With access to over 1200 personal clients over the last 8 years, here is a quick summary of the road map that most people work through. (based on the initial assessment chats that we have had)

See if any of this resonates with you:

1. You joined a commercial gym like Anytime Fitness or Fitness First and replicate what someone else is doing. (generally a friend or the best looking person in the gym)
2. You feel good for a few weeks/months but then run into a plateau because you don’t fully know what you’re doing. 
3. You hire a PT from that gym, but they are often under-qualified and overpriced because they have huge overheads to hit each week. They do ok, but you don’t feel there is enough value to justify the $120+ / week on a single session. 
4. You lose faith in personal trainers and decide to try again on your own to save money
5. That gets stale and you decide to try a large group HIIT training gym because it looks fun. 
6. It works for the first 3 months. You feel fitter, you’ve leaned out. Great success. 
7. Then the gains begin to slow down and no matter how hard you flog yourself in the sessions, the results plateau and your body is starting to feel sorer and sorer each session. 
8. You don’t want to stop flogging yourself because you don’t want to lose your gains, but you know if you keep going, you’re going to get injured.
   

You’re now at a frustrating crossroad where you don’t know whether you should stick with the high-intensity stuff to maintain the results you got, or revert back to the cheaper commercial gym side, knowing that you won’t maintain the intensity to see any real results. 

This is the journey we hear all too often because most people don’t know any different. We all get fed the same stories from big marketing companies and magazines that make it hard for us to think differently. 

Your options have you torn between cheap and convenient vs powerful hype videos that look fun and exciting.
Most of us don’t have the time or knowledge to research the difference between each gym and take the gym on face or marketing value. 

So, before you continue to lose faith in the fitness industry and give up on your dream body, here is how you can make some quick assessments and decisions as to whether or not the next gym is going to live up to your needs and provide value for money.

The gym should follow these 3 principles of delivering value. 

1. Results: they should be able to get you a result in all 3 of these categories
   – Body composition and physique transformations. (help you drop body fat whilst developing lean muscle tissue to become a healthier version of yourself)
   – Performance: help you develop strength and fitness across the 10 physiological adaptions so you become a well rounded and physically prepared person 
   – Pain-free movement: they should have the knowledge and skills to help you get stronger through a large range of motion, at different intensities so that you can become and then stay pain-free for years of limitless movement
   
   They should help you realise that to get long term sustainable results, you need a broad range of volumes and intensities across a variety of adaptions so that you don’t flog yourself into exhaustion or plateau.

    

2. Relationships: They should provide a great environment for success. They should know your name, know your story and foster a community of like-minded individuals that make it impossible to fail.

    

3. Experience: they should create a world-class training experience that combines knowledge, experience and all the 1% in between so that you can get the results you came for and enjoy the experience at the same time.
   
   These 3 principles should help shape your next fitness decision and help you judge the next gym you think about joining.
   
   Make sure you do your research and don’t get sucked into hype videos of people training super hard all the time. There is much more to fitness and health than HIIT training for 45 minutes a day. 

Find a gym that helps you learn the fundamental movement patterns with perfect form and then slowly manipulates the training variables to ensure you see constant and linear progress. 

If you aren’t able to make it to one of our gyms but would love to see how we program, you can get a FREE 7-day trial to our online programming app + nutrition resources by clicking HERE.