To the general public, strength training is probably associated with body builders, bulking up, or maybe Olympic lifters. Recently, and largely thanks to Crossfit, the general public have heard and listened to the message that the optimal way to get lean and stay lean is to perform weight training. It is great to see less people associating resistance training with body builders and more with the type of results they were always promised by our industry.
Clients are becoming more inclined towards strength training, metabolic conditioning, kettle-bell training, complexes, and other forms of resistance exercise and are reducing the emphasis on steady state cardio workouts such as long jogs and cycling. This, we feel, is a good thing.
We believe that properly designed weight training can, over time, create more significant physical transformations and health improvements than any other form of exercise that we know of.
This training model can be extremely effective but requires more skill, more equipment, more space, and more patience. Train right, train consistently, and train regularly and your achievements would be beyond your best expectations. At Ninth Wave we are driven by that vision for all of our clients.
Don’t expect to see your commercial gyms throwing out treadmills or large group classes any time soon though – their business models couldn’t survive if their clients all performed the type of exercise that really was best for them.
To give you an idea why I believe this to be true: a commercial gym I worked at had approximately 8000 members but only 2000 actively using the facility. This means 3 out of 4 clients were actually subsidizing those people that did turn up. What would happen if every client actually used the gyms 2-3 times per week?
The same gym had 2 squat racks to cater for those members – I can only estimate that maybe only 200 of those members actually used the racks. At Ninth Wave – we have 3 racks, more than 95% of our clients come at least twice per week, and most of them will at some point be in the rack with a bar on their back or in their hands!
When training for fat loss or fitness we typically want to induce some level of metabolic stress and, in an article for Fox News, Nick Tumminello notes that is exactly what can be achieved with metabolic conditioning. Designing, coaching, executing, and progressing these routines is difficult – which is probably why so many people are stuck spinning their wheels on a stationary bike.
At Ninth Wave we believe that clients will be at their fittest, strongest, and at their most healthy after regular weight training. It isn’t a quick fix, it requires patience and a lot of hard work from a good coach and even more from the client. It is fine to take your time and build up slowly and safely – you have your body for the rest of your life and getting it back into optimal shape is the only ‘marathon’ we are interested in.