5 minute read
Johnny Martin’s life-changing decision
TRAINS TO TRAINING
By Shawn Ryan
Johnny 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, 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.
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 to 6 years old, she says, and he has worked wonders with them.
“I’ve had several kids that were a little hot-headed. He taught the kids how to calm down, how to breathe and use their words to explain what’s going on when they’re angry. He’s shown them what they need to do. Just take deep breaths and think about what he’s taught them in yoga.”
Martin began his yoga journey in 2015, when he saw a Facebook post of his great-niece doing yoga. His first reaction was, “Why in the heck is she doing yoga?”
“She was only like a year and a half old, so I went online and I started looking up all the benefits for yoga with kids. I found out it helps with ADHD. It helps with autism. It helps with behavior. It helps with concentration and focus.”
But the path to his own business was a long, zigzagging route. Growing up in Chattanooga, he enlisted the Navy in 1993 for a tour of duty that lasted until 1997. After his service ended, he moved to Texas to study mechanical engineering for a year, then came back to Chattanooga and landed a job in customer service at BlueCross BlueShield.
“I kind of liked that. I’ve always loved to help any way I possibly can,” he says.
Leaving the insurance company, he joined the Chattanooga Police Department in 1999 and stayed until 2003, assigned to East Chattanooga. “I started getting burned out,” he said.
He left the police department and joined Norfolk Southern Railroad, rising to the level of conductor engineer in the Chattanooga railyard, where he was responsible for moving locomotives between multiple tracks to keep trains organized and on schedule.
He stayed until 2019, teaching yoga on the side, mostly for free to build the business, but he left the railroad paycheck behind to start Young Yogaletts and teaching yoga full-time.
“Even then I was crying, ‘Lord, I don’t know if I can do this,’” Martin recalls.
He took solace in the Bible’s Jeremiah 29:11 “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”
“The Lord said, ‘Trust me.’ I said, ‘But I have a job at the railroad,’ and he said, ‘Whose job? My job. I gave you that job,’” Martin says. “So on Labor Day 2019, I walked in and handed in my resignation.”
One of his original customers in the Hamilton County School System was Barger Elementary, a kindergarten through fifth-grade school. He started with 13 of the school’s male students, asking for a wide mixture of boys. “I didn’t just want kids with behavior problems. I didn’t want just low academic kids. I have kids that make straight As. I wanted all of them, because that deals with inclusiveness.”
By the end of the yoga program, 11 of the students had earned awards for academic improvement, he says.
At Serenity Learning Center, the kids not only learned from Martin, Strickland says, they’ve taken their lessons home.
“When they go home and their parents are upset, the kids say, ‘Mom, calm down and breathe. If you breathe, it’ll make you better.’ That’s coming from four- and five-yearolds, you know what I’m saying?”
— Denita Strickland, colleague and teacher
