FAQ
You don’t have to be fit to train with us — you train with us to get fit! Our gym is totally suitable for complete beginners — our three levels of progression mean that a professional athlete and someone exercising for the first time can both do the same session, and each will get a challenging workout.
We’ve read the research and 30 minutes is absolutely enough. Thanks to something called Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption (a.k.a. the ‘Afterburn Effect’), which can set you up to continue burning calories for up to 48 hours after your workout, meaning that the length of the workout is less important than the type of workout in terms of calories burned.
If you want to benefit from the afterburn effect, you have to ask just a little more from your body than it can handle that day. While that's almost the definition of 'tough' (and it has to be if you want to see results), a session isn’t an exercise in torture. There's certainly no boot camp-style sergeant major screaming at you to push out another rep. What we mean by tough is that you'll be glad to see the back of the last set of exercises, and you're gonna be very sweaty and out of breath at the end. But rest assured, it’ll not only be over quickly, it’ll be manageable and safe, regardless of your fitness level.
Will training at your gym help me lose weight?
The kind of training that we do at our gym is fantastic for fat loss because it enables you to keep burning calories long after your session is done. However, you shouldn't regard training at our gym as some sort of magic pill that will guarantee you'll get skinny. While most of our clients do lose body fat and gain lean, dense, efficient muscle, the results you get depend on a host of factors such as training frequency, training intensity, nutrition, sleep and stress. If you can combine training regularly at our gym with a fairly clean diet and a decent amount of sleep, you're certainly going to get in great shape.
No, and unless you're training fairly infrequently or show up to every session in optimum condition, nor should you. In general, if you're a beginner, you should usually begin with moderate-intensity sessions that focus on technique and developing a strong base of high-quality movements with full range of motion. This doesn't mean that you won't see results at the start - by focusing on technique, you'll have to push yourself hard enough to start seeing results despite not training at maximal intensity.
Even when you've been training at our gym for a long time, you shouldn't necessarily push to the max every single time. Our coaches are there to help you vary your training in accordance with how you're feeling when you come to the gym. If you've turned up hungover and on no sleep, it's probably not the day to go all out. However, more moderate ("tempo") sessions still have great benefits: they help you get stronger, improve your aerobic capacity (strengthening your lungs and heart) and improve your technique, while still causing a metabolic (fat-burning) effect due to the amount of muscular activation.
While the latest fancy machines or complex movements might seem like they hold the key to getting in shape, if you're training for general health and fitness, you really don't need to be able to perform specialized movements like muscle-ups or olympic lifts. Not only do they take a tremendous amount of time to learn safely, movements like these can put a lot of stress on your joints and ligaments, and, in our opinion, carry an unnecessarily high risk of injury.
We stick to free weights and bodyweight movements because doing so is time-efficient and helps you build strength in a way that respects the way your body is designed to move. In other words, we train the body as a machine, not with machines; we train movements, not muscles.
Never! Amongst other things, the sessions vary daily in terms of the work-to-rest ratios, the order in which exercises are performed, and the overall intensity required, which means your body is always kept guessing and your progress never stagnates. Importantly, we don't just randomly throw a bunch of exercises on the boards each morning - our proprietary algorithm ensures that over time you get as close to a perfectly balanced training stimulus as possible, regardless of how often you come to the gym.
We don't pay attention to the number of calories burned in a workout because it's an outdated and broken way of looking at exercise and nutrition for general health. Not only will calories consumed affect everyone differently, the number of calories burned by people doing identical workouts will vary for each person, every time, depending on a huge range of factors such as sleep and lifestyle habits, stress and nutrition.
Regardless of this, the way we see it the number of calories burned during a session at our gym is arbitrary: the number doesn't matter, even if we could know for sure what it is. That's because when you train the way we train here, you get an 'afterburn' effect whereby your body keeps burning calories for a long time after exercise.
This is a tricky question and really depends on your fitness level and ability to commit. Generally, 4 times per week is a good place to start, with a rest day in between each training day, and you can make adjustments from there depending on how you feel. You'll realize that as your body adapts and gets stronger, you can also recover faster, meaning you can increase your training frequency if you so desire. If you want to train every day, that's fine, but we recommend that you talk to a coach about how to personalize this by varying the intensity, so you don't over-train.
This is a tricky question and really depends on your fitness level and ability to commit. Generally, 4 times per week is a good place to start, with a rest day in between each training day, and you can make adjustments from there depending on how you feel. You'll realize that as your body adapts and gets stronger, you can also recover faster, meaning you can increase your training frequency if you so desire. If you want to train every day, that's fine, but we recommend that you talk to a coach about how to personalize this by varying the intensity, so you don't over-train.
While a lot of our clients do see aesthetic improvements pretty quickly, we're not in the business of offering quick-fix solutions, and aesthetic improvements are only one portion of the complex equation. We don't want you to get too hung up on the number you see on your scales every morning, which can fluctuate for all sorts of reasons. Just try to do a little bit better every time you come for a session. Focus on the journey, not the destination.
To gain lots of muscle mass, you need to train in a very specific way, and you have to lift a lot of weight. If you train consistently at our gym , you'll get in extremely good shape, but we're not training you to be a strength athlete or bodybuilder. Combining resistance training with the cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory demands of HIIT will make you efficient, strong, durable and lean, but it won't leave you looking like The Hulk - you'll probably end up closer to the athleticism of a kickboxer. However, if you are interested in bulking up certain muscle groups, our coaches can help you do that – just ask!