GMB Fitness is a small team of movement teachers who make online training programs for adults who want to stay strong, mobile, and capable for the next few decades of their lives.
We’ve been at it since July 2010. More than 130,000 people in over 100 countries have trained with us, almost all of them at home, on their own schedule, in sessions of 15 to 45 minutes.
We teach strength, mobility, and motor control as skills you practice, the way you’d practice a martial art or an instrument. You work on specific things you can feel and test. Each skill becomes raw material for the next one, so the work keeps adding up for as long as you keep at it.
Who GMB Is For
Most of our clients are somewhere between their late 30s and their 50s, and most of them already train. They lift, run, climb, roll, surf, hike, or chase small children around, and they’ve noticed a gap opening up between what they know about fitness and what their body will do on a given Tuesday.
A lot of them train at 5am before the house wakes up, in a space that doubles as the living room. They read the research. They have opinions about barefoot shoes. They’ve done enough programs to know which promises to ignore, and at some point they started working around a knee, a shoulder, or a lower back.
One of our recent reviews came from a 46-year-old emergency medicine doctor in Italy with three kids. That’s a pretty typical GMB client, apart from the part where he saves lives for a living.
What they want is a practice they can run themselves for the next thirty years, with no dependence on a particular coach, gym, or piece of equipment. That’s what we build.
Why We Started GMB
We kept meeting people who were strong in the gym and couldn’t control their bodies outside of it. Lifters with big numbers who couldn’t get into a deep squat. Athletes sidelined by injuries that shouldn’t have happened. People grinding through workouts they hated because they assumed that’s what fitness required.
The fitness industry sells intensity and aesthetics because both photograph well. Moving well is harder to fit in a thumbnail.
Physical therapy fixes what’s broken. Elite athletics assumes you have unlimited time and a recovery budget to match. Most adults live in between, and almost nobody was writing training for them.
So we built it: progressive skill practice organized into a curriculum, with a physical therapist checking every progression and two martial artists obsessing over how to teach it. We’ve been refining it for fifteen years. There’s no final version, which is sort of the point.
How We Train
Every program uses the same loop. You assess where you are with specific movement tests. You address your weak points with progressive exercises, rating your own quality and effort so the session matches how your body feels that day. Then you apply what you’ve built to whatever you do outside of training, and start the loop again from a higher floor.
High-energy day? You do more. Low-energy day? You do less, and it still counts.
The full method, the session structure, and how the programs connect each have their own page:
- 👉 The GMB Method: how the training works and why
- 👉 The Curriculum: how the programs build on each other
- 👉 All Programs: what’s available and who each one is for
What Makes GMB Different
Most of it comes down to how we sell and how we support you. Each of these is a decision we made because it’s how we’d want to be treated as customers.
You buy a program once and keep it
Elements, our flagship, is $150 one time, and it’s yours for good. There’s no renewal date and no license that expires. We update our programs regularly, and you’ll always have lifetime access to the newest and best version.
Every price is on the page
You can see what everything costs without handing over an email address or getting on a call. Nobody here will offer you a “free assessment” that turns into a pitch. We don’t do discounts or secret sales on random days. Everyone pays the same prices, because isn’t life just easier when things are simple and fair?
Ninety days to prove it works
Use any program for 90 days. If it isn’t working for you, email us and we’ll help. If you’re not happy, we’ll send a refund. A lot of online coaches get real cagey about this kind of thing, but we realized a few years ago that almost nobody ever asks for refund anyway, so the longer window simply isn’t a risk for us.
A person answers your email
When you get stuck on a difficult movement or need to adapt something around a cranky shoulder, someone on our team writes back. Our “customer support team” is actually just a bunch of our certified coaches who know our programs inside and out. If you need help, they can actually help.
Actual, credentialed expertise
Our cofounder, Dr. Jarlo Ilano, PT, DPT, OCS is a board-certified orthopedic physical therapist, and every exercise we teach passes his clinical filter. That’s a big part of why people with old injuries and chronic tightness can train with us and keep making progress.
We’re trying to make ourselves unnecessary
The programs are designed to teach you to need us less. When a client stops sending questions because they can work it out on their own, the training is doing what it’s supposed to. A lot of them stick around anyway, which we appreciate 🙂
What we skip on purpose
There’s no native app to download. You train online through Praxis, our training platform. There’s no AI coach, no branded supplement line, and no flash sales. A lot of people are too focused on what’s popular to spend time learning what works. We put our time on energy into the things that matter.
The Team Behind GMB
We’re nine people spread across Japan and the US: three founders and a crew of coaches and programmers who make sure everything works the way it’s supposed to.
Ryan Hurst, Head Coach
Ryan was a competitive gymnast until a training accident ended that career. He spent the next 28 years in Osaka training judo, jiu-jitsu, and Iaido, including time with the Osaka police judo team. A shoulder dislocation in judo made him rethink what training should cost the body, and his answer became the core of how GMB trains. Ryan designs our programs and is the guy in most of our videos.
Dr. Jarlo Ilano, PT, DPT, OCS, R&D
Jarlo is a physical therapist, board-certified Orthopedic Clinical Specialist, and certified Therapeutic Pain Specialist with clinical work in the Seattle area. He has over 40 years in martial arts, two decades of it spent teaching Filipino martial arts while treating spinal injuries and mobility restrictions in the clinic. He’s the reason our programs are safe for people with real histories of injury and pain.
Andy Fossett, The Boss
Andy holds a 6th-degree black belt in Taido, serves as General Secretary of the World Taido Federation, and spent years as a public school teacher in Japan. He built GMB’s curriculum structure by applying educational theory to movement training, and he writes most of what you’ll read from us (hi!).
Amber Mira, Director
Amber joined in 2010, shortly after we launched, to help answer client emails. She now manages the entire team, oversees product quality and client support, and handles everything else that keeps the place running.
How We Got Here
We’re teachers first, and we’re still learning. Over fifteen years of coaching clients and training coaches has changed what we teach and how we organize it.
2005-2010: Three martial artists met through a fitness certification organization and found they had the same complaint: strong gym-goers who lacked the control and mobility for real-world movement. We started teaching through a series of small projects, and Gold Medal Bodies officially launched in July 2010.
2011-2014: Built the core methodology by coaching thousands of people through handstands, gymnastic rings, and functional flexibility. Launched Alpha Posse, our membership, to 100 founding members. (“The A-Team” was taken.)
2015-2018: Created Elements as the foundational program, expanded the curriculum with Integral Strength, and launched the Apprenticeship program for coach certification. Realized “Gold Medal Bodies” sounded like elite gymnastics, while most of our clients wanted to get off the floor without grabbing the couch. We started going by GMB.
2019: Launched Praxis, our custom training platform. The word means applied practice: turning what you know into what you can do.
2020-2024: Rebuilt Elements from the ground up, retired older programs, and organized everything into a single curriculum around systematic progression in strength, mobility, and motor control.
2025 to now: Still refining the programs and the curriculum. Big things on the horizon 😉
A lot of fitness fads and companies have come and gone since 2010. We’re still here because clients keep coming back, and a couple thousand of them have written about why:
