Gym Marketing
It's the same hour, and the building is doing two opposite things at once.
In one room, people are rolling—hips and elbows and the particular kind of breathing you only hear on a jiu-jitsu mat. In another, a class is moving through a yoga flow, slow and quiet, the exact opposite energy under the exact same roof.
Thirteen thousand square feet in Bartlett, Illinois, programmed by one man who sees no contradiction in any of it.
Joey "The Real" Diehl is a professional fighter. He's also a certified yoga teacher. He has been both for a long time, and he gets a little tired of people acting like that's a paradox.
Yoga, the term just means to yoke or to unite. And you can't say jiu-jitsu is not that.
When Alex took the Gymdesk Originals camera out to meet him, he didn't find a guy who added yoga to a martial arts gym to fill the schedule and pad the revenue.
He found a guy who thinks BJJ, MMA, yoga, mobility, and fitness were never separate things to begin with.
He calls the whole idea movement, and he built a gym around the refusal to break it into parts.
Three People in a Sublet Room
Start where he started, because the scale of the place now makes the next part land harder.
In 2021—the deep part of COVID, the worst possible time to open anything—Joey was subletting about half a room inside somebody else's business.
Three people in the class. That was the gym.
About eight months later he'd outgrown the half-room and took over the whole gym area in that building. A few years after that, he outgrew that too.
Then, in February 2025, he took over the entire 13,000 square foot building and opened the full academy—every program, all of it, under one roof.
Three people in a class, all the way to over 300 people in five years.
Three hundred and twelve members now, if you want the exact number. Ages three to seventy-five.
Here's the part most growth stories skip, and the part that tells you who Joey actually is: he won't take credit for a strategy.
Ask him how the vision pulled all those people in and he more or less shrugs—he couldn't tell you.
There's no growth playbook he'll walk you through, no clever acquisition trick he's dying to explain. That's not false modesty. It's a posture.
He has a near-allergic reaction to the gimmicky, salesy version of this industry, and "here's how I blew it up" is exactly the kind of talk he doesn't trust.
So if he won't explain how the gym grew, you have to look at what the gym is. That's where the real answer lives.
He Won't Call It Cross-Training
Run more than one discipline and you'll likely notice the same quiet problem: the members silo.
The jiu-jitsu crowd stays on the jiu-jitsu mat, the strikers keep to striking, and the yoga people rarely wander past their own class.
You can offer five things under one roof and still run five separate little gyms that never talk to each other.
The usual fix is for the head coach to personally train everything, just to model that crossing over is allowed.
Joey's gym doesn't silo the same way, and it's because of how he frames the whole thing. He doesn't think of these as different products that happen to share a calendar.
He thinks of them as one practice wearing different clothes.
I'm not just someone who trains jiu-jitsu. I am a martial artist.
The word yoga, he points out, just means to yoke—to unite. And once you sit with that, it's hard to argue jiu-jitsu isn't doing the same thing: uniting breath and pressure and a body under load.
He builds the gym around a balance he keeps coming back to—strong and soft, action and relaxation.
Even the members who only ever come for yoga, who never set foot on the competition mat, he calls "movement artists." They're not a lesser tier of member; they're in the same project as everybody else.
That breadth runs in every direction—little kids, people in their seventies, and a women's jiu-jitsu program with its own head coach, Tayla Meredith.
None of it reads as a separate business bolted onto the side; it all reads as the same room, sized for whoever walks in.
You don't have to take his word that the soft stuff belongs in a fighter's life.
There's a real case for what yoga does for grappling, from hip mobility to recovery to the tightness many longtime grapplers find rolling builds up over time.
We've made that case in detail over in yoga for martial arts, and the same logic runs through any honest argument for training across disciplines.
But Joey isn't making a training argument. He's making an identity one.
That's the difference between a gym where yoga gets bolted on for revenue and a gym where it was load-bearing from day one.
The name carries the whole thesis. Real Movement.
The word real, to me, is authenticity—instead of gimmicky fitness fads.
The Fighter Who Found Yoga on His Back
You can't really sell the integration unless you've lived it, and Joey has.
He started wrestling at five—his older brother wrestled, so he wrestled. He was an MMA fan as a kid.
At fourteen, he started jiu-jitsu, which all started from his mom.
It was my gift from my mom … my birthday gift to go train jiu-jitsu.
That same mom works his front desk now.
There's a version of this gym's story that's just that one detail, looped: a kid gets jiu-jitsu as a birthday present and twenty years later his mother is checking members in at the school he built.
