"If Borderline is going to stand for one thing, it's going to be known for it's complete rebellious actions against the typical norm of what we're accustomed too on a day-to-day basis whether it's fitness, fashion, or lifestyle."

"Go against the fucking grain", I once told myself.

Hi, my name is Joseph Kleinberg and I'm the founder of Borderline Barbell. Ever since I was 18 years old, I envisioned myself to owning my very own small business. After graduating high school and doing my time throughout community college, I always had a sincere passion for wanting to operate my own training facility one day, Borderline Barbell.

I noticed I would always do things for school and work, but I was truly never happy. Then I came to the realization that everything I was doing for school and work, I never wanted to do in the first place. It was a tough moment in my life because I didn't know what my passion was, until I started going to the gym.

At the beginning, I only started going to the gym to work on my general health and making sure I was still being active because my worst fear at the time was to gain weight. Gaining weight in the aspect of knowing I have a very bad blood line of health conditions.

So I dedicated myself to go consistently to build discipline overtime. Fast forward 2 years later, I decided to try out powerlifting. Now I had no idea what powerlifting was to be honest, but I thought the idea of being strong equated to being jacked. So I was definitely committed.

After competing in my very first powerlifting competition in 2018, I fell in love with the sport and developed a sincere passion to keep getting better. At that moment, I was hooked. Now being 26, I have now dedicated over 6 years to the sport and to this day, I still continue to compete at the highest level possible.

Borderline Barbell was created right around covid, maybe the year of 2021 to be exact, not sure about the month though. In the grand scheme of things, we started as a powerlifting club, that at the time, we had over 30 people apart of the crew. Which eventually all kind of fell a part and it was only like myself and 3-4 OG's that stayed.

The Imperial Valley isn't like your typical county like Los Angeles or San Diego where everything is accessible. You have different cultures, different sports, different everything. Down here, we all kind of do the same repetitive thing whether if it's fitness or lifestyle. So keeping that in mind, powerlifting did not exist before or even when our club had a good amount of supporters.

It's definitely doing better now than it was like 2 years ago for sure but by putting the wrong people into the wrong positions, it kind of tainted the sport where now it went back into full circle of not being a thing again in the Imperial Valley. So as we we're still pushing the message of powerlifting, I started to focus on other aspects on how to develop a community to help get the goal of our very own training facility.

Fast forward again, that's when I started to stay up countless hours every night and build my craft of learning how to use software for graphic design. Every single day, I kept watching youtube videos, practicing on the software, watch more youtube videos as if I was in a class. The thing though, even when I was tired, I was actually happy because everytime I got better and dedicated all my time too the process, it was for my true passion. Borderline Barbell.