get moving
Gyms are nice but do you need one? With a little bit of knowledge and creativity, almost anything can become a gym. In other words, you can "gym it."
I spent the first 12 years of my career training folks in large commercial gyms, and they always seemed weird to me (the gyms, not the folks). The industrial lighting, the machines and treadmills, the vanity-focused marketing (“Look better for summer!”), etc. It all seemed to reinforce the sterile, competitive, modern office culture we allegedly go to gyms to escape from. I didn’t like to train myself there. How did they feel?
What's more, the exercises I was having people do required none of this. If a client was dead set on "getting big" we could of course use barbells and machines to do proper weightlifting/bodybuilding routines, but most of the time they just wanted to sweat, forget about work, and feel better. I felt strongly I could deliver this result to a higher degree if we actually left the gym.
Gradually I started sneaking clients outside to do the same workouts but under trees, near streams, in natural light. Oh, the potential lawsuits! But they loved it. Now, sure, when the weather wasn’t cooperating we’d stay inside but the workouts were the same. I rarely used machines or weights, hardly any equipment at all. In fact, I took great pleasure in using the building itself – guard rails, staircases, etc. – to construct workouts that were not just tough but FUN and CREATIVE. My background in parkour made it easy - EVERYTHING is training equipment to us! It led me to a simple conclusion: Gyms, strictly speaking, are unnecessary.
You can train anywhere.
Fast forward to today's post-pandemic world. People everywhere have been forced to (re)discover how movement and exercise can be trained outside of the gym setting. At MonkeyDo, our mission is to get our clients to view the whole world as a place to train and explore movement; to use whatever's around them to produce the same, if not higher, level of fitness they might at an indoor gym.
TRY A FREE VIRTUAL CLASS OR PRIVATE TRAINING SESSION to see just how much there is to do right there in your living room or back yard, and then take this knowledge out into the world. Or back to the gym. It's not like they're bad :)
For some ideas check out our Gym It! series, where I demonstrate full-body workouts using everyday objects, “gym”-ing them instead of self-sequestering inside another box:
-Seanobi
