This Unusual Virginia Business Offers Shooting and Yoga

Recently, I drove to a somewhat lonely stretch of parkway in exurban Loudoun County, where I parked among a sea of military and pro-gun bumper stickers. I entered a Walmart-size building and met up with Jason Brown, the cofounder of XCAL Shooting Sports and Fitness. He led me past fancy gym equipment and through a cigar lounge, which would later be the site of a podcast event hosted by a defense-tech CEO. We stopped to talk by a gun safe emblazoned with the words united we stand and a caseful of assault weapons.

Shooting ranges aren’t unusual in our area, but XCAL is something odder: a $30 million, 95,000-square-foot combination gun hub and wellness center. It offers yoga, spa services, and other activities more associated with lifestyles of the urban and progressive. Under one huge roof, you can get a CBD massage with scented candles, sip bourbon in a leather chair, or shoot a belt-fed machine gun in a soundproof chamber. XCAL has about 10,000 members, Brown says.

Brown is an avid shooter, but he says his goal is to reach fitness enthusiasts who haven’t shot before. XCAL, he hopes, makes firearms less intimidating for people who come for other activities. “They realize, ‘This isn’t what I imagined the gun community looks like,’ ” Brown says. He came up with the idea when he was working as a luxury-car technician and wealthy clients who knew he was into guns would ask where to go for a high-end shooting experience. He knew only “stereotypical industrial-park-type, tough-guy ranges,” he says, and they’d be disappointed.

At XCAL, “there’s no politics,” Brown insists. “It’s all about fun.” The concept certainly seems like it could appeal to MAHA types. But Brown wants to avoid seeming partisan. “As a person, I like it,” he says of MAHA culture. “As a business, we won’t touch anything that puts us on a side.”

Well, maybe. XCAL’s offerings do sometimes lean rightward, as with events led by conservative commentator Shermichael Singleton and ex-Marine John Keys. At one such gathering this summer, weapons producers showed off their wares, and prizes like silencers and scopes were raffled off. Keys told the crowd that “there’s something about this event that really disarms people—but not in the way that we don’t want to be disarmed.”

This article appears in the October 2025 issue of Washingtonian.

Ike Allen

Assistant Editor