Nourish Allyn is a wellness center that specializes in fitness, nutrition, and overall self-care. It offers personal training, gym access, and recovery methods such as massage and pulsed electromagnetic field therapy.
Jennifer Nash Forrester is the owner and operator of Nourish Allyn. Her competitive spirit and passion for health and wellness were developed at a young age. Growing up she played a number of sports including basketball, soccer, swimming and running track. She went on to secure a full scholarship to compete as a sprinter at the University of Washington. While there, Jennifer met her college sweetheart and they married a couple of years after they graduated. She would go on to gain over 25 pounds and found herself very unhappy in her skin. She made it a priority to restructure how she would incorporate fitness into her routine after being a student athlete for most of life. In 2010, Jennifer became a certified personal trainer. And over the last nine years, she has practiced and studied many different approaches to nutrition and training modalities. In 2017, Jennifer with her husband purchased property and opened a private wellness practice specializing in fitness and nutrition. She has enjoyed serving her local community as a holistic lifestyle coach and helping the people in her area become healthier more informed individuals.
Committed to Foster Comprehensive Wellness
Nourish Allyn is impacting the industry through its commitment to an honest approach that encourages nourishment and overall wellness. At the core of the company is its mission to empower every person to move well and eat well. This simple and honest approach has helped many people find sustainability along their wellness journey. When Jennifer works with clients, she makes it a priority to get them seeing themselves as a project. She teaches her clients how to “eat to live – not live to eat” while providing them with accountability for guidance, the correct information to keep them on track and the motivation so they see through. Her approach helps each individual stay focused on their goals with workout benchmarks and specific wellness tools that guide clients through their wellness journey.
Achievements Come from All the Lessons Learned
Several past experiences have molded Jennifer into the coach that she is today. Through sharing her own personal story, she has been able to successfully encourage the people she works with to shift their focus to overall wellness. Jennifer reiterates that the process is a journey and it is not just about diet and exercise. It’s about progress – not perfection and she provide tools that will help create a shift in the relationship her clients have with food, fitness, and self-care. Her vision is to see all the people she is working with learn how to incorporate these tools healthily and realistically. Jennifer hopes that everyone she coaches understands that we all have free will in our lives and that applies to our health and a guilt-free balance in our choices.
Over the years, Jennifer has practiced many different training methods from bodybuilding to boxing and even CrossFit. In 2012, she opened up her first personal training studio with her husband. Over the next few years, she focused on mastering her own health so she could lead by example for others. She lost 25 pounds of the excess weight she was carrying and developed her own unique approaches to cross-training with fun dynamics to keep the body guessing and engaged. During that time, Jennifer began sharing her workouts on Instagram. She says the opportunity of a lifetime presented itself when the Office of the First Lady contacted her to collaborate with Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move Campaign. It was a natural fit to partner with the nationwide initiative aiming to create a healthier future for kids and families. Later that year, Jennifer’s husband and she learned she was pregnant. And finally, in 2017, Jennifer opened her private wellness practice specializing in fitness and nutrition.
Delivering Wellness Through Innovative Approach
Nourish Allyn reminds people that there is no one size fits all approach and the company makes a point to meet every client at their starting point. Next, it encourages them to adopt a more conscious eating regimen and lastly, provides a workout program that focuses on functionality and mobility, requiring that clients learn proper control of their body weight, stability, and balance before trying to incorporate any heavy lifting. This model has worked well for the community Nourish Allyn serves.
Leveraging Partnerships to Provide Fitness Solutions
Nourish Allyn outfitted its workout space with both TRX and SKLZ equipment. Both companies are global leaders in human performance, skill development, and performance training products. Offering these products to the clients encourages them to focus on the overall performance of their bodies. With the introduction of modern training tools that promote functionality, mobility, and recovery, Nourish Allyn’s members have found the training equipment easy to implement into their routines. The company also added a Bemer therapy room to help with recovery, and it has been scientifically proven to help increase blood circulation up to 30% with no negative side effects.
Mitigating Misconception to Overcome Challenges
At the start of Jennifer’s career in the fitness industry was trying to make changes to her own lifestyle. The structure she had become accustomed to during her time as a collegiate athlete no longer existed. She was learning about how to balance work and still maintain physical activity. She got a job at a gym and soon learned that there was a lot of bad information circulating about fitness and nutrition habits. Jennifer then recognized a continuous cycle of people seeking knowledge at box gyms and then being misled and sold lies in the form of supplement packages. She wanted to break that cycle and that is what prompted to blaze her own trail and open her first training studio with her husband. With her own space, Jennifer could control how she encouraged her clients to lead a healthy lifestyle. She made it a goal to break down the misconceptions people had learned about how to eat and train.
Jennifer began motivating her clients to seek real food and stop taking extreme measures for a temporary fix. Soon her clients recognized they had been starving themselves and not nourishing their bodies. They started paying attention to the poor quality of ingredients in their protein shakes and they learned that overdoing cardio was negatively impacting their metabolisms. However, Jennifer made a point to teach sustainable methods that would help improve their overall lifestyle.
The Way Ahead
Consumers are becoming more informed and it is forcing companies to be more accountable for the quality of their products. The diets and gimmicks will not disappear because people will always look for a quick fix, a magic pill, or the fountain of youth. However, Jennifer foresees more and more people focusing on overall movement for the body and paying attention to what they eat and how they move for the purpose of not just looking good but also feeling good. This will lead to people to focus on becoming the best version of themselves.
Essential Advice to Business Leaders
Jennifer encourages all emerging entrepreneurs in the industry to not be afraid to start small and work your way up. Recognize it takes time to build an empire.
She said, “I have noticed that a number of my business ventures are closely aligned with the different stages of my life. Being that I was an athlete for most of my life, I never really struggled with weight gain. However, after college, I went on to gain over 25 pounds and found myself very unhappy in my skin. I made it a priority to restructure how I would incorporate fitness into my routine after being a student athlete. The shift occurring in my life encouraged me to study nutrition and find new ways to incorporate what I learned into my own practices and pass the knowledge along to my clients. I welcomed my son Jaziah in 2016 and I had gained almost 40lbs during my pregnancy. Shedding that baby weight was a completely different experience and it gave me a new perspective on weight loss and the challenges that a lot of people face when trying to shed unwanted weight with a career and a family. Upon reaching my weight loss goal I felt even more empowered to share all that I had learned and experienced along the way. This past May I welcomed my daughter Zaria into the world.”
Now, Jennifer is focusing on her efforts to leave an impact on young women and girls through the sport of Track and Field. Late last year she co-founded Trackgirlz, a non-profit that aims to motivate women and girls to be authentic and teaches them how to lead healthy, active, and well-nourished lifestyles. Jennifer’s goal is to share her life lessons and experiences with the hope that the next generation can learn from her story and be motivated to achieve their dreams.
