edge on the competition,” he said. “(But) cowboys don’t share their winning secret.”
Michaels left him without a choice.
“She’s like, well, Cowboy, … I just took away your only product.”
It kicked him into action. In a scene that follows, Ehmann rolls out of bed well before dawn and tells the camera that he grew up on a ranch (south of Castle Rock), and that no other competitor is getting up at 3 a.m. to work as he is.
“I grew up watching my dad bust his butt every day, so I knew that as far as my work ethic (goes), no one could touch me,” he said.
He rounded up his missing trainee and told him his backstory: “I went from one of the top riders to a few years later, I’m not riding, I’m retired, I’m living in a basement. Lost everything. Lost my relationship. Was $57,000 in debt. So I’ve come from the bottom of the bottom.”
The trainee returned. But after 14 years in the fitness business — and even — he was still going to have to up his game again to stay on the show.
“Cowboy Ryan started with a concept in need of an overhaul,” said Randy Hetrick, founder of and a judge on Sweat Inc., in a statement. “But he was one of the most tenacious, hard-working entrepreneurs that I’ve seen in a while.”
Ehmann, 43, survived that episode and came home to Loveland, where he brainstormed even more. “After having Jillian Michaels kick my butt, and getting me to raise my standards, … I took a look at everything I’ve done over the years,” he said. “I’m putting it into one duplicate-able franchise model.”
That model will come to Denver after the first of the year, he said.
“We’re going to have four of them opened next year that we own and operate, but we presold six franchises on top of that,” he said.
To nail down the concept, he looked at “what are the biggest complaints?” he said. People don’t want to walk into group fitness classes late, so they’ll often just skip it entirely if they’re caught in traffic on the way to the gym. He decided to run the workouts at Cowboys Gym on a continuous loop that participants can jump into anytime after warming up.
Another issue: “People don’t have 45 minutes or an hour to work out.” So he made the workouts at Cowboys Gym quick, just 28 minutes.
And there’s the accountability factor. At Cowboys Gym, participants write three things on a small blackboard above their fences at the gym: their name, target heart-rate zone and goal.
Kelly: “Smaller pants.” (A month in at the Fort Collins gym, she has already succeeded on that front.)
Mollie: “Be amazing.”
Beth: “Wedding.”
When Beth headed out the door, Ehmann ushered her out with high-fives and hollers. “She’s got a wedding to go to. Woo!” he called out, and the women still working out echoed his “Woo!”
“We’re all in this together,” he said.
Jenn Fields: 303-954-1599, jfields@denverpost.com or @jennfields
