The journey to Freezer Fitness

Freezer Fitness, nestled behind the Mildmay Cheese Haus on Mildmay’s main street, is a place of wellbeing and health that started with a group of friends looking to find a place to work out.

During the depths of the cancellations resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, Beth Fischer and her friends found themselves wanting to work out together. Due to distancing guidelines, they first started outside, working by streetlight, before moving into a garage to work out together.

When the winter weather blew in, however, the group found themselves contending not only with a lack of space, but also the cold. After explaining the situation to her husband, Tom, he jokingly said he could put Beth and her friends in the freezer, referring to the large freezer facility their family owned, and inspiration struck for the couple.

Beth explains that, originally, she had only intended to take a small corner of the facility, located behind the famous Mildmay Cheese Haus, for her friends to work out in, but as they looked at the building, which had been a cold storage facility for 80 years, she realized it could be used for so much more.

From Tom’s offhand comment, a facility including work-out rooms, spaces for lessons, specialty health and wellness services and community spaces was born.

It wasn’t a quick journey, however, as Beth points out.

“We started in 2021, right in COVID, and we moved equipment outside for people to use, and it was a private thing,” she said.

Over time, however, she realized that, like her and her friends, people wanted a space to call home for their workouts and physical activities, which lead to major renovations and a grand opening earlier this year.

When recounting the history of the new fitness company, Beth explains that old infrastructure, like the ammonia plant for the freezer space, had to be removed, and new infrastructure, like stairs had to be constructed. The latter allowed the Fischers to utilize a huge upstairs space that, for 80 years, had only been storage accessible by a ladder.

The facility’s bottom floor includes a large room for independent or free-form workouts called The Freezer and a space for exercise classes called The Locker, both of which are named for their previous uses.

Journeying upstairs, which is dubbed the Above Zero space, visitors find the Great Room which offers unique opportunities like yoga and Pilates, and is also available for community uses, like meetings, local groups and parties, as well as youth programming like babysitting or home alone courses.

Other upstairs facilities include the spa room, boasting both infrared sauna and a cold plunge, the Burton Room, named after Beth’s grandfather, and the Bieman room, named after her Great-Grandfather. The former is a space for red light therapy, which Beth describes as a non-invasive therapy for a variety of issues and is available both on site and at home. The latter room is a space Beth hopes to rent out to a wellness practitioner to further enhance the offering of the facility.

She said the goal is to have a space where “people can leave feeling better than when they came in,” and having a massage therapist or reflexologist or similar practitioner in the room would help achieve that dream.

That dream is couched in her former experience, Beth said, as an educator.

While she worked in the education system, she focused on making sure students had access to everything they needed in one location. Freezer Fitness is, as much as it can be, a similar endeavour, she said.

That endeavour has been made significantly easier by the Municipality of South Bruce, she said, and Bruce County, through grant programs that are available.

“The municipality has been a great partner the whole way through,” she said.

While the municipality previously offered workout space and equipment, she said she never saw it as a competitor because municipal staff have always been there to help her, even when that municipally-run gym shut down and it was time to find new homes for the surplus exercise equipment.

“I was one of the first who got to bid on it,” she said, acknowledging that purchasing exercise equipment new would have been a huge barrier to starting Freezer Fitness. “The added benefit was that many of [members of the community] knew and liked that equipment, so having it here is great.”

The Municipality has also helped her with opportunities like the Façade Grant, which helped her remodel the entrance to the gym, and the Digital Main Street grant, which was a great steppingstone for her business.

“The social media instructions and web site creation that was available to me was great,” she said. “The website looks fantastic and has an embedded app that helps me to arrange memberships. It was huge to get that.”

As someone transitioning from the education sector, Beth said that all the opportunities to help her make her business work were appreciated as she had to switch her mindset from being in a field where people came to her to one where she needed to provide a service.

Part of what has made the business a success, she says, is connecting with the community and fellow business owners. She said that working with Nikk Wise, the owner of Harley’s Pub and Perk, has really taught her how the businesses can help each other out. The two have run events and are running future events, Beth said.

She’s also made connections with people who utilize the space through business networking and said that she had a good response from an open house she held earlier this year.

Visit Freezer Fitness in person at 73 Elora St, Mildmay or online at freezerfitness.ca.

This article is part of an ongoing Community Revitalization series initiated by the Municipality of South Bruce.