The MOB Origin

I started an online mobility class during the pandemic. It grew to the point that I decided to make it a monthly membership. I would offer four 30 minute classes a week and for one monthly fee, members could attend as many classes as they liked.

When I started the membership, I assumed members would attend one to two classes a week. What I found was that the same 10 members would come to every single class, every single week. They made so much progress that I couldn’t take any new drop-ins into the classes, and I decided to close off the group and make it private. In communication with the members, I started saying or typing “mob” for short in reference to the membership and the classes. The MOB morphed into a small and tight knit community.

Over the past 3 years, I have watched these members gain so much strength, mobility, and confidence in their ability to do things in life from holding grandkids, hiking, and scrambling on hands and knees in tight spaces to maintain a yard or a house. I’ve witnessed knee, hip, and wrist pain drastically improve, resiliency as new injuries arise, and the acquisition of new skills that were once long gone such as jumping and crawling. But most surprisingly, I witnessed the creation of a community around a set of values within an online space in a way that I never would have thought possible before the pandemic.

I wanted to offer this opportunity to more people without losing the qualities that made the original MOB so successful. There are three reasons the original MOB membership worked as well as it did. Consistency which fostered progress, connection through a supportive one on one relationship between me and every single member, and community which was formed around a set of values. The new iteration of the MOB membership will strive to maintain all three of these components.

I also wanted to offer a membership for people of a certain age group who are really starting to witness big changes in their bodies that might feel scary. I wanted to offer a place where the classes are less about fitting “exercise” into your day and more about really thinking about these two questions: What do you want to be able to do right now AND what do you want to be able to do in 20+ years? Those two questions require a completely different approach than counting steps and toning triceps. Not only is that approach not prevalent in the fitness industry, it’s even less prevalent for those who are middle aged and older. The age groups of 50 and up tend to have amassed a number of aches and pains; the changes in movement abilities tend to be more impeding; and I’ve found that concern for safety during exercise is of a higher magnitude than in the younger population. It’s for those reasons that a practical, directly applicable, and future-thinking approach becomes even more relevant.

My goal is to address all of this within a single membership. I hope you’ll join The MOB.

keep moving.
alia bisat

You can read more about me and how I started here and here.