Sports have become a year-around activity between high school teams, travel teams, and off-season training. During the downtime between seasons, athletes must find a place to train. Some athletes train at gyms around town, while others train on their own.

Breakthrough Sports Performance, located on the south side of Columbia, is notorious for training high school and college athletes, and recently added training for younger children. Junior Khaleel Dampier, the backup quarterback for the Battle football team, has been training at Breakthrough for a year and a half now. 

“Breakthrough is more of a one-on-one session, and [they focus on] having more interactions with you and doing the workout right,” Dampier said. “They are also very flexible to you and you can workout when you want to.”

Also on the south side of Columbia is Athletes Performance Institute (API) Project Fitness, a rival gym for Breakthrough. Senior Tavian Miller has been working out at API for the last two and a half years.

“API is a great environment for people who wanna get better with everything in their life,” Miller said. 

He also added that API has challenged him off the field as well. 

“API has encouraged me to do the right things in school as well,” Miller said. 

But there are still gyms besides Breakthrough and API. Junior Tommy Atherton has been working out at Columbia Training Academy for two years. Atherton used to workout at Breakthrough before going to the Training Academy and decided to make the switch because of their different styles of workouts. 

“Doing something different and getting better results in my opinion,” Atherton said. 

Training Academy is a boxing gym, while Breakthrough and API are more general sports training. Atherton does cross-sport training instead of doing workouts that are specific to football. 

“I like the one-on-one competitive factor instead of relying on teammates, it’s just you,” Atherton said. 

Some students, however, train on their own. Senior Darren Jordan has done workouts on his own for the past two years. He said he believes working out on his own can have some advantages, like being able to tailor his workouts to what will better prepare him for the upcoming season. 

“I like to workout by myself so I can create workouts that accommodate what I need to work on,” Jordan said. 

Columbia has many options throughout the city no matter what sport an athlete does.