MOSES LAKE — Tyler Dart has been working out since he was a 12-year-old in football practice.

"I just started showing people how to do certain exercises," he said, "and it just grew, snowballed from there."

Now, Dart is putting his teaching muscle to new use, as owner of Anytime Fitness, which had its soft opening Saturday.

Dart, who moved to the Moses Lake area about three years ago with wife Nikki and their children, works with his wife and Tod and Krystal Haneberg in the new venture. Dart moved into the area with a friend to offer personal training.

"I've always wanted to open my own gym," he said, noting he came across Anytime Fitness on the Internet. Dart said it's one of the fastest growing fitness franchises, and one of the cheapest to start. "The opportunity presented itself, and I took advantage of it."

There are 300 Anytime Fitness locations nationwide at the moment, Dart said, and 300 more are going up this year.

"There's one opening every day," he said, noting that membership is good at any location. "It's a nice, small, neighborhood-friendly environment."

Gym offerings include 24-hour access, six certified personal trainers, and "a quarter of a million dollars" worth of equipment, Dart stressed, as well as a tanning salon.

"Moses Lake, to me, personally, has been starved for a franchise branch name gym, especially one with 24-hour access because of all the shift work that the companies have here," he said. "There's some people that work graveyard that they get off of work and they want to work out, but no place is open."

Dart called the response since opening "overwhelming," noting that the gym's soft opening broke the corporate record of 75 memberships sold by selling 100.

"I love helping people," he said. "And the best way to help people is to prevent. As a trainer and a gym owner now, we can help prevent people from diabetes and … it's a preventative measure. I love helping people live a healthier, happier life."

Asked about the outlook of his business, Dart responds that he is eyeing four other sites, including one more in Moses Lake, and in Wenatchee, Lake Chelan and Ephrata.