Westside Fitboxing Santa Cruz: Heavy-Bag Fitboxing, Core Power Strength, and Coaching Built on Form

Sally Larter’s credentials on a studio floor are technical before they are anything else. She came to fitness kickboxing through martial arts rather than through group exercise, trained in Muay Thai, and holds a fourth-degree black belt earned across years of study. Her original use for fitness kickboxing was conditioning that kept her ready for martial arts training. That order of operations still shapes how she teaches: strike mechanics are treated as a skill to be transmitted correctly, not as a cardio prop.

Deana Rabiah arrived from a different direction. A former soccer player, she was looking for a way to stay fit that was genuinely enjoyable and surrounded by people she wanted to be around. The two had been training together since their children were small. When the studio space where they had both worked closed during the COVID period, they opened Westside Fitboxing together, keeping the fitness kickboxing and adding Rabiah’s Core Power Strength program as the studio’s second format.

Those two backgrounds meet in one training premise: a newcomer learns to strike before being asked to strike hard. Larter teaches the mechanics in free Saturday morning sessions held to four people, and the fitboxing hour moves from a warm-up into thirty to forty minutes of unbroken punching and kicking, then closes with arm, leg, core and mat work. No day is split by body part, so a single visit trains everything.

The first thing a newcomer encounters at Westside Fitboxing is not a workout. It is a lesson. Larter runs free how-to sessions on Saturday mornings and holds them to four participants at a time, because the point is individual correction rather than volume. Anyone who cannot make Saturday can arrange another time during the week. Larter is direct about why she protects this: proper form keeps people from getting hurt, and it makes the workout itself better.

The same instructional care extends to the ordinary logistics of a first visit. New participants are encouraged to arrive ten to fifteen minutes early so the space can be explained, wraps can be fitted, and mats and weights can be pointed out before anything begins. Rabiah and Larter both make a habit of being present in the room even when they are not the ones teaching, and instructors are told in advance when someone new will be in class so that person gets attention before and after the session.

None of this is complicated. It is simply sequenced correctly. Where many striking environments assume competence and let newcomers work it out, this studio treats competence as something the business is responsible for supplying.

Inside the Method

Inside the Method: Gloved participants hold a high plank on the wooden floor between the hanging heavy bags. Photo: Courtesy of Westside Fitboxing

Ask Larter what actually distinguishes the studio and she goes straight to equipment. Westside Fitboxing runs all of its fitboxing classes on heavy bags suspended from the ceiling and secured to the floor. She is not aware of another studio in the area doing the same. The common alternative, a freestanding water-filled base bag, moves under contact, and in her assessment a moving target does not deliver an adequate workout and increases the chance of striking the wrong surface.

Two other choices follow from the same reasoning. The studio does not spar, which removes the single most common reason people say they wanted to try kickboxing but did not. And it does not run classes on shared focus mitts, where participants alternate between working and holding. Larter has mitts and respects mitt work, but for a fitness hour she wants continuous output rather than a queue.

The result is thirty to forty minutes of uninterrupted contact work per participant. Larter also points to what she believes real impact contributes, including upper-body loading and, in her account, bone strengthening, both of which she considers increasingly relevant as people age.

The studio does not program split days. Rabiah puts it plainly: every day is an all-body day. That has a practical consequence for people whose schedules are unpredictable. A participant who can only make one session in a given week has not missed the part of their body that was scheduled for Tuesday. They have trained everything.

Within that constraint, the owners deliberately vary the work. Larter describes mixing sessions up so that muscles do not settle into a pattern and participants stay challenged. The variation is not decorative. It is the mechanism that keeps an hour-long format productive over months rather than weeks.

Instructors are given genuine latitude inside that structure. Sessions are not choreographed for them from above. The owners’ position is that different instructors bring different strengths, and that letting them build their own classes within an agreed framework produces more creativity than a scripted template would. Participants, they report, respond to that.

Rabiah’s Core Power Strength class runs on mats stationed among the bags, but the work is independent of them. It is Pilates-inspired, centered on core strength and overall body strength, and carries more weight work than the fitboxing hour. Its emphasis is functional: learning to engage the core, learning to bend and lift something heavy without paying for it later.

