Tonight I noticed a new fitness company in Vancouver promoting a boot camp program that they’re planning to launch this spring. As I was reading through the info about their boot camp, I laughed when I read the following:

What to Expect: This is not a typical boot camp that consists of excessive running…

Activities: On any given day, our boot camp includes a variety of activities from running…

Funny that they claim there’s no excessive running at their boot camp, and then give running top priority in their list of activities you’ll do at their boot camp.

For the record, there is precisely zero running at my Vancouver boot camp program.

Kettlebells are a pretty popular piece of exercise equipment, and people often ask me about them, or more specifically why I never talk about them in any of the nearly 200 fitness videos I’ve got on my YouTube channel.

The answer is simple, I don’t like kettlebells. Don’t get me wrong, they’re unquestionably an awesome piece of exercise equipment that’s sure to produce fantastic results for anyone who uses them, but I personally hate using them.

I did a “Kettlebell 101″ workout back in the summer of 2008 because I was interested in learning more about kettlebells in order to see if I could introduce them into the workouts I run for my clients in Vancouver. It was an intense workout where we ran through many of the most common kettlebell exercises. Despite the workout clearly being incredibly effective, I found the workout (i.e. exercising with kettlebells) to be a miserable experience and not something I would remotely enjoy doing again, much less on a regular basis.

I believe that exercise should be fun, and since I didn’t remotely enjoy exercising with kettlebells, I don’t exercise with them. I use exercise tools that I do enjoy, such as resistance bands and the suspension gym.

But don’t avoid kettlebells just because I don’t like them. Maybe you’ll love them. So if you’re interested in exercising with kettlebells, I encourage you to try a kettlebell workout and then decide for yourself whether exercising with kettlebells something you enjoy and want to do on a regular basis.

Prior to starting my own Vancouver personal training company, I worked for several other personal training companies in Vancouver. The negative experiences I had working for those other companies was one of the driving forces behind me starting my own Vancouver personal training business.

One negative experience in particular stands out as important towards pushing me to start my own business, and shaping that business into what it has become today. The negative experience I speak of involved working for a personal training company in downtown Vancouver. The guy running the company and overseeing the team of trainers was without a doubt the most boring fitness professional I’ve ever met. He was a miserable person to be around, and his training style was “all business”. No smiles, no jokes, no fun.

Working out must be an enjoyable experience. If you don’t have fun with your workouts, and look forward to exercising, you’ll never get results.

When I started my own Vancouver personal training company, the goal has always been to make exercise fun. I go out of my way to make sure my clients enjoy and look forward to all of their workouts. By making exercise fun, your workout consistency will be higher, you will push yourself harder, and higher consistency plus increased intensity equals better and faster results.

“High-intensity interval training is twice as effective as normal exercise,” said Jan Helgerud, an exercise expert at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. “This is like finding a new pill that works twice as well. … We should immediately throw out the old way of exercising.”

Today on my other blog I posted 5 Reasons Never To Go To The Gym Again.

Let’s face it. Chances are, you hate exercising at the gym as much as I do. The good news is that you don’t need to go to the gym to get in great shape. As a matter of fact, chances are you’ll get better results if you avoid the gym entirely. Here are 5 reasons never to go to the gym again.

I received the following question today via my YouTube channel:

Do you have or can you make female specific videos?

My answer:

Practically all of my videos are made for both males and females. 99% of my customers in Vancouver are female. Contrary to popular belief, women shouldn’t exercise any differently than men. Whether your goals are fat-burning (as is the case with 99% of my customers in Vancouver), or muscle-building, the workouts are the same for men and women.

Subscribe to my YouTube channel to get updated when new videos are posted.

Great blog post by Craig Ballantyne titled 7 Reasons Never To Do Crunches Again.

I just spent two and half hours reading through all your ab questions from last week and I must say I’m shocked…

…I didn’t realize how many people were still using crunches to try and get a flat stomach and six pack abs.

Unfortunately, I have bad news…doing crunches is NOT going to get you the results you want.

(Although you knew this already, of course, as so many of you also wrote in with frustration that the crunches were not working.)

So I’m going to prove today what you already knew, and that’s how you NEVER need to do crunches again…here are the 7 reasons:

Prior to launching my Vancouver boot camp program in the spring of ’08, I wasn’t certain that I was going to call the program a “boot camp”. I strongly considered calling it group personal training because the vast majority of Vancouver boot camps are very low quality aerobic workouts with overcrowded classes and unqualified instructors, and I didn’t want to call my outdoor exercise program something that would group me in with those other embarrassingly low quality workout programs.

But I decided to call my outdoor exercise program Mode Boot Camp, and the rest is history. The boot camp program quickly grew to become one of the most popular outdoor exercise programs in Vancouver, overtaking most of the low quality aerobic boot camps that had been putting a stain on the fitness industry in Vancouver for 4 or 5 years.

The moral of the story is that not all Vancouver boot camps are equal. Do your research before joining a boot camp in Vancouver, as you’ll find that programs vary in many important ways, such as:

Other Vancouver Boot Camps

• make you bring useless little hand weights
• lots of pointless and ineffective jogging
• unbelievably useless “core” days spent doing crunches for an hour
• 5-day per week workout programs
• overcrowded classes of 30 or more people
• unqualified and uninterested instructors
• zero satisfaction guarantee

Mode Boot Camp Vancouver

• we provide all of the equipment
• zero pointless jogging
• zero useless ab crunches or “core” days
• just total-body fat-burning core-strengthening circuit training
• better results in 2 or 3 workouts per week (not 5)
• small class sizes of 15 people or less
• instructors are fully certified and experienced personal trainers
• 100% unconditional money-back satisfaction guarantee

Visit our Vancouver boot camp website for more info about our outdoor boot camp program.