Today we’d like to introduce you to Zach Saffell
Hi Zach, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I’m the youngest of 5 siblings. I grew up below the poverty line in Ogden, Utah. My parents were divorced when I was 2 years old so my dad wasn’t always in the picture. When he was in the picture, he would often talk about old football stories and this created enough interest for me. As a young kid I was the first in my family to decide to play football, I remember it cost $70 to sign up and I had to beg for my family to scrape the money together for me to play. I instantly fell in love with the sport, but I was small. Shortest kid on the team, I earned the nickname bulldog for being small and tough. When I got to highschool I knew if I wanted to make up for being short I would have to get extremely strong and fast. This is where my passion for performance training began. I spent countless hours in the weightroom and reading about strength and speed training. This started 18 years ago before YouTube was a thing, and we didn’t have strength coaches at the school so much of our time training was purely experimenting on ourselves seeing what worked and what didn’t work. I did achieve great strength and speed for a 5 foot 5 highschool kid and I also had a very success football career for being the smallest linebacker in the state. But through this experience I also learned that training with zero professional supervision is a good way to get yourself hurt, it is also a good way to waste time if the training you are doing isn’t strategically planned out and backed by science. See, many people look at performance training and think “oh they are just lifting weights, we can do that at the local commercial gym.” But I assure you bicep curls and bench press is not the same as what we do at my gym. My gym is focused on making athletes stronger, faster, and more explosive, along with creating good movement quality that will assist these athletes not just in sport but later on in life as well. As I said before I grew up poor, many of my friends I grew up with were in jail, on drugs, or dead by the time I was 18 years old. I truly believe football saved my life, it kept me off the streets, away from the bad decisions I watched countless friends make over the years. I have always been grateful for the lessons I learned as an athlete, work ethic, toughness, team work, leadership, goal setting etc. What I am the most grateful for though is the men who were my role models on the field, I didn’t have great father figures at home, but I had great father figures as coaches so at a young age I knew I wanted to some how give back to kids the way those men gave their time to me. I began my coaching career at Ogden high in the weightroom in 2016, I eventually transitioned to being a varsity linebacker coach. By 2020 I realized that I was much more passionate about the off season training than I was about the sport itself. You see you can impact kids greatly in the 3-5 months of a sports season, but in the gym I get the chance to impact them every day year round. As that undersized kid in highschool I learned I can completely transform a person to make them accomplish things they otherwise would never have a chance accomplishing. I can take an average athlete and make them good, and I can take a good athlete and make them great. With strength training I am giving these athletes tools to not only succeed in sports but to continue life with a passion for fitness beyond sports. In 2021 I officially opened “my gym” Custom Built Strength and by gym I mean I turned my 1 car garage into a personal training studio and began training athletes in this tiny space no one would ever assume was there. My first athlete was a football player who was living with me at the time, he grew up in hard circumstances and my wife and I decided we would take him into our home to keep him from living on the streets. I began sharing some of our training results and quickly I began gathering interest from a few parents in the community. This idea started out as an idea for a part time side gig to potentially help earn some extra cash while also working a full time job and being a father to my two kids that were under 3 years old at the time. Early on I began seeing extremely good performance results and extremely good success from my athletes both on and off the field. By 2022 I was working from 6am-9pm 6-7 days week. It became tough trying to manage the volume of people that wanted to train with me in the small space I had. In 2023 I finally decided to make the jump to a real gym location, which again is in a warehouse in an industrial park in Ogden and from the outside one would never know that behind those doors athletes are being exposed to world class training and equipment along with achieving world class results. I believe in investing heavily into my athletes and tracking their performance improvements to ensure they are getting the best possible results they can to reach their sport goals. I truly feel that my gym is making a positive impact in this community. I continue watching kids improve their confidence, become more resilient, and achieve their sports goals, and I believe they will all walk away with a passion for fitness that will help them live long healthy lives behind sport. The gym is still growing, and we are in there getting better every single day.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No definitely not smooth, there are many challenges when it comes to being an entrepreneur. It has been a rollercoaster at times. Financially, mentally, physically it can be exhausting but I continue pushing forward because I know it is better for my family to watch me push hard to achieve my dreams than having them grow up watching me work a 9-5 job that I hate. I am extremely passionate about what I do and I didn’t start this with the number one goal to be rich, I started it to help people so it makes it a lot easier to deal with the hard times because I love what I do.
As you know, we’re big fans of Custom Built Strength and Sports Performance. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
I specialize in strength and sports performance training for both male and female athletes. I make athletes stronger, faster, and more explosive. I utilize world class training equipment and cutting edge technology to provide my athletes with science backed data driven results that are proven to improve their performance in which ever sport it is they do. I currently work with football, baseball, lacrosse, hockey, volleyball, basketball, soccer, cheer, track, and softball athletes. With multiple male and female athletes accepting division 1 scholarships I am confident in our ability to help athletes reach their goals and I am willing to do whatever I can to help them get there.
How do you think about happiness?
My family makes me happy, giving my 2 children a life I didn’t have growing up makes me happy, giving their mother the ability to be a stay at home mom so she can raise my kids while I pursue my dream makes me happy. Watching timid kids turn into confident ambitious athletes makes me happy, seeing kids watch their mental health improve after gaining a passion for fitness makes me happy, having athletes reach out to me to tell me how my gym changed their life makes me happy, doing hard things and seeing the results pay off down the road makes me happy.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Custombuiltstrength.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/custombuiltstrength?igsh=bzFkcTdnZHNiMTNq&utm_source=qr
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/mxqjBLPSk8VBm8FP/?mibextid=kFxxJD
