Jon & Liza Davis

Around Labor Day of 2023, a guy I'd never met came in for an info session with Brian. He and his wife had just been transferred out here from Minnesota, they hadn't bought a house yet, and they were doing what a lot of people do when they land somewhere new — working through a list. Prototype was the third or fourth gym they'd looked at.

He walked around, looked at the equipment, talked to Brian for a while. Then he went out and called his wife.

Three years later, Jon and Liza Davis have logged 639 results between them, competed on our platform, run our events, and joined our book club. Jon has become a fixture of the Sunday bench crew. Liza has become one of the strongest women in the building. But if you ask either of them what they actually got out of this place, neither one leads with a barbell.

They needed something they could do together

The story actually starts in January of 2020, in Minnesota, right before the world shut down. One kid was in college, one was in high school, and Jon and Liza looked up and realized they had spent a decade and a half driving to other people's games.

"We realized we needed to start doing something for ourselves besides just going to kids' sports activities," Liza says.

They wanted to do it together, which was harder than it sounds. Jon grew up in a small town in Kentucky playing soccer, baseball, and basketball, and had a real lifting history — he fell in love with the bench press in high school and never fell back out of it. Liza grew up in a tiny town in Minnesota running cross country and track, ran three years at a small engineering school in Indiana, and had barely touched a barbell in her life. They'd been married more than twenty years at that point. They had never found a sport they could share.

"Jon had a history of lifting and didn't love cardio," Liza says. "I had been a distance runner and had never really lifted. So CrossFit kind of felt like something we could meet in the middle on."

They got through an intro session and then COVID hit, so they did Zoom classes in their basement. That's the whole origin story. A laptop on a basement floor, two people in their forties trying to find something that belonged to both of them.

It was humbling from the start. "We were doing box step-ups and I would get home and I could hardly stand up and sit down on the couch," Liza says. What kept them in it wasn't the training. It was that scaling was normal — that nobody made them feel behind for taking small steps. "You came back for the people, and the rest of it kind of came along with it."

Why they can train six days a week now

This is the part I want people outside the gym to hear, because it's the single most common misconception about what we do here.

At their old gym, the workouts were long and heavy on volume. "If an AMRAP here is maybe 12 to 15 minutes, most of them were 25 to 30, and the reps were a lot higher," Jon says. "It was just harder on our bodies." They could physically only train three or four days a week. Their bodies needed the rest.

Here, they come six days a week — because not every one of those days is a beating. Some are lift days. Some are recovery days. "It's good work," Jon says, "but it doesn't completely wear us down."

Liza has leaned all the way into that. She has a history of a tight back that can get painful, so Sunday is her maintenance day — PT work, the sauna, the cold plunge, while Jon is out on the floor benching. "I get my body ready for another week of workouts," she says. "But it's a great time to just kind of get my head in the right place for the week as well."

Recovery is where almost everybody underinvests. Liza is the exception, and it's not a coincidence that she's also the one still setting lifetime bests in year three.

The gloves

Jon hurt both of his wrists when he was a kid. By the time he started training as an adult, he couldn't do a push-up from his hands. He wore gloves for everything, at every gym, for years. That was just the deal.

Then he started working with Tony on his bench press, and Tony gave him a pile of accessory work to go with it. Months of it. Then one day Jon showed up and realized he'd forgotten his gloves.

He came in the next week and did a wall walk without them. "I never thought I'd get under a bar again without my gloves on," he says. "That's been tremendous."

Nobody set out to fix Jon's wrists. He came here to bench. The wrists were a bonus that fell out of doing the work properly with somebody paying attention — which is more or less how every good thing in this building happens.

Same story with his shoulder. He tore it up a long time ago and hadn't touched his bow in years. Garrett's shoulder work got it to the point where he had the thing restrung. Same story with the mulch, honestly. "Carrying 300 bags of mulch is a lot easier when I'm in shape than when I'm not."

On the bench itself, he tested 295 lbs in April. He and Tony had been pointing at 300 for a long time. Then he made a call — he decided to shift his focus toward his bodyweight for a stretch and started working with Gillian, knowing full well it would cost him some numbers on the bar. He made the trade on purpose. That's a more mature athlete than the one who walked in three years ago.

"I wouldn't have imagined I'd think of myself as an athlete"

Liza came in as the runner of the pair. The one who'd never lifted. Three years on, the barbell is the part she loves most.

