Wellness center guts out pandemic, now hopes to bring Point Ruston merchants together

The owner and founder of Grit City Wellness celebrated the site’s grand opening in October 2019, nearly five months to the day before the first case of COVID-19 was reported in Pierce County.

Since that time, loans, grants and, yes, grit have kept the site going, with expanded offerings from its early start focused on cryotherapy.

Chyna Willman, 46, of Puyallup, doesn’t give up easily, and her facility’s name could be a reflection of that determination, as well as a nod to Tacoma.

She recently sat with The News Tribune for an interview about her business and a new merchants’ group she’s helping to spearhead, still in its early stages.

With the ups and downs of the pandemic, marketing has been a catch-as-catch-can approach, with the early promotions soon becoming a distant memory amid COVID-19 and lockdowns.

With the help of Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program and grants, Willman noted, “I’ve used every resource that we could have. Are we fully recovered? No.”

So she’s out promoting, with hopes also that a new alliance with other Point Ruston merchants can help lift all of them.

“There has just never been a greater time that we need a merchants association,” Willman said. “We need a united front. We need to have one voice for the merchants in Point Ruston, and right now that doesn’t exist.”

All of that is a long way from her previous work in the auto industry, jetting cross country for meetings. Now, her commute from Puyallup to Point Ruston isn’t that bad, she noted.

“When you commute across the country, and then your commute is now like, 15-20 minutes, it’s a breeze. I listen to podcasts. I love it.”

How Grit City Wellness landed in Point Ruston

Willman knew she wanted to locate her business in Point Ruston after visiting when the development was still fairly new.

‘We were out at Point Ruston and sitting on this patio ... we were having fish and chips and microbrews. And like, this is my bliss moment. I’m looking at the ferry going to Vashon Island. And I thought to myself, ‘How do I come here every single day?’ Because I don’t want to be up there on that plane anymore, as you watch them pass over.”

The plane is reference to her previous career in the automotive industry. She spent more than 15 years with different companies traveling as a liaison between auto manufacturers and dealers.

“So whatever the manufacturer wanted to achieve with their dealers across the country, we would essentially implement, train, execute and do that over thousands of dealers,” she said.

She eventually moved up the ranks. “I did everything from high level account management, boots on the ground, to sales and managing people.”

It was draining.

She talked to a sales agent at Point Ruston on potentially investing in another business.

Ultimately, she decided she wanted to set up shop her way with her ideas.

“I was dying to create something and had that piece inside me that was just dying to be creative in some way.”

She added, “I really thought if I can help people feel better, they’ll do better.”

At the time, she found no one was offering whole-body cryotherapy in Pierce County, a treatment she herself had discovered in her coast-to-coast travels as a way to rejuvenate.

“From all of my experiences going to these different businesses, some of them franchises, some of them privately owned, small businesses, I thought I had an opinion that everybody was doing it wrong, or at least not the way I would do it,” she said.

Cryotherapy in its basic form is any cold therapy to help relieve swelling or muscle pain, and can range from a simple cold pack to ice baths to what Grit City offers, which is an actual cold chamber.

Grit City Wellness’ website describes the process as this: “The room rapidly lowers the skin’s top layer to 32°F while the cabin temperature drops to a range of -150°F. Participants are protected with socks, gloves, slippers, face mask and a cap while in the chamber.”

The sessions last two to four minutes.

Some research has shown promise to the effects; for now the whole-body version is still considered alternative therapy and the FDA recommends you check with your doctor first.

“I can honestly say to someone when they come in, if you’re at a level nine pain, and you do this treatment for three to four minutes, we’re going to drop you to a four and it’s instant,” Willman said.

The relief lasts, she says depending on the individual, anywhere from a few days for chronic pain sufferers to longer for someone in good health.

Expanding with gym, yoga, meditation pod

From cryotherapy, the business branched out into a 24-hour fitness center, yoga studio, infrared sauna, a meditation pod and compression therapy using a NormaTec Recovery system that gives a compression massage.

Along with fitness instructors, the staff includes a chiropractor and a nutritionist, and they offer private yoga instruction.

Grit City Wellness also offers an Ashiatsu practitioner. “She provides massage therapy to your body using her feet,” Willman said.

“Every day we find something more that we can integrate,” she noted.

She sees what she’s offering is changing moods and perhaps minds after clients feel physical improvement. Feel physically bad, you could be easily mentally triggered to anger, as she explained.

She described it as seeing “people go into the whole body cryo system with a straight mouth, and then come out smiling because they just got this flood of endorphins. And the same goes with the meditation pod.”

She noted that for most people “meditation is either just nonexistent or difficult for people to achieve. And so we’ve provided this really cool modality for meditating.”

The meditation pod, a Somadome, offers binaural music and coordinated light, as you sit in the chair she described as made of microcrystalline tiles, “so it stops electromagnetic waves from getting to you while you’re in.”

“Our bodies are organic bodies being inundated. And so to have, even as a quick respite from all that, it’s amazing to see how people respond,” she added.

Kris Shook, who leads the Shook Home Group real estate firm in University Place, says he’s benefited from the site’s cryotherapy and more as part of his own wellness plan.

“I’m a cancer survivor,” he told The News Tribune. “I had two kinds of lymphoma at the exact same time.”

He said after reading about cryotherapy, he decided to try it, and “I do not like cold whatsoever,” he added.

“I gave it a shot and started really enjoying the way it made me feel. And then they also have the sauna. And I’ve always loved saunas,” Shook said. “To be able to go from the sauna to the cryotherapy chamber; just the benefits between both of those was really super important — the way I felt ... what it did for the joints.”

He said he’s also benefited from the compression therapy, massage, meditation and yoga.

“My oncologist always said, ‘Hey, listen, you’ve got to be doing more things ... to kind of mellow you out a little bit and relax.”

“I’ve been going there now for about two years,” he said. “I think we all get so busy in life ... Stress is so prevalent in everyone’s life that people have to take the time out to take care of themselves mentally, physically and emotionally. And over there, you have all that.

“I just wish more people took advantage of it,” he added.

What’s next

Willman now is helping form a Point Ruston merchants group to boost representation.

She’s hoping the Merchant’s Alliance at Point Ruston Waterfront can start to tackle issues such as more coordinated marketing as well as the various parking requirements on site, the result of multiple Point Ruston property owners-landlords.

Also important would being able to confront issues before they turn into a public-relations fiasco, such as the recent Mexican food imbroglio between the Tacoma Farmers Market and Point Ruston.

Justine Kunz, director of sales and marketing at Silver Cloud Hotel Tacoma at Point Ruston Waterfront, is on the board of the newly formed group.

She told The News Tribune this week that a main goal is to be a single source of information so visitors and locals can have “a central hub to be able to go to rather than sourcing 10 to 15 different websites to be able to gather that information.”

“We collaborate with the different businesses and just found that we were somewhat siloed in our operation and our marketing efforts,” Kunz said.

Beyond that, Kunz said, the alliance could tackle issues collectively, “whether that’s safety issues, security issues. ... If we don’t share and communicate about those issues, we don’t know if other people in businesses are experiencing those same issues.”

To that end, “Chyna has been the inspirational lead for this type of collaboration and organization, which has been really great that she’s taken charge of this as a business owner.”

“She’s been a great promotional voice,” she added.

Willman sees herself as a problem solver and optimist and is ready to see Point Ruston work better both for customers and merchants.

“You know, I don’t wait around a lot for things, I just tend to try to go after them.”

Grit City Wellness

5005 Main St., Suite No. 119, Tacoma

▪ Website: gritcitywellness.com