A Summer Camp for Fitness Enthusiasts

How Power Monkey Camp became a hub of community and expert instruction.

Twice a year, some of the best coaches in the CrossFit world gather in Crossville, Tennessee at the site of a gymnastics summer camp for kids.

For each of these week-long sessions, close to 100 CrossFit athletes and fitness enthusiasts learn about gymnastics, Olympic weightlifting, endurance, kettlebell training, and nutrition. They return home with improved skills in all these areas, but Dave Durante, the co-founder of Power Monkey Camp (and Power Monkey Fitness), said the highlights of the week are the connections made and the friendships formed. 

“We've become a really close family,” Dave said about the camp attendees. “We've had people get engaged at camp, we’ve had kids that were born because of camp, we have people with Power Monkey tattoos now. It's turned into beyond anything any of us ever imagined.”

The funny thing is, Dave didn’t start off running a fitness camp. 

He began as a gymnast, taking his competitive career all the way to the top: the Olympics.  

A Hub of Fitness Education

After growing up in New Jersey, Dave won a scholarship to Stanford, where he competed on their gymnastics team. Then, after graduation he joined Team USA and won multiple national championships. Finally, in 2008, he was an alternate on the American team that competed at the Olympics in Beijing.

Unfortunately, Dave went to the Olympics with a torn ACL, so he had surgery as soon as he returned. As he was recovering, he began looking online for workouts and discovered CrossFit. First he did the workouts by himself in the Stanford gym, but soon he got in touch with CrossFit headquarters in nearby Santa Cruz. He began creating content for them and eventually became part of the CrossFit Gymnastics staff. 

Eventually, Dave and his business partner, Shane Geraghty, branched out from teaching gymnastics and began working with other high-level coaches, like Olympic weightlifting coach Chad Vaughn.

“We just wanted to educate people around fitness. And the niche that we created around ourselves was how to collect former elite athletes who transitioned to being coaches,” Dave said. 

They began traveling around the world teaching weekend courses, focusing on gymnastics and weightlifting. 

Then, in 2013, Dave decided he wanted to do a bigger event, something longer than a weekend. He’d been going to the Flip Fest kids’ summer gymnastics camp in Tennessee for twenty years to help his Olympic friends, John Roethlisberger and John Macready.  

“It's a beautiful facility,” he said,”and so I thought it could be a great opportunity to do the same thing with adults. Why not give adults a chance to be kids again? So I pitched the idea to my partner and my wife, Sadie, who's an enormous part of our company, and the one who signs off on all my crazy ideas.”

At the first Power Monkey Camp they had 30 coaches and 30 participants, which meant the camp wasn’t profitable. However, Dave said he knew they were onto something special when people started crying as they got on the bus to go home. 

“I couldn’t believe people were crying after a few days together,” Dave said. That’s when he realized Power Monkey Camp was more than just a great informational week, it was a life-changing experience.

“It grew from there, and it's turned into what I think is a hallmark event in terms of fitness education,” Dave said. “Not just for functional fitness and CrossFit, but for people who are like-minded and think wellness and fitness are an important part of their lives.”

In the end, Dave said the thing that sets all Power Monkey coaching apart is the consistent instruction through each of the skills they teach. This means that when someone goes from the kettlebell instruction with Jeff Martone to the jump rope station with Dave Newman, they will hear consistent themes, and instruction that builds on itself. 

“There's going to be a throughline in terms of how things are taught,” Dave said. 

Athletes are able to see that the way they hinge on their kettlebell swing helps them when they pick up a barbell, and how their overhead position holding a barbell or dumbbell is similar to how they work on their handstand. 

“I think it's because we've worked together for so long,” Dave said. “We believe very deeply in terms of the goals and how to approach coaching similarly, we think similarly in terms of how we need to approach coaching. And so our philosophies have grown together.”

Expert Instruction Abroad and Online

Building on the week-long camps in Tennessee, in the last few years Dave and his team began running Power Monkey Retreats in locations like Greece, Sicily, South Africa, and Croatia. 

These trips include expert coaching and personalized instruction as well as locally sourced menus and local excursions. 

“They’ve been an enormous hit,” Dave said. “We sell those out pretty quickly because we curate your vacation for you in these idyllic locations around the world and layer fitness on top of it.”  

For people who aren’t able to travel but still want expert instruction, the Power Monkey Training App offers a monthly subscription program that provides fitness programming and skill-based gymnastics instruction. You can choose from a free option, or monthly or yearly plans that offer more personalized coaching. 

While they’ve been in business for many years, Dave said they are still a small team. 

“If you're writing in, I'm most likely seeing an email and writing you back. I think sometimes people get a shock that I'm the one responding to their question about their muscle ups,” Dave said. 

As CrossFit has changed over the years, Dave said he’s seen the audience for the camps, retreats, and the app change. 

“It's broadened in terms of the type of person who's interested in coming to an event like this. I think initially it was a little bit more diehard people that were looking to compete,” he said, adding that now it’s more everyday people who love fitness.

While they are happy to help people qualify for CrossFit Regionals or the CrossFit Games, Dave said their bread and butter is the average athlete who just wants to improve their skills in the gym. 

“Our primary goal is to help the everyday athlete become more efficient and become a little bit more capable of doing these movement patterns for the rest of their lives,” Dave said. 

About Author, Hilary Achauer

Hilary is a renowned fitness business writer, marketing content writer, and journalist. She’s written content for start-ups, entrepreneurs, executive coaches, wellness providers, gyms, and CrossFit. Her focus is always on telling the best story with a clear, compelling style and being able to engage readers, bring in new customers, or build an audience.