Who we are
Train Unique started in 2014 as a fitness class called DREAMS — six athletes and one coach. More than a decade later it's 180-plus athletes, floors in Lafayette and Baton Rouge, and a full-time coaching staff. This is the person responsible for it.
Close to five hundred athletes have trained here since 2014 — and once a family finds the floor, they tend to keep it. The average athlete has been here four and a half years.
Founder & Owner
Damon's connection to this work started long before Train Unique.
He was diagnosed at age three with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, a rare genetic condition affecting the body's ability to produce certain hormones. Growing up meant medication, medical appointments, lab work, physical limitations, and learning very early that there were parts of his body he could not control.
Fitness changed that.
Sports gave Damon something his medical condition often took away from him: a sense of control over what his body could become. That eventually led him into strength and conditioning, coaching, and professional MMA.
Years later, when Damon began working with athletes with disabilities, he recognized something familiar in them. He understood what it felt like to have people see the diagnosis before they saw the person. And he understood that being challenged, coached, and expected to improve could be empowering instead of cruel.
In 2014, Damon started a small fitness class called DREAMS. Six athletes showed up.
Those six became the beginning of something much bigger.
DREAMS became Unique Fitness. Unique Fitness became Train Unique. The program grew to more than 180 athletes, multiple training locations, a full-time coaching staff, and a coaching certification recognized for continuing education by NASM and AFAA.
The work has been noticed outside the gym, too — a Mayor-President's award in Lafayette, and a seat on the Governor's Advisory Council on Disability Affairs.
But the philosophy never changed.
Train Unique is built around the belief that athletes with disabilities do not need to be handled like they are fragile. They need coaches willing to understand how they move, adapt when necessary, expect effort, and keep raising the standard.
Damon built Train Unique because he knows firsthand that a diagnosis can shape someone's life.
It does not have to define what they are capable of.
A diagnosis can explain the challenge.
It doesn't define the ceiling.
In his own words
What changed the day they stopped saying clients or special needs and started saying athletes — the limiting beliefs it broke, and how it shifted the whole culture of the gym. It's why that word is the only one used anywhere on this site.
On the floor
Not a statement, not a policy — a floor. Athletes of every ability training in the same room at the same time, and the everyday texture of a gym where that's simply how it works.
More than sessions
Training is the spine of Train Unique, but the community is the body around it — events, celebrations, and a room full of people who show up for each other off the floor as much as on it.
In his own words
Damon on the kind of room he set out to build — one where every athlete who walks in is seen, supported, and celebrated, and why not every gym feels that way when you walk through the door.
Off the clock
Costumes, smoothies, dancing — a minute of what a Train Unique event looks like when nobody's training. The friendships made on the floor don't stay on it.
In the press
Six straight years of coverage — TV, print, podcasts, and the disability press, from Friedreich's Ataxia News in 2021 to Louisiana First News, The Current and CAST News in 2026. The stories, with links, are on the press page.