At Kaizen, we believe that everyone can improve their health and fitness for a better life. Our mission is to provide you with the tools, guidance, and accountability you need to achieve your goals.
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Experience You Can Trust
Owned by an exercise physiologist with over a decade of experience in training and coaching, our goal is to not only kickstart your health journey but to help you transition to a permanent healthy lifestyle. We are committed to equipping you with the knowledge and skills necessary to maintain your desired lifestyle independently.
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Commitment To Safety
Safety is a cornerstone of our philosophy. We ensure you learn how to perform lifts correctly, train effectively, and improve your nutrition safely. Our expert guidance helps prevent injuries and promotes long-term well-being.
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Welcoming Community
Whether you’re new to fitness or a seasoned lifter, Kaizen is a place where you can feel comfortable and supported. Our open community and positive atmosphere, fostered by both staff and members, make everyone feel at home.
Location:
1811 Industrial Boulevard
Suite 105
Norman, OK, 73069
Meet Our Owners
Kaizen Performance Gym, owned by Garrison and Alli Niemiec, opened its doors in January 2019 to accommodate those in the Norman and Moore, Oklahoma community that wished to develop lifetime health and fitness habits, continuously improve themselves and be surrounded by others on the same journey. But the philosophy behind it had been blossoming since Garrison was in middle school.
kai·zen
/kahy·zen/
A Japanese philosophy to strive for continuous improvement and "good change".
Our Story
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The husky kid who outlasted everyone
Garrison was the husky kid. He loved sports, but his body didn't volunteer him for them. He wasn't the fastest in the drill line or the strongest in the weight room, and making a varsity roster wasn't going to happen by waiting for his genetics to catch up.
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So he put in the work.
More after-school runs and lifts than any other athlete on the team is the method he’ll tell you about, but it goes further. He couldn't out-strength the kids who were stronger. He couldn't out-sprint the kids who were faster. But he could lean on them long enough for them to break first.
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That became the pattern. Endurance. Accumulation. Small things, stacked. It's how he made varsity, and it's also, he'll joke, how he moved in with his wife. He never really asked... A piece of furniture here, a few more nights a week, another drawer, a toothbrush. By the time she noticed, the move had already happened.
Samurai at midnight, hypertrophy at 1 AM
Garrison is, by his own description, a nerd. Dungeons & Dragons. Tabletop games. Anime. The discipline of deep interest in whatever has his attention.
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Japanese culture is where that discipline took root. He read about the samurai. He studied Miyamoto Musashi. He understood the cherry blossom: beautiful because it's brief, captivating because it's earned. Through that window he first met the idea of kaizen as a practice rather than a word:
the Japanese philosophy of small, compounding improvement that rebuilt a country, a manufacturing tradition, and any underdog who isn’t willing to let go of their dreams.
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The same instinct drove him into the science of training. In high school, that meant bodybuilding.com forum posts at one in the morning and Muscle & Fitness magazines read front to back. Trying the supplements. Testing the exercises. Keeping what worked, discarding what didn't.
He approached fitness as a research project, with himself as the subject.
A pivot, and a pursuit of the real thing
In 2014, Garrison was enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, pursuing a chemical engineering degree and participating in the ROTC program with the intention of transferring to West Point.
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Then he was diagnosed with epilepsy.
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The military path closed. The engineering degree had been chosen to serve that path, so it stopped making sense too. What remained was the work he'd already been doing every free hour: studying how the body moves, adapts, and gets better. Now he had room to take it seriously.
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He changed his major to Health and Exercise Science and didn't look back.
AM classes and PM coaching
Through undergrad, Garrison worked primarily with athletes at Youth Performance, while also coaching adults and general population clients at 10Gym. The connection with young athletes stuck immediately, and it remains one of the things he's proudest of today.
The difference, he'll tell you, is that he refused to coach by command. Kids, and for that matter adults, don't learn from "do what I say." They learn from understanding why.
So that's what he gave them: the reasoning behind every drill, every progression, every rest interval. The kids got better faster than their parents expected, and then the parents started asking if he trained adults too.
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His speed and agility work became the thing people talked about. The programs he built in those years (the ones young athletes ran home and told their parents about) are the same programs Kaizen is now known for, refined and improved through several more years of iteration.
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In 2017, he began his Master's in Exercise Physiology at the University of Central Oklahoma. Mornings in class. Afternoons and evenings coaching. The rhythm of a man who had decided this was his life's work.
The arrival of Kaizen
The idea for Kaizen arrived in 2018 from a specific frustration. Garrison was seeing genuine community at the places he coached: youth teams grinding through summer training together, older adults pulling up chairs for coffee after a health club session, relationships built around the simple fact of showing up.
The training systems supporting those communities were a different story.
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He was an exercise physiologist working inside businesses built by people who weren't. The programming was generic. The standards were soft. The science he'd spent years studying had nowhere to land. Inside someone else's framework, he felt stuck.
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So he did what he had always done. He started accumulating. He secured a business loan. He found a space. He opened Kaizen in 2019.
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The original vision included weightlifting, yoga, and martial arts. Within a year, the community told him what it actually wanted, and it was the thing he loved most anyway.
Strength and conditioning became the foundation. What the Norman community was missing, and what Garrison was built to provide: credentialed, physiology-grounded coaching that treats every member like an athlete regardless of age, sport, or starting point.
Still a student
Running Kaizen revealed a gap in knowledge Garrison hadn't planned for. He understood physiology, coaching, and programming, but he didn't yet understand business the way he wanted to. So he did what a kaizen practitioner does.
He went back to school.
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He completed a second Master's degree, this time in Business Administration. Today, he attends NSCA clinics as a student and a presenter, both at the national and state level. He serves as the Oklahoma State Director for Fitness and Weightlifting Events at the Oklahoma Senior Games. And he never misses an opportunity to improve his coaching or his business acumen.
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The gym is named for the practice of kaizen, not just the idea. You'll feel it from the moment you walk through the doors.
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Come write the next chapter of your story with us here at Kaizen.
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We'd love to have you.
