Joe and Hailey Mendenhall want Hermiston and its surrounding communities to learn there is more to health and fitness than cardio, weightlifting and nutrition.
That’s why they opened the Advantage Wellness Studio at 190 E. Main Street in Hermiston. On Thursday, they celebrated their studio with a ribbon-cutting ceremony hosted by the Hermiston Chamber of Commerce.
“It all started with me being a little bit banged up, dealing with some arthritis,” Joe said. Joe is an underground miner, and his job takes a toll on his body.
“I was fighting the pain,” he said.
He began looking into physical therapy and other ways to heal his pain.
“I started about a year and a half ago diving deep and going down all the rabbit holes,” he said. He learned about cold plunging in which you submerge yourself in cold water for a short period of time. Advocates say it can reduce inflammation, quicken recovery time and improve mental health.
Cold plunging led Joe to cryotherapy in which, for just a couple of minutes, you step into a machine that can produce temperatures as cold as 270 degrees below. It will likely sound crazy to the uninitiated, but health experts say it poses no danger.
“When you get into cold shock, you just need to focus your mind and breathe,” Joe said. “Being uncomfortable is good for your body.”
He and Hailey then got the idea of opening a wellness center featuring the latest technology.
“I was thinking why isn’t there something like this in Hermiston,” he said. “So, we wanted to share what we learned with the entire community.” They opened Advantage Wellness Studio in late spring.
There are no dumb bells or treadmills. Instead, there are various rooms with futuristic machines that look like something out of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The cryotherapy machine is designed to increase blood circulation, decrease inflammation and improve your energy level. The studio also offers localized cryotherapy for pain management.
“When your body stresses, it grows and gets stronger,” Joe said. “We’re really just tricking our body and putting it through a little bit of stress. It feels amazing and the results are amazing.”
Hailey said cryotherapy is seven to 10 times more effective than immersing yourself in ice.
“It’s colder and penetrates deeper,” she said.
Advantage Wellness Studio also offers a couple of different saunas – an infrared sauna and a cocoon sauna pod. Joe said sweating is the body’s way of healing itself. The infrared sauna penetrates body tissue designed to produce a detoxifying sweat. The cocoon sauna pod gives off dry heat and provides a vibration massage.
Nomadic compression is another service the studio offers which can help in a variety of ways including increased blood circulation and decreased pain and inflammation. Joe said he uses it for his restless leg syndrome.
The technology offered at Advantage Wellness Studio is the same used by top athletes around the world.
“You go into any NFL gym, NBA gym or MMA gym and you will see everything we have here,” Joe said.
Joe said his cousin, who weighed more than 400 pounds and was on nine different medications, began paying visits to the Advantage Wellness Studio and in a couple of months had lost a significant amount of weight and is now on just a single medication.
Joe said memberships to the studio have been gradually increasing as word gets out.
“The people who come in here and get results go out and tell everyone else,” he said. “The retention rate is great.”
The studio is open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday, but the Mendenhalls hope to increase hours in the future.
“We want to be open for everyone including those who work during the day,” Joe said. “As soon as this gets rolling, we’d like to be open, if not 24 hours, then maybe 20 hours a day.”
For more information, visit the Advantage Wellness Studio website.
