OUTREACH
TRAINS TO TRAINING Johnny Martin’s life-changing decision By Shawn Ryan
J
ohnny Martin stood in front of the group of high school basketball players. He was trying to teach them yoga, and he was getting pushback. A lot of it. “Some of them were saying, ‘I’m not doing this, man. I’m not doing yoga. That’s for girls. I ain’t doing it,’” Martin recalls. Before he even talked to them, he knew what the players would say, and he already had a response in hand. A challenge. “I said, ‘Listen, why don’t we do this? Who’s the strongest?’ They all want to raise their hand. ‘Me. Me. Me.’ I said, ‘OK, why don’t we go down to the gym?’” Once there, everyone would bench press, he says. Everyone would do squats. Everyone would do the Crow, a yoga pose with hands flat on the ground, elbows bent and knees resting on the elbows. “I said, ‘If you can beat me in benching, squatting and a Crow pose, nobody in here has to do yoga.’” The players had to do yoga. Martin, a sophomore majoring in Child and Family Studies at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, teaches yoga to students at six schools in the Hamilton County system, including Barger Academy of Fine Arts—where his wife, Tammy,
14 | The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Magazine
teaches third grade—Dalewood Middle and Brainerd High. “That’s the reason why I’m going to UTC,” he says. He wants to blend his schoolroom education with his yoga “because I deal with a lot of kids that have behavior issues,” says Martin, who opened his own combination yoga studio and workout gym—Cage Fitness and Yoga Lounge— on Lee Highway in the next few weeks. When he started teaching yoga in 2016, he began with daycare centers, teaching three-, four- and five-year-olds, but parents soon approached him with questions about expanding his reach. “Parents would reach out to me and say, ‘Hey, are you doing yoga other than the daycare?’” Now with his own business, Young Yogaletts, he holds several certificates for teaching yoga to kids. He continues to teach in daycares but has added individual children as well as schools to his repertoire. Although billed as yoga, his classes go beyond stretching and flexibility and muscle tone. Through games and other activities, he gives lessons on how to deal with anger and anxiety. He shows participants how to increase their ability to concentrate when stress and excess energy get in the way. It all leads up to building the kids’ self-confidence and ability to respect and deal with others, he says. “I’m going to want to make you strong because we’re working to find muscle. I’m going to help you gain better mentally because, when you run into adversity, you can identify the stress,” he says. He uses basketball as a reference point. “It’s two seconds left in the game, and you’ve just been fouled. Y’all are down by one, and you get two free throws. How stressful is that? You can identify that stress. Your stomach starts bubbling. You start sweating, but now you also start breathing. Now you start sending more oxygen throughout the brain.” Denita Strickland has worked with Martin—they call him “Mr. J,” she said— for the last three years at Serenity Learning Center, which she opened 20 years ago. The school has students from 2½