Her bench went from 105 lbs to 135 lbs. Her deadlift went from 165 lbs to 245 lbs. Her hip thrust went from 105 lbs to 225 lbs — the biggest raw jump in her entire file. And in July of this year, deep into year three, she set a lifetime best power clean at 125 lbs. That's not a rebuild or a comeback. That's someone whose ceiling is still moving.

She's also the competitor of the two. She's done the Open and most of the in-house competitions because she wants to keep pushing her technique and find out what's there. Jon's take on that is one of my favorite things either of them said:

Ask Liza what surprised her and she doesn't talk about a number. "I don't think I would have imagined that I would like lifting weights, or that I would think of myself as an athlete more than I did," she says. Thirty double-unders. A 135 lb bench. Clean and jerks. Toes-to-bar. Things the version of her who ran cross country in Indiana would not have believed.

And they've figured out how to train together, which is its own skill. "When we started we weren't sure how much to push each other, or how to push each other," Liza says. "I think we found our rhythm now." Saturday is the partner workout. They know exactly where each of them is going to struggle. That's the point.

Adopted

Here's the part that gets me.

Liza got transferred out here. Jon kept his Minnesota job and works from home. So he moved 1,200 miles to a state where he knew nobody, into a house with no coworkers in it.

They started showing up to the 5:30pm class, and the 5:30 crowd turned out to be full of families whose daughters played volleyball. Jon and Liza's own kids were grown and gone, and they missed high school sports. So they just started going to the volleyball games. Other people's kids. Every match.

That is not a thing a gym membership is supposed to get you.

Liza joined the book club. They tried different class times specifically to meet more people. And they've both been vocal about the community stuff — Row for Westborough, the youth clinics. "To me, a gym should be more than about just its members," Jon says. "It should be something that the community can come to."

Jon still runs a thousand-kid youth wrestling tournament in Minnesota every January and takes a middle school team to the state tournament in March. When he's traveling, Tony sends him workouts. "I don't feel like I'm ever disconnected," he says. Their son Eli wrestled, which got him into lifting, and he showed up for Murph a couple of years back and cranked out all the pull-ups like it was nothing. Their daughter came through at the end of June — Natalie spent real time with her on pacing and the basics, and now Liza is doing a HYROX in DC with her over Labor Day, an event she had specifically said she wasn't going to do until she talked her into it.

Jon's also running again for the first time in a long time. He and Liza can go three and a half to four miles now. He told his daughter he'd be ready for a 5K by Thanksgiving.

They came here looking for a gym. What they got was a town they already knew people in, a Saturday morning ritual, a way to keep up with their own kids, and — in Jon's case — a set of hands that work again. Nobody came here for what they actually found. Jon and Liza just found more of it than most.

"I want to be able to do this for a long time. I want to continue to get better at something. I'm always working on something to focus on, and I want to be healthy well into the future."

If you're someone who just landed in a new town and doesn't know a single person yet — or you've been here twenty years and your kids just left and the calendar went quiet — this is what Jon and Liza figured out. You don't find people by waiting to be introduced. You find them by showing up somewhere at the same time every week until the faces stop being strangers. The training is real and it works. But the 5:30 crew, and the volleyball games, and the Saturday partner workout are the reason they stayed.

You don't need to know anybody here. You don't need to be in shape first. Come sit down with us for a No Sweat Intro — no workout, no pressure, just a conversation about where you're at and what you actually want.

The volleyball thing is what I keep coming back to.

They didn't know anybody here. Their kids were grown and gone. And instead of waiting around to get invited to something, they just started showing up to other people's kids' games. That's not normal. That's who they are.

I think about Jon calling Liza from our parking lot too. Three or four gyms and he made the call after one conversation with Brian... that's not about our equipment. That's about how somebody made him feel for twenty minutes.

And the gloves. Bad wrists since he was a kid, he just accepted it for years, and then Tony gave him some homework and now he's got his hands back and he's shooting a bow again. Nobody planned that. That's just what happens when you stick around.

But honestly the reason I wanted their story in this series has nothing to do with any of that. Jon and Liza are some of the nicest, kindest, most humble people in this building. Every single time. They just show up and take care of the people around them and never make it about themselves.

I'm really glad they found us. They're the type of people that make Prototype what it is.

— Mike

This story was developed through a recorded video interview and shaped with the help of AI writing tools. The facts, quotes, and experiences are Jon and Liza's own — AI helped organize and present them in a format worthy of the story they've lived.