He turned pro at nineteen and fought to a professional MMA record of 12-10, working as a union sheet-metal worker by day to pay for the privilege of getting hit at night.
And then the body sent the bill.
A back injury—the kind grappling specializes in handing out—put him on the floor at twenty-one. That's when yoga came in. Not as a lifestyle, not as a brand, but as medicine for the damage the hard stuff had done.
He got certified at twenty-five and has taught it for a decade since.
That arc is the gym. The soft discipline entered his life because the hard one broke something, and the two have been balancing each other ever since.
It's also, not coincidentally, the most common yoga story in the entire grappling world—talk to enough longtime jiu-jitsu players and you'll hear the same confession over and over: my back went, I started doing mobility and yoga, and I came back stronger.
Joey didn't discover a market. He just told the truth about his own body, and it turned out a few hundred people in Bartlett had the same body.
He's a third-degree black belt under Jeff "Big Frog" Curran—lineage he'll mention if you ask, but won't build his whole identity on. That's not the point, and he knows it.
What a Kid's First Class Should Feel Like
The breadth only matters if people stay, and people only stay if the first day doesn't scare them off. Joey treats that first impression as the whole ballgame.
Watch the kids' class and you'll see the philosophy in miniature.
The five o'clock class, led by Kyle Perkins, isn't drilling submissions—it's positional games, movement, learning where your body goes before anyone learns to finish anybody.
Kids start as young as three, and nobody gets thrown into the fire.
On the GDO shoot, Brian Lastovich—Gymdesk's VP of Marketing and my boss—was there watching his own kids try it, and what he described is exactly the make-or-break moment every gym owner knows by heart.
That swing—from what is this to I want to come back—is the entire retention game compressed into one class.
Most owners have watched the other version happen: push too hard, spar too soon, treat a nervous beginner like a competitor, and you don't just lose a student.
You can lose them to the sport for good.
Get it right, and you've got a member for years. It's the cheapest, highest-payoff thing a gym can control, and it shows up again and again in gym retention strategies.
For the littlest ones, the on-ramp matters even more—it's why a thoughtful approach to jiu-jitsu for toddlers tends to feed everything else a gym does.
A kid who has a good first class brings a parent, and the breadth Joey built—something for the three-year-old, something for the fifty-year-old with the bad back—is what turns one good first impression into a household that never leaves.
Running Five Disciplines on One Schedule
The calendar is where multi-discipline gyms go to die. For years, Joey ran the way a lot of owners start: on instinct and cash.
When I started my business, I didn't know anything. So I was just taking in cash at points and just starting fresh.
When he took over the full building in 2025, that stopped being possible.
The second you're running yoga and fitness and BJJ at overlapping times, the schedule is the business—and a schedule that complex can't live in a notebook.
So when he went looking for software, he wasn't chasing a feature list. He was solving one problem.
"The big criteria I was looking for was an ability to create a good schedule, to make it easier for people to book classes and check in."
That's the honest entry point for any platform in a gym like this. It's not about extra features; it's about keeping overlapping class schedules straight so a member can find their class and walk in.
At RMMA that shows up as a kiosk at the front door—people come in, check themselves in, and get on the mat without a bottleneck. (If you've never set one up, the mechanics of a front-desk check-in system are simpler than most owners expect.)
The platform also quietly does the unglamorous money work—a point-of-sale that bills merch off a saved card on file, which turns retail into a real second revenue line instead of a shoebox of receipts.
And it gives him something he never had in the cash years: the ability to actually see the gym growing, member by member.
He doesn't hedge on whether it was worth it.
It's a program we obviously use every single day. I don't know how we would run anything without it … it's what keeps the doors flowing and moving.
Movement Is Medicine
Strip away the square footage and the member count and the software, and Joey's whole operation comes down to one refusal.
He won't make you choose between strong and soft.
He won't tell the fighter that yoga is beneath him or tell the yoga member she isn't a real martial artist. He won't break movement into a tier list.
The injury that found him at twenty-one taught him that the hard and the soft need each other, and he built a thirteen-thousand-square-foot argument for it.
That's the lesson worth taking, and it's not "add yoga and watch revenue climb." Breadth works when a single idea holds it together. It collapses when it's just classes stacked on a calendar to look full.
Joey's gym holds because he actually believes the thing the name says—that it's all movement, and movement is for everyone who walks in.
If you're running more than one discipline and watching it splinter into separate little gyms, the fix probably isn't another marketing push. It's a reason for the parts to belong together—and, underneath that, martial arts management software that can actually run all of them without the schedule falling apart.
Movement is medicine. Joey just built somewhere to take it.
