NEW YEAR, NEW YOU
How to shape up? Try group training or climbing
As the music swells in the early notes of Bruno Mars’ “24K Magic,” 20 men and women in sweats and spandex are in a small South Side gym, poised with fire in their eyes, ready to attack the weights and machines in front of them. The song hits an early crescendo, Adam Cross yells “GO!” and they’re off: a flurry of legs pumping and arms flailing. Within 15 minutes, that collective glint has given way to a bunch of thousand-yard stares as they fight through to the halfway point of a workout at 3 Minute Fitness.
To be exact, it’s a 39-minute program of Mr. Cross’s creation: 10 three-minute bursts at stations that mix strength, endurance and resistance training, employing everything from kettlebells and medicine balls to motorless treadmills and exercise bikes, with one minute breaks in between. It’s high intensity interval training — known as HIIT — and it’s done in a group setting, thereby combining the American College of Sports Medicine’s top two fitness trends for 2018.
This is often the day the New Year’s resolution rubber hits the road of reality, and Mr. Cross and his business partner Derrick Carson are bullish on the program they’ve honed. In two years, they’ve opened three locations — their first in Moon, a second in February on the South Side and a third just a few weeks ago in Bridgeville.
“We’ve been telling people, keep eating your cookies. We’ll be here for you today,” he laughed.
The 39-year-old Beaver County native sold medical devices for 15 years and was simply an armchair fitness buff. Despite an educational background in biology, psychology and math, he’d never formally studied kinesiology. But he ultimately spent a full two years researching his answer to a simple question: “How can we do fitness better?”
“Every big box gym in America today is flooded with people standing around like deer in headlights, wondering what do I do?,” he explained. “And they don’t necessarily want a personal trainer with a clipboard following them around. And then maybe a month later they just stop going.”
He said that if group HIIT training were a continuum, of the two most ubiquitous models CrossFit, which employs powerlifting, would be on one end and Orangetheory Fitness, which requires longer treadmill runs, would be on the other. Although he credits both for their innovation and influence, he said he’s positioned 3 Minute Fitness to be “right in the middle” with an
even, alternating balance of strength and endurance exercises and combinations that never repeat.
As he tinkered through the trial and error phase of developing the program, Mr. Cross knew he was on to something when he had strangers coming up to him asking just what exactly it was he was doing — and if they could join him. A few years later, he and Mr. Carson have found a winning formula and hope to begin franchising the concept this year. A month’s membership is $99 for unlimited classes.
A new gym using an older fitness concept can be found at Elevate Fusion Fitness, which will open next week on Butler Street in Lawrenceville.
Elevate offers 30-minute high intensity group classes on VersaClimber machines, which are akin to a full-body StairMaster.
Studio co-owner Abbey Renfrew said she’d initially intended on opening a Spinning studio but found that market to be saturated. Trainer Jordan Rose instead turned her on to the VersaClimber, which has been around since 1981 but is seeing a recent revival in fitness circles.
“It’s like a Spin class, but what’s different about the machine is that it’s a fullbody workout the entire time,” Mr. Rose said. “You move like you’re climbing and engaging your core and posterior.”
Classes are $22 with various membership packages available, and it’s the only gym in the city dedicated solely to this method.
From simulated climbing to actual climbing, ASCEND on the South Side opened in March, offering a wide range of bouldering-centric programming in Pittsburgh’s largest indoor climbing facility. Co-owner Paul Guarino said they like to trick newcomers into having a workout.
“We try to do a good job to make the first or second visit fun and meaningful, and so they’re yearning to come back for more,” Mr. Guarino said. “Climbing is one of those sports where it appeals to the person who isn’t necessarily fitness forward. But it’s a fun activity with friends or individually, and you get a good workout without realizing it.”
It caters to elite climbers to first-timers and kids.
“Climbing appears to be a strong, skinny person’s sport, but I assure you it’s not,” he said of his own introduction to climbing. “People say, they can’t do it because they have no upper-body strength. I had none either until I found this in my 20s. I was never into sports, and this was the thing that made me say, ‘I kind of like working out all of a sudden.’ ”
Rope and bouldering climbing classes are available, and the center also offers an array of various styles of yoga classes. Prices vary.
Finally, on different ends of the do-it-yourself fitness spectrum you can go high or low tech and be effective, provided the motivation is there.
Just ask Laura Phillips. The Lawrenceville attorney purchased a Peloton stationary bike (retail: $1,995) with a display that streams live Spinning classes she can do at home. She has gone from rarely exercising to a zealot for the product and routine, which she does three to four times a week and has lost more than 50 pounds.
She quipped that if her house were on fire, she might be inclined to rescue the bike before her husband.
Then there’s simple, free things like climbing the Cathedral of Learning stairs: 36 floors starting on Staircase A and an elevator ride back down, although your hamstrings may hate you by the end. Or try simply walking around the exterior of a landmark such as Heinz Field, which is roughly a mile in circumference.
Those kinds of activities inform the basis of Melanie Robb’s creative fitness challenges with friends.
Mrs. Robb, 40, of the South Side Slopes, has enlisted 25 friends and family members to do a “mile a day” challenge in 2018.
The idea is that each person who commits will walk, bike, run or swim at least 1 mile every day for 100 days — in or outdoors.
“I just wanted to move my a— in this horrible weather,” she laughed.
“Everybody when they have a fitness goal, they’ve got to have a reason and a motivation. Some people join a gym, and that’s their motivation. They’re paying for it. I go to a rec center and it’s $5 a month, so my motivation are my friends and family,” she said.
This past summer, she created a pushup challenge for friends after reading Jesse Itzler’s book, “Living with a Seal: 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet,” about living and training with a Navy Seal. The idea was to do pushups every day for 100 days — at least one the first day, two the second, three the third and so forth. She also had a pragmatic reason: “It was summer, and I wanted my arms to look good.”
She got 36 friends and family members to sign up. Only nine made it all the way through, and she had Tshirts made up for those who finished, mailing them from Connecticut to Beaver County.
“[Fitness] doesn’t have to cost anything,” she said. “You just have to like to be out of your comfort zone.”