The Body Building in Clovis, a total body health and wellness center is bringing new and innovative technologies and methods including cryotherapy, plasmalifts, stem cell injections and infrared wellness pods. Photo by Frank Lopez.

A business in the Central Valley is offering some of the latest methods to keep the body in the best shape possible.

Since 2017, The Body Building, a full body management facility in Clovis, has offered conventional wellness methods such as massage therapy and chiropractic care, but also delved into some more experimental methods, including a cryotherapy chamber and infrared sauna.

Cyrotherapy is used to relieve muscle pain, sprains and swelling from soft tissue damage or surgery. Cryotherapy involves stepping into a full-body chamber that lowers the temperature to extremely cold levels for a few minutes to trick the body into hypothermic mode, which kills bad cells and causes good blood cells to surge to vital organs.

In an infrared sauna wellness pod, infrared lamps warm the body directly and make the body sweat more intensely, supposedly bringing benefits of better sleep, detoxification, weight loss, soreness relief and clear and tighter skin.

Co-founder Kasey Kahl started off in the mortgage business, but when the 2007 recession hit and a lot of people got out of residential real estate, he joined them. He then started to get involved with the marketing side of health and wellness ventures.

 

 

Kahl may be a familiar face to reality television fans, as he appeared on the sixth season of the reality show “The Bachelorette” and was also featured on the second season of “Bachelor Pad,” which features contestants from both the Bachelor and the Bachelorette.

Another motivating factor for Kasey in opening up the business was the opioid epidemic, which he saw claim the lives of some of his friends. He didn’t see opioids as a good method for recovery or pain management and started doing research to find something different.

Amanda Kahl, Kasey’s wife and co-founder of The Body Building, with a kinesiology and science degree in hand, wanted to create a health and wellness facility that would provide physical training, nutritional dieting and meal plans.

Kasey suggested starting a small gym-type business for Amanda, but once he saw the empty space that would be the future site for The Body Building, his ambitions grew.

“When we came here and saw it was available, we looked through the windows and there was nothing here but wood and cement. I saw everything before my eyes, I couldn’t shake it,” Kasey said. “Granted my vision was much bigger than my bank account. I didn’t really realize what I was getting myself into, but I knew that if I opened up this facility with all the amenities — recovery, technology, the newest, best, latest and greatest — that we could help a lot of people.”

The Body Building also offers chiropractic massages, stem cell injections, non-surgical body sculpting, plasma lifting, fibroblast therapy, magnetic field therapy, a juice bar for juice cleansing and an oxygen bar.

A selling point for The Body Building is stem cell therapy, also called regenerative medicine. It’s meant to promote the repair response of diseased, dysfunctional or injured tissue using stem cells. The stem cells are taken from umbilical cords that are donated after birth, and renew themselves many times and move through the body to where they are needed.

It is still in the trial phase and not approved by the Food and Drug Administration yet, but since The Body Building is an FDA approved facility, it is allowed. While there are other places in the area that do stem cell therapy, Kahl said that others extract stem cells from bone marrow, which is really painful.

“It’s natural, it’s non-invasive, it doesn’t hurt — all the things we have here are all natural, including stem cells,” Kahl said. “We have 100% success on [stem cell] knee injections. People are feeling better after 24 hours. People who haven’t walked pain free in 14 years from surgeries are getting one single injection and being able to do squats again.”

Kahl said that he is constantly doing research on new and innovative health and wellness technologies, and follows a mantra to try to be the first to do something. He says that he will be bringing new technologies to the facility in about three or four months that will “blow people away”.

With new and innovative medical technologies being offered at The Body Building, it’s no surprise that some hefty investment was needed.

Kahl said that the cost of the equipment, research and development alone required an investment of about $1.2 million to make the 3,200 square foot building a top-notch facility.

There is a wide range of customers that come to The Body Building — from 8-year-old student athletes to 90-year-olds. A lot of athletes, from professional to local amateurs, come in for treatments, Kahl said.

Kahl believes that these modern, more holistic approaches to pain therapy represent the future of the medical world. He also hinted that a new machine that can burn 10,000 calories in 20 minutes is on the way, but he didn’t name the machine.

Regarding the beauty services offered, Kahl said that more people are searching for natural treatments that don’t require invasive surgeries or going under the knife. Currently there are 25 members on staff, with the beauty ambassadors all being qualified and licensed.

Interest in these approaches to pain and beauty therapy in the Valley has grown since last year, Kahl said, with an increase of 400-500% when compared to the summer of 2018 and the opening of second location in the works. There has been offers to turn The Body Building into a chain, but Kahl is more interested in building up what he already has.

“I’m trying to help the people here — my friends my family, this community. I want to keep doing things for them,” Kahl said. “When the time comes, when God says, ‘lets expand your horizons and help even more people,’ then I’ll take a look.”