Rabiah is also candid about a coaching behavior she considers part of the method. Many of her participants, and in her observation particularly women, underestimate their own strength. So she watches during class and encourages people to go a little further than they would have on their own. Nothing dramatic, and never at the cost of safety, but enough to close the gap between what a person believes they can lift and what they can actually lift.

That, she notes, is difficult to replicate alone. An instructor who has watched the same person across weeks can see progression the person cannot see in themselves. The two formats are designed to complement one another, and while some participants combine them, either one on its own is built to deliver a complete session.

Asked what changes when someone trains consistently, both owners named the same thing before anything physical: empowerment, and the confidence that follows it. Larter describes watching a participant arrive timid and, within weeks, hit the bag hard. Rabiah calls out the smile that appears when someone lands a kick they could not land before.

The physical markers they cite are equally concrete. Endurance builds, so the breaks a newcomer needs early on become less frequent. Weights get heavier. Upper body and shoulder strength develop, which Rabiah notes matters especially for women. Larter adds mobility as a companion to that strength, because a strong body that cannot move well is only half useful.

Larter’s proudest measure is audible. When a participant has trained long enough for form and strength to arrive together, the kicks and punches can be heard across the room. Everyone present hears it. So does the person throwing them.

The participant range at Westside Fitboxing runs from college students to senior citizens, and the owners regard that spread as one of the studio’s better outcomes. A frequent question they field comes from people in their fifties who have not trained in years and want to know whether the class is appropriate for them. The answer is yes, and the reason it can be yes is the design: work at your own pace, take the rest you need, use the modification when you need it.

Rabiah points to a hesitation that keeps many people out of group classes entirely, which is the fear of not being able to finish, or of not being good enough to be in the room. A format where nobody is watching anyone else’s bag, and where the instructor has already offered three ways to do the movement, dissolves a good deal of that.

The social result is one the owners did not engineer but clearly value. Participants stay in the parking lot after class talking. Friendships form across generations. Rabiah mentions the small practical exchanges that follow, the offer of a truck to help someone move, the ordinary reciprocity of a small community. The owners are also explicit that the studio is a welcoming place for everyone, including the substantial LGBTQ community in Santa Cruz, and that their instructors reflect the community they serve.

Member Experience

Member Experience: A participant holds a glute bridge on a mat with a small teal prop between the knees, as others work through mat exercises among the heavy bags. Photo: Courtesy of Westside Fitboxing

One of the more unusual positions the owners hold is that they do not want to win participants away from anyone. Larter says directly that she would never tell someone to train only at her studio, and that the us-versus-them posture she sees in parts of the local fitness scene bothers her. There are enough people to fill every space, and people need to find the training that resonates with them.

That position is commercially unusual and methodologically consistent. The studio’s participant base includes surfers, mountain bikers, and other athletes who come specifically to cross-train, and a studio that wanted exclusivity would be at odds with the people it serves best. Rabiah adds the local reality with some humor: in Santa Cruz the real competition is the surf and the trails.

There is also a broader position underneath it. Rabiah is critical of an industry that has taught people they must already look a certain way to walk through the door, and that markets a body type as a prerequisite for participation. She and Larter set the studio against that. The stated aim is strong, fit humans, whatever else those humans happen to look like.

The Owners

Photo: Courtesy of Westside Fitboxing

Deana Rabiah and Sally Larter

Westside Fitboxing

Santa Cruz, California

West side of Santa Cruz, California

Founding Principle

Nobody should have to already know how before they are allowed to begin. Teach the form, remove the intimidation, and the strength follows.

The two women who own Westside Fitboxing cover different halves of the same method. Larter carries the technical side: a martial arts background including Muay Thai and a fourth-degree black belt, responsibility for the fitboxing classes, and the free how-to sessions where new participants learn to strike correctly. Rabiah leads Core Power Strength, the studio’s Pilates-inspired core and full-body class, and coaches progressive load with an eye on participants who underestimate what they can do. They had trained together for years before opening the studio, and both describe the same operating aim: a safe, welcoming room where people of any age or background can build a body that serves them.