INTIMIDATION FACTOR…
Strength training is more popular than it has ever been.
Go to any commercial gym in any city in the world, and you will find at least a few bumper plates and barbells.
And it's the main equipment you'll find in gyms like ours.....
However, many people find the concept of strength training intimidating.
It's actually one of the MAIN reasons I got into this industry; I saw the gender segregation in the gyms, the women would stick to the cardio machines, partly because the guys were crowding the weight room, but mainly because they didn't want to lift weights anyway.......
Because of that fear of getting injured, of getting 'bulky' from the "intimidating", heavy weights.
There is a ton of chatter out there about getting strong using only your bodyweight, no need for 'scary' weights.
Even in our functional fitness world, many gyms now offer non-barbell classes, some of them ironically calling it CrossFit-Lite....
I love gymnastics, I fully believe we don't do enough of it, or push ourselves far enough along the spectrum of mastery with it.
And despite earning the moniker of Robocop from my running style, I know that aerobic capacity is underdone too.
BUT, the real world doesn't care about relative (bodyweight) strength, absolute strength is key to accomplish most tasks.
The car tyre weighs what the car tyre weighs.
The struggling child weighs what they weigh.
The sofa weighs what it weighs.
The unconscious loved one in a crashed car weighs what they weigh.... (sorry, too morbid?)
But if you aren't strong enough to pick up what you need to pick up, it doesn't matter how many pushups and situps you can do..
Absolute strength can only be built with external load.
We love dumbbells and kettlebells and sandbags (and utilise them more than most gyms), but we still agree that the best way to create the greatest improvement in absolute strength is with a barbell.
Of course, when you're new to it, we discourage overly heavy weight in the beginning, for THIS reason.
A lot of time is spent learning how to exert high force in a safe technically efficient manner. People actually fall in love with the process of wringing 1% by !% more progression out of their movement.
And the funniest thing about lifting heavy weights, if you think about it, is that they are never actually TOO heavy.
Because then you can't lift them....
“The strongest intimidation, by the way, is the invention of a hereafter with a hell everlasting.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche,
Given that no one reading this is in the hereafter just yet, we could interpret this to mean, that lacking the basic physical capacity to thrive right now, in the real world, is hell everlasting as long as that life.