After my recent post on how agility ladders are pointless for fat loss, I wasn’t thinking I’d be doing a follow-up post on the same topic so quickly, but Thursday night I heard a story that I can’t resist sharing with you.
If you read my post on agility ladders, I commented on how I recently saw a Vancouver boot camp program doing agility ladder drills with their overweight customers. This is a boot camp that markets itself as a fat-burning exercise program. The idea of having overweight people do agility ladder drills to burn fat is ridiculous.
Anyway, I ranted about it the other night when I wrote that blog post. It felt good getting it off my chest and I figured this was a topic I probably wouldn’t complain about again for a while. Wrong.
So last Thursday night when I arrived at my evening boot camp, one of my customers said she noticed the other Vancouver boot camp program doing agility drills with their customers, and she saw a women have a pretty nasty fall while trying to navigate through a set of agility cones and hurdles the boot camp had setup. This goofy fat-burning agility training workout was taking place on concrete.
I cringe whenever see average men and women doing agility training during a workout designed to produce fat-burning and general fitness. There is absolutely no reason to include those types of drills in a boot camp workout program geared towards burning fat and improved fitness. With average people doing agility training at a fitness boot camp, the risk of injury is high, and agility training is completely pointless for fat loss.
Besides the ineffective jogging and countless useless abdominal crunches, the thing I find most irritating about other Vancouver boot camps is when they use the agility ladder.
I saw a Vancouver boot camp program using the agility ladder with their customers the other night and it made me sad for all the customers that signed up for the program thinking they were going to burn fat and get in shape, only to have their time and effort flushed down the toilet on a drill that has absolutely no place in a fat-burning exercise program.
The problem with the agility ladder is that unless you’ve got the speed and agility of professional athlete, there’s no way you can navigate through the ladder intensely enough to actually produce any significant fat-burning results. You might as well just play hopscotch with your kid because you’ll be getting about the same amount of cardiovascular workout and fat-burning from playing hopscotch as you would from doing agility ladder drills.
Agility ladders should be used by athletes looking to — wait for it — improve their agility. If you’re looking to burn maximum fat with the most time-efficient workouts possible, avoid the agility ladder at all costs.
We used my GTX Suspension Gym prototype at my Vancouver boot camp program this morning and it worked great. The dual-anchor GTX provides a more comfortable exercise experience than the single-anchor TRX (which we’ve been using at my boot camp for a while now), and the feedback from my customers about the GTX was extremely positive.
Visit my Facebook page for pictures of the GTX in action.
Visit our Facebook page for more boot camp photos, and visit our Vancouver boot camp website for more info about our outdoor boot camp program.
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.
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.
Mode Athletics does more than just run cutting-edge Vancouver boot camp programs.
We have a popular YouTube channel with over 150 videos about how to exercise at home or anywhere with minimal equipment.
Last week I started uploading some home exercise demonstration clips from a DVD (for Mode Workouts) I filmed with Victoria Plant. Here’s a sample:
Subscribe to my YouTube channel to get updated when new videos are posted.
Our next round of Vancouver boot camps start on Monday March 1st. Mode Boot Camp Vancouver is an outdoor fat-burning workout program that’s unlike any other boot camp or group exercise program in Vancouver. At our boot camp, you don’t have to bring any of your own equipment (we provide the equipment for you), you only need to workout 2 or 3 days per week (and you’ll see better results than at any 5-day per week boot camp in Vancouver), you’ll be among a small group of 15 people or less, you’ll never do any pointless and ineffective jogging or abdominal crunches, and our boot camp is 100% unconditionally guaranteed.
Visit our Vancouver boot camp website for more info about our outdoor boot camp program.
If you’ve ever participated in my Vancouver boot camp program, you’ve no doubt heard me talk about the importance of developing a habit of regular exercise. Only after you get into a habit of exercising regularly does it become automatic.
Studies have shown that it takes at least three weeks exercising regular before it starts to become routine. So if you haven’t been exercising regularly, and you’re just beginning your new exercise program, you need to be extra diligent in your first few weeks and ensure that you don’t miss any workouts.
In the initial stages of a new workout program, it’s sometimes very difficult to drag yourself to your workouts. If you’re used to waking up at 7AM, it will be quite challenging during the first few weeks of a schedule change where you set your alarm an hour early two or three days per week so you can exercise prior to going to work. But after a few weeks, this new schedule starts to become routine, and it becomes very easy, almost automatic, to stick to your new schedule. The longer to follow the new schedule, the easier it is to stick to it.
So if you’re starting a new exercise program, and making changes to your schedule to accommodate two or three weekly workouts, try to be extra diligent in sticking to the program and being consistent during the first few weeks. After you get over the initial period of change, you’ll find that your new schedule is very simple to follow, and becomes almost automatic.
If you’re interested in beginning a new exercise program, Mode Athletics run cutting-edge outdoor boot camp workouts for clients in downtown Vancouver, BC.
I posted an article on Squidoo today about the top 5 benefits of fitness a boot camps in Vancouver.
If you’re bored with traditional gym workouts, or have never liked going to the gym, then check out the top 5 benefits of taking your workout outdoors and joining a fitness boot camp in Vancouver.
