There’s no excuse now: Army veteran is helping people cope with a new normal
FRANKLIN, Wis. (BVM) — Fitness is an important part of people’s lives. The physical and mental benefits of it are immense. For Dan Newberry, it helped him cope with life after the military. Now through his Lift for the 22 Foundation, in honor of the 22 veterans that commit suicide everyday, he’s helping other veterans who struggled the same way he did.
An army veteran who served two tours in Iraq, Newberry received a Purple Heart for his service. After being medically discharged from the Army, he wasn’t sure what to do.
“I had a really hard transition from the military,” Newberry said. “I was one of those guys who got out and wasn’t really sure what I was going to do.”
That’s when he went back to something that he had enjoyed while serving, physical fitness.
“The one thing that I found was I missed doing physical training,” Newberry said. “It was something that we did every morning as a group and I didn’t realize then, but I realize now it was the opportunity to build that team comradery that a lot of service members look for.”
He began to work out again and even lead a fitness class. That fitness class was something he wanted to do for the community, and so he began looking for gyms to host his classes. He started in a small gym in Greenfield.
“There were like five or six of us and then the club grew from there and then we began moving to Fuel Fitness, a CrossFit gym, to sign up more people,” Newberry said. “We did that until January of last year, it kind of tapered off so we decided to go national with it.”
In partnership with a group that buys gym memberships for veterans, they went out to communities to showcase the class and then offer it to them. The goal of these events was to get people active again, using fitness as a means to reconnect with the community.
Helping give veterans and others who suffer from mental illness the ability to find other people who enjoy the things they enjoy such as physical fitness, it was also a way to get people back into good enough shape to compete in fitness-based competitions.
The reason for the competitions is that Newberry has found that the people who get involved in gyms that allow them to find like-minded people and even compete in events, like CrossFit, are more likely to keep the membership. It goes back to why Newberry started all of this in the first place — he missed the camaraderie of training with others and being on a team.
“That’s why we changed to doing real fitness classes and encouraging people to participate in sports activities and rec activities,” Newberry said, “anything to get people off their couch and active in their community is our main goal.”
His foundation is going to host a basketball tournament and a league. The call for community and an active lifestyle met a road block this spring as the COVID-19 pandemic forced people into their houses. Stuck at home, it can be hard to work out and also socialize the way they used to.
It is a tough situation for people with mental illness who used fitness as a type of therapy. Cut off from your friends, stuck in the same place every day after a while can almost become torture. Newberry tried to fix that the best way he could.
He set up his own workout regimen for himself. Then he began to host a virtual fitness class for the people looking for a way to get back into working out but can’t go to the gym anymore.
“We have come such a long way with technology,” Newberry said. “Let’s actually use social media and this technology for what it’s for, which is to bring people together.”
