At the grand opening of his boutique fitness club, TRUMAV Fitness, Tim McGraw opened up about how his life has improved since he started working out 10 years ago. And not just in a physical sense.
“Fitness has been very important to me, especially over the last 10 years of my life,” McGraw told the crowd at the Friday (Jan. 18) opening. “I’ve always been an athlete, I’ve always worked out, and I’ve always tried to keep myself in some sort of shape. But over the last 10 years, it’s really been a life-changing experience for me. It’s improved everything in my life.
“Certainly it’s improved my physical condition. But it’s improved, I’d say, 85 percent of my mental condition. There’s the other 15 percent that shows up every now and then that I try to fight off,” he joked, adding that since he became so dedicated, he has seen improvements in his relationships with friends and family, along with his relationship to his music and his career. “Without my commitment to fitness over the last 10 years, things would’ve turned out quite differently.”
When a reporter asked McGraw what it was ten years ago that changed — what kind of flipped the switch on his dumaflache — he said it was seeing himself in the trailer for a 2008 movie.
“Ten years ago was when I really was not taking care of myself as well as I should. And my lifestyle wasn’t as good: up until 3 o’clock in the morning, having that extra beer with the band, eating cheeseburgers late, and not hitting the gym in the morning. It was just getting out of control. And I’ll tell you what one of the big keys that turn my life around was. My kids were younger, and we were at the theater, and all the sudden the trailer for Four Christmases (he played Dallas McVie) popped up, and my face popped up on the screen. And my oldest daughter said, ’Geez, Dad. You really need to do something.’ And the next day,” he said, “I was in the gym.”
The club is something McGraw said has been a dream of his for years. He partnered with fitness industry leader, Snap Fitness, to develop the franchise, with the flagship club in Nashville’s Gulch neighborhood. That first location is owned and operated by fitness entrepreneur Wirth Campbell.
And if not a fitness club, would McGraw have followed in other country artists’ footsteps and opened a superfluous Nashville honky-tonk? Unlikely.
“Who knows, one of these days maybe I’ll do something like that. But I wanted to find something that really sort of took what we did on the road and how we worked out on the road — the circuit training and the principles we have preparing ourselves for the show — we wanted to carry that into what we are doing in a gym.
“Those honky-tonks are fine and good and great, but it just didn’t seem true to who we were on the road.”
McGraw’s next show is on Feb. 1 in Atlantic City.
