Max Life Fitness and CrossFit Primal: Two of the Best Places to Workout in Waukee

It was a prize-fight like no other in our first .

Waukee Patch readers voted and two winners have been chosen.

and in Waukee will share the award for Best Place to Workout in Waukee. Folks at Max Life Fitness logged more than 1,400 votes while CrossFit Primal dominated our comments section with dozens of positive comments about the gym.

Melissa Grandon, co-owner of Max Life Fitness, said they were blown away by the amount of support from their gym family.

"I think it's awesome just knowing that we have such a strong community of people that we've had such a positive impact on," said Grandon. "It's cool knowing that people are so passionate about what we do and they're sharing that information with others."

Max Life Fitness, opened almost two years in Waukee. Grandon says the gym focuses on all-around wellness not only by working on fitness but also nutrition.

"We train people that the change has to come from within and we do that by developing a strong inner belief system that helps them make those lifestyle changes," she said.

Grandon said Max Life Fitness caters to everyone from teenagers to seniors and to people at every fitness level.The gym is open six days a week with 10 different class times during the weekdays and three different class times on Saturday.

CrossFit Primal, right next door to Max Life Fitness, takes more of a military approach to fitness. With workouts that are more intense, more focused and far more challenging than something most people can do on their own, CrossFit touts "strength, endurance, stamina, agility, balance, speed, power, flexibility, coordination and accuracy" in its program.

"Crossfit is different in that we have a workout of the day for every time slot and every person does the same thing depending on skill level," said CrossFit Primal co-owner Jeremy Yoder. "It's 15 to 25 minutes of hard work with no rest. When most people are done, they're sucking wind...it takes some time to recover. It's not like when you're at the gym and you're taking little breaks in-between. When that clock starts, you just go to work."

Yoder said he and co-owners Ryan Arguello and Brian Maro weren't surprised to learn that they shared the title of Best Place to Workout with Max Life Fitness. They were proud to share the spotlight.

"We were really excited about it," Yoder said. "No matter what happened or how things turned out, we were just excited to have all of our members putting it all out there for other people."