Finding a New Gym in the New Year

I have to admit that writing this blog has not come easily. When I was based in Boston, I wrote all the time. Between magazine’s, web sites, newsletters and the like, it was essentially a weekly endeavor. It was easy then. Whatever topic was rattling around in my brain had a ready outlet. It’s been several years since I’ve written on a regular basis though and I’ve found it very difficult to narrow things down this time around.

I guess we should start with what I do. I own a gym, Alpha Fitness, right on Main St. in East Greenwich. I know some of you New Year’s Resolvers are rolling your eyes already but before you click back over to the EG police log to see if your neighbor’s kid got busted for hosting a house party on New Year’s Eve, hear me out. There are a lot of you out there who will join a new gym this month, most of you will get a great deal. $10 or $20 a month, free spin classes, 2 free personal training sessions. Maybe even a couple complimentary smoothies to jump start your weight loss journey. Ugh.

If you think cheap, free, short term or liquid calories are going to help you in any meaningful way just stop reading now and go back to your Wii Fit or your latest DVD obsession, I can’t help you. If you already follow 17 different fitness experts on FaceBook and have figured out the best diet and exercise combination from cross referencing each of them in an Excel spreadsheet, likewise- godspeed to you. I’m the wrong guy to talk to. If you’re looking for a little bit more than that though, maybe I can help. 

So now you’re waiting for my angle, right? My big sales pitch? Well sure, I think my gym is better than all the rest. If I didn’t, I’d steal what someone else was doing and try to do it better! My staff is as well trained and certified as any training staff in the state though, and I think we do what we do better than the other guys. This blog isn’t about a sales pitch for my gym though, so that’s as far as I’ll go (ok, I’ll go a little farther and tell you to check out our FaceBook page and add us to your spreadsheet data: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alpha-Fitness/207634585996437). 

This blog, for today anyway, is about helping you choose a gym that will get you to a better place. This time of year is a windfall for the big box gyms, people will flock to them. They will stroll through the door with the confidence of the righteous, plop down their credit card and sign away a small portion of their soul. All the while a little voice inside them is screaming to run away, but they won’t listen. They know that fully 75% of people who join a gym in January will stop going before the end of March, and 90% will weigh the same or more this time next year. You will be different though, you will be the exception! Except you probably won’t. You’ll probably be like everyone else. Why? Well, chances are you will lack consistency in your workouts and your eating. There will be a lot of reasons for that. Your motivation may get lost in the daily grind of life. You might get hurt. You might get bored. You might get frustrated by a lack of progress. Whatever the reason, you won’t be consistent so you won’t get great results, and if you don’t get results why keep banging your head against the wall? I know some of you will find a diet and stick to it like glue for a few months and lose 20-30 pounds, it will be mostly muscle and water, not fat- fat doesn’t shed that quickly. Who cares though, the scale is going down, you’re smaller, everyone is happy! We all know how that story ends though. And begins. And ends. Over and over. 

So what’s the solution? Every great coach knows that to get the most out of your players, you need to put them in a position to use their strengths and succeed. You need to find a gym that is going to put you in a position to be consistent so you can succeed. Whether you’re looking for weight loss. fat loss, muscle gain, improved movement and flexibility or sports performance- you need to find a gym that will motivate you, educate you, train you and keep you healthy. The good news is you have lots of choices these days. So let’s take a look at how to find the gym that’s right for you.

First let me cop to the fact that as a small gym owner I don’t think you’re going to find what you’re looking for in the big box gyms. They will tell you differently but you don’t have to look too hard to see that very few people are successful at reaching their goals working out in gyms that have corporate headquarters.  I’ll save the details of why I think that’s the case for another day, but even the slickest salesperson can’t change the facts. Big gym = Little results. So what else is there? Gyms like mine are typically referred to as micro gyms and most offer a variety of services and specialties, the tricky part is finding the right one for you. First off, beware of gyms that do everything. No one trainer can be all things to all people. Look for gyms that either have a varied staff of highly educated and certified trainers, or a staff that is REALLY good at exactly what you are looking for. Look for experience. I know some great young trainers and employ a few of them as well, but if the person running the show trains people as a hobby (as in they have a full time job that is NOT as a trainer) or has been training for only a couple of years ,you are rolling the dice. A master’s degree in kinesiology is not a necessity, but some formal education involving anatomy and physiology ought to be a given. It’s not, but it ought to be.

I have written and re-written this section on nutrition at least a half dozen times. It is a murky, dark, swamp of a topic that I can’t possibly do justice to in a paragraph. Suffice it to say that for most of you this is the lynch pin of your success and your new gym must excel in nutritional knowledge and support. It must be an integral part of the program. No cookie cutter, one size fits all afterthought is going to get it done for you and anyone who tells you otherwise is not to be trusted. I promise to dive into the deep end of the pool on this in the near future but for now let’s just leave it there before someone gets hurt…

The next thing on your list is programming. Most micro gyms focus on small group training. Programming for groups long term is not easy and it’s not quick. I do all of the programming in my gym and I can tell you that it is the single most time consuming part of my job. Oh I get the allure of “randomized” training for general physical preparedness, I was a convert for a couple years myself. There was a problem though, my clients weren’t getting great results. The cold hard truth is that most exercise requires some level of skill and to improve you need to practice that skill. If you do an exercise 10 times in one month you will develop a certain degree of skill. Do it 10 times in one year and you are re learning that skill each time. If you are going to go the route of small group training you must find a gym that programs with a purpose beyond making you sweat profusely. If sweating equaled weight loss every overweight yuppie in a button down shirt strolling down Main St. in July would be shedding pounds. 

Hand in hand with qualified trainers and effective programming is injury prevention. If consistency is your goal you must stay injury free. The number one criticism of small group training is under qualified trainers demanding too much intensity from clients who are not ready for it. Believe it or not, most injuries in the gym don’t come from accidents or even terrible form. They mostly come from people with poor movement patterns that break down under repeated stress. If your car is out of alignment you don’t need to crash it to do damage, just drive it really fast for a long time and watch what happens. The problem isn’t the intensity of the workout, or how heavy the weight is, the problem is you don’t move really well just yet and you need to fix that before you go for a spin around the track at top speed. Movement screens are essential for new clients and if you’re looking at a gym and they don’t have a screening system for basic movement patterns just move on (as a frame of reference, this is a link to the movement screen we employ at Alpha Fitness: http://www.functionalmovement.com ). 

So now our bottom line- Consistency is your greatest attribute. A mediocre program done consistently will yield excellent results, an outstanding program done sporadically will yield none. The final piece in your search for a new gym must be the people. Will they motivate and encourage you? Is this a place you WANT to show up to several times a week? We actually turn some people away (not many!) at Alpha simply because we know it’s a bad fit for them. You need to want to be there. I said earlier in this blog that I wasn’t making a sales pitch and that’s true. I never make sales pitches. Our clients make them for me all the time, but if I have to sell you on my gym it’s not a good fit for you. Do a little research (I said “a little” spreadsheet boy!), decide what you’re looking for. When you do, the right choice will be obvious.  The only way to be the exception is to be exceptional, or consistently surround yourself by those that are. 

Next week: the soul-sucking black hole that passes for nutrition in this day and age (unless someone requests a different topic to save me from myself…)

-Dan Crawley

http://www.AlphaFitness.biz