Walk the Walk
Photo by Lawrence Tabudlo
Each day, Egan Inoue wakes up at 4 in the morning. He then makes a protein shake before heading to his workout center, Egan’s Fitness, where he launches into a series of breathing exercises, calisthenics and push-ups.
When he’s satisfied with his daily warm-ups, Inoue will pack up his downwind foilboard and head to the ocean, eager to burn about 1,000 calories in an hour and a half. When he’s done, he’ll head back to the gym to perform mobility exercises before he’s off to work with clients and teach fitness classes.
Amazingly, he does this all before the clock strikes 8.
Next weekend, Inoue will still be waking up at 4 a.m., but for a different purpose — to gear up for the sixth annual Young at Heart Expo. The event takes place Sept. 26-27 at the Neal S. Blaisdell Exhibition Hall, and Inoue says he’s looking forward to his fitness center’s participation in the two-day expo.
“(The expo) is designed for 55 and over, and if you’re looking for a great quality of life and you’re interested in longevity, this is something that you should show up at,” Inoue advises.
Egan’s Fitness instructors will be there offering a sports trainer for all ages, a high intensity interval training (HIIT) workout, and a Fit Forever coach that will be running a class for people to work on their balance and coordination.
Inoue offers this piece of advice to those who value their physical condition: “If you don’t prioritize your health and fitness today, you’re going to be forced to prioritize that when you get older.”
Fitness has been a part of Inoue’s life for as long as he can remember. The Mānoa Valley native started training in martial arts at the age of 4. His parents, Naomi and Errol, also enrolled him in baseball and basketball at a young age and he remained active in sports through high school — first at Roosevelt and then after he transferred to University of Hawai‘i Lab School.
At 16, Inoue discovered the sport of racquetball and his whole life changed. He began playing competitively and went on to become the state champion by the time he graduated from UH Lab in 1983. Soon after, he turned professional and traveled the world for the next 10 years — highlighted by his world titles in 1986 and 1990, and his qualifying for the U.S. Olympic Team.
For his racquetball prowess, Inoue was inducted into the International Racquetball Federation in 2020. Along with his induction, he also received a plaque and a letter from the federation in which he was credited for a major rule change — one which limited players to only one serve.
“I would spend hours in the court hitting thousands and thousands of one certain shot until I got it. It was just repetition every day,” Inoue reminisces. “I always remembered one of my coaches telling me, ‘The more reps you do, the better off you’re going to be. It takes 10,000 reps in order to master it.’ That’s what I was trying to do all the time and I think it helped develop discipline because I knew what I wanted in the end was to be the world champion.”
When his racquetball-playing days ended, Inoue carried this same discipline into the world of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. The owner of black belts in tae kwon do, hapkido, shotokan karate, Jeet kune do and Japanese jiu-jitsu, Inoue has dominated every Brazilian jiu-jitsu tournament he entered in Hawai‘i and California as a blue belt and was ready for the next step in claiming the world title in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. And that’s exactly what he did in 1996 — a feat that had never been done before by a non-Brazilian competitor. He did it again the following year as a purple belt.
Returning to his martial arts roots was a fortuitous move for Inoue. His younger brother, Enson, had a major fight lined up as he was on his way to becoming the Shooto world champion. However, he asked Inoue to stand in for him due to him being unable to fight due to a staph infection. Inoue agreed, entered the MMA ring for the first time ever in his life and won the fight by submission in the first round. Ultimately, he wound up winning five more world titles.
It was around this time that his wife, Marcia, asked Inoue what he planned to do with all the MMA honors.
“You’re just going to keep trying to win world titles?” she inquired. “Why don’t you use it for something better?”
Enter Egan’s Fitness — originally dubbed Egan’s Bootcamp — which opened in 2010 in Mānoa Marketplace, and now has two locations, in Honolulu and Pearl City.
“What we try to do is we try to make fitness easy for people because it’s a very hard thing,” says Inoue. “Anytime a new client comes in, we do a fitness assessment because it’s hard to get somewhere if you don’t know where you are.”
From there, Egan’s Fitness will recommend the different services and programs the center has to offer — ranging from group fitness, weightlifting, functional strength training, to name a few. It also provides nutrition consultations, a wellness center, Brazilian jiu-jitsu classes, youth athletic training and its Fit Forever class.
Inoue makes it a point to be in the gym each day in order to offer guidance to clients and everyday gym members. One of these people is 99-year-old John Hayakawa.
The two first met when Hayakawa’s son approached Inoue and asked if he could train his father, whose health had been declining.
“He doesn’t have that bounce in his step anymore,” Inoue recalls Hayakawa’s son telling him.
When Hayakawa first came in, Inoue did an assessment to see what his strengths and weaknesses were and also asked Hayakawa what he was looking for in a fitness program.
“Their ‘why’ should be because they want to be independent for as long as they can,” says Inoue. “And that was John’s thing, which is a big thing. Because, to me, the stronger your why is — why you want to do something — the better chances you’re going to stick with it and you’re gonna stay consistent with it. And that’s where John is.”
Under Inoue’s guidance, Hayakawa has been improving his functional strength, coordination and balance. He’s also been performing exercises like throwing balls against the wall and hitting baseballs.
“I’ve been training him for over three years and the amount of strength and balance he’s gained since has been pretty remarkable,” Inoue says proudly. “The bounce in his step is back.”
When asked why it was so important for Hayakawa to prioritize fitness, he responds, “You’re always trying to keep well and keep going. You try different kinds of things. But then when you get into something like this training with Egan, you’re totally motivated to kind of keep going and then there’s the whole sense of wanting to be well (that) becomes more important.”
Hayakawa encourages others to do the same.
“This whole sense of being able to move around, to lift things, it gives you a kind of sense of freedom,” he says. “I look around and truly wish others could have the same kind of experience.”
Inoue agrees.
“At my age now, I’m 60, that’s where my focus has been in the last 10 years — (on) longevity,” he says. “How am I going to make it to 100 years old and still be doing athletic stuff?”
It’s why he developed his new online program: Egan Inoue’s Blueprint for Living Long and Living Strong, which he hopes to release next month. The program focuses on mindset, exercises that everybody should be doing, mobility and also what beneficial supplements there are.
The program is also set to release as an ebook with the same name as well — making it the second that Inoue has published in his lifetime. His first book, Becoming Relentless, which “is a blueprint to achieving what you want in life, business and sports,” was published in 2014.
“Most people see me as a world champion and they think about me always winning, but in this book, I like to share about all the times I’ve failed,” notes Inoue. “This book is about overcoming obstacles … and I would hope that it inspires people no matter where they are in their lives.”
