How Noah Neiman Is Reshaping The Fitness Industry With Rumble Boxing

Words by Tess Adamakos

Photos by Evan Kaucher

Coming from an accounting background, Rumble Boxing Co-Founder and trainer Noah Neiman is reshaping the fitness industry, which is notorious for preying on insecurities with crash diets, 6-Minute Abs and Skinny Tea. While Rumble Boxing and tattoo artists both team up to improve the outer looks of our favorite A-Listers—like Justin Bieber, Kendall Jenner and David Backham—Neiman highlights that it’s all about the internal goals that keep you motivated, consistent and able to achieve results. 

Neiman, who has been featured on Dr. Oz, Good Morning America and Bravo TV’s Work Out New York, calls Rumble a unicorn story that he couldn’t be more grateful for. “The physical body changes will come,” Neiman says. “But your body can be your palace or your prison.”

Rumble has had a celebrity clientele since the beginning, can you tell us a bit about those early days?

It’s really an honor to have some of the biggest names in the world, like Sylvester Stallone, investing in your boxing gym shortly after you open. That’s something we definitely don’t take for granted. While it’s something that we look at as a badge of honor, it doesn’t define us. We treat everybody like Sylvester Stallone.

My personal love of fitness started at an early age, and it was always kind of my savior. It was always the thing that could keep me emotionally in check when my ADHD would rage up. I would workout and feel much more in control. As I started to lose weight and feel healthier and look healthier, I started doing better socially and emotionally, which really helped shape my love of fitness. That’s why with Rumble, I don’t care what fitness makes you look like, I care about how it makes you feel.

That’s really ingrained in the DNA of Rumble, we want you to have a great time, and yeah, you’re going to look good if you stay consistent and you eat well, but you’re going to feel like a fucking rockstar when you walk out.

From training pro boxers for 10 years now, which trainers inspire you?

One of my favorite trainers, Mike Tyson’s mentor and trainer [Constantine “Cus” D’Amato], would say: “How you fight is how you live your life.” He was talking about the implications of the consistency, dedication, focus, the mental tenacity and what it takes to be successful in the ring is the same toughness it takes outside of it. I like to add an amendment to that: “How you train is how you fight. How you fight is how you live your life.” 

Everything we do is a form of habit, so when I’m interacting with people, working out, training, boxing, whatever, I want to be consistent with who I want to be as a person. I think that there’s a hard parallel to find outside of this niche space. I’ve always found that when I can put in the repetitions and focus in the gym and in the training and in the boxing ring, that I’ve been able to parlay that into how I structure my business, and how I can work through relationships, etc. and it’s always made me a better person. That’s really the focus of what I do.

It’s not: “You’re going to get a six-pack and you’re going to look good on the beach and it’s fucking tank top season.” That’s so fucking baseless. Yeah, you’ll look good on Instagram, but I really talk about the emotional and mental benefits of forging these neuro-muscular connections that could make you smarter, make you more able to sit down and focus and improve yourself and become a better citizen.

You have tattoos for this ideology, including the Lil Wayne quote, “Repetition is the father of learning.”

Yes, and all of my tattoos have meaning to me. This ideology, when you feel better about yourself emotionally, that’s going to carry you into putting in the necessary repetitions and putting in the consistency, to change your physical body. But because we’re so backward as a society, we focus on the external factors first.

Another tattoo is my Sisyphus tattoo by Big Steve. Sisyphus was forced to push a rock up a hill and watch it roll down when it got to the top, as punishment. But this French philosopher [Albert Camus] said instead of being a punishment, imagine Sisyphus happy? Imagine if, through that routine, he found peace, comfort and purpose in that.

What is one of your favorite Rumble success stories?

What’s really cool about social media is the accessibility. You get to see first-hand clients’ happiness with their progress. Whether a client sends me a story about their father passing away or they were going through a bad break up, or they just got laid off and was going through a depression; and how their experience at Rumble helped change their life and could reclaim their emotional state.

Of course, there are the weight loss stories and how they used to hate working out until they found Rumble, and those are great too, but there’s this client, Rick*, who was really overweight, actually obese, and he was on all of these high blood-pressure medications that were really messing up his mood and emotions, and obviously have a tremendous impact on our body as a whole.

He started training with me 3-4 times a week, and he lost over 100 lbs, but more importantly, his depression went away and his doctor was able to take him off all of his medications.

He was able to really embody everything that’s right about fitness. No matter if you’re in shape or out of shape, fitness can always improve your life, whether it’s emotionally, mentally or physically. We hugged and he started to cry a little bit, and to have that moment, to see him feel so good about himself because of something we did together was the most beautiful thing, and really what fitness is about. Moments like that, it really helps you as a trainer to put in the necessary hours. Helping people enjoy themselves enough to work hard, have fun, come consistently and really reshape their whole mind and body, it’s a beautiful thing. Something that I would never, ever take for granted.