Blog
Linda Smoot
“I am a person with a family history of back pain. My father, mother, and sister all had back surgery; some repeatedly. My brother also has problems, but has had no surgery. As a teacher, I stood on my feet a lot and began to have serious problems with my back. In 2003, I began a regimen of massages every two weeks. Though this helped, I continued to have pain. about 4 1/2 years ago, my masseuse recommended Exercise Inc. What a recommendation that was! I have continued these exercises every week since, though have recently gone to every 2 weeks. The relief is amazing. I rarely have back pain and if I do, I know the next weeks exercise will give me relief. I would recommend Exercise Inc to anyone!”
Posted in Ivy Emerick
“My husband and I started working out at Exercise Inc after we learned that it only took a commitment of 20 minutes per week and that we could work out in our business attire. It didn’t take long before I realized that my metabolism was working better than it had in several years. I also have firmed up and my waist is smaller.
During the previous two years I had been diagnosed with osteopenia after two sequential bone density exams showed declining bone mineral density numbers. After working with Exercise Inc, my most recent bone density test results came back as normal!
I have enjoyed the information provided regarding nutrition as well. I have made several dietary changes as a result that are helping me be in better control of my weight and I feel, generally, more energetic. Exercise Inc has brought about significant beneficial changes to my overall health and fitness.”
Exercise Inc Update
Well it’s been a few months since our last newsletter. We’ve been really busy, but that’s no excuse for not keeping everyone informed about what’s been happening at Exercise Inc.
So far, 2011 has been the best year we’ve ever had. We are changing the lives of more people than ever before. Thanks to you, our clients, telling your friends about us, our business has increased 20% over last year (what recession?). Our Zionsville store is almost at capacity, training more than 250 personal training sessions a week. Our Avon store has seen a record high as well this year, and our Brownsburg store as usual is “turnin and burnin,” as you know who would say.
In June, we hosted an incredible seminar here in Indianapolis for personal trainers from all over the country to learn about slow movement, high intensity strength training. It was an opportunity for us to sharpen our skills as trainers and to network with other trainers from all over the country who do what we do. It’s amazing to me that the methods we use are so effective, but there really are only a hand full of training studios who use those methods. I guess that means we’ll have to open more Exercise Inc’s.
The two most informative speakers at the seminar were Dr. Doug McGuff and Mark Sisson. Dr. McGuff wrote a great book a couple of years ago called Body By Science which explains scientifically, from a doctor’s point of view why 20 minutes a week is all anyone needs to exercise. Mark Sisson is a former professional endurance athlete who wrote Primal Blueprint, which is a plan for living the way our paleolithic ancestors did in order to promote maximum health and longevity.
It was amazing to hear these two very eloquent speakers explain from a medical and anthropological perspective that to achieve maximum health our exercise needs to be less frequent and more intense (i.e. 20 minutes a week) and we need to stop eating sugars and grains. Both Doug and Mark recommended a we stick to eating only meat, vegetables, fruits and nuts. It’s that simple. The problem is our western diet is so screwed up, that you really have to hunt and gather (or forage, as Mark puts it) to find real food. Once you understand that corn and beans aren’t vegetables, 80% of the items in the modern grocery store become disqualified as viable foods for sustaining health. That’s really scary when you consider the amount of corn and beans we grow in Indiana.
If you would like to see Doug or Mark’s presentation, DVDs from our seminar are on sale for $20. They are well worth the money and time to hear good scientific evidence supporting the type of diet we have been encouraging you to eat.
As a final comment I would like to congratulate Sid Morris, the manager of our Zionsville store for winning our Go-Getter contest in June.
Because Sid generated the most referrals, and he did it in the most creative manner, he won $200 and an iPad 2. Congratulations Sid!
Personal Fitness Coach: Amanda Gatlin LIVE on Fox59!
Amanda Gatlin, Personal Fitness Coach at Exercise Inc in Brownsburg, was featured by Fox 59 on August 8, 2011. Amanda has been with Exercise Inc since 2008 and has devoted her life to being a wonderful mom and helping others to improve their health and fitness. After attending the 2011 Indy HIT Seminar, Amanda made it her goal to raise her family more healthy by incorporating the paleo lifestyle into their dietary and lifestyle habits. She created her blog, www.gatwings.blogspot.com to highlight this transition and help others realize that you can live a paleo lifestyle with children.
In this video Angela Ganote, who is a client at Exercise Inc, interviews Amanda on tips for mommies as they prepare children to go back to school. We hope you enjoy the video. For more information on being a paleo mom, contact Amanda at amanda@exerciseinc.com.
Brent Emerick
“Perhaps the most important 20 minutes I spend each week is at Exercise Inc! Being able to complete a full workout during lunch or a short afternoon break from work is very convenient. A full workout without sweat means no need to change clothes…workout in business clothes! I have noticed the back pain from computer/desk work is helped very much and the increased energy during afternoons is significant. This program has really made a big difference in how good I feel.”
Karen Polk
I started working out at Exercise Inc in June of 2010 with David. I’d previously gained weight about a year and a half before from some medical stuff and hadn’t been able to lose it on my own with traditional workouts (lots of cardio and strength training) and diet. I had heard commercials for Exercise Inc on the radio and it definitely caught my attention. So after checking out their website and realizing I did need to try something new, I finally decided to go in for a consult and check it out.
After the first workout with David, I definitely liked the entire concept and decided to at least give it a go for 12 weeks to see what happened. My initial weight loss goals was to lose 50lbs (which to me was a crazy goal- I didn’t think I’d lose that much weight).
So each week I worked out and logged my food so I could get tips on my diet. David was great about pointing out what foods to cut out like cereal which I used to eat all the time, and which foods should be kept in my diet. The workouts also freed up a lot of my time because it takes so little time out of your week. You’re in and out in 20 minutes, and then have a week to relax and recover. No more going to the gym almost every day for over an hour and sweating my butt off.
Over the next 7 months I gradually lost about 55lbs, and I am still losing weight. I’ve also gone done about 6-7 pant sizes. Recently I’ve gotten so many compliments from people I know too, and have several co-workers interested in the program. It’s definitely made me feel a lot better about myself. I am still keeping track of my food each week because it helps me to stay on track until I get to my ultimate goal weight. Exercise Inc’s program is so efficient that it would be crazy to change anything.
Submitted by: Karen Polk, February 2011
The “Why” About Our Habits
Gary Taubes is a scientist and a journalist who has spent much of his career writing about “bad science.” In 2002, he gained national prominence by publishing an article in the New York Times, “What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” This article challenged the validity of low-fat diets and defended the Atkins diet against the medical establishment. The article put Gary on the map. It also made him the recipient of a lot of hate mail. If you have time click on the link and read it.
In 2007, Taubes published his book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. This book discusses the history of dieting and the bad science that led our government and our medical community to believe dietary fat causes heart disease and obesity. In Good Calories, Bad Calories, Taubes very eloquently makes the case that refined carbohydrates – sugar and flour – are responsible for heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, and many other of the diseases of civilization.
Good Calories, Bad Calories changed the way I think about nutrition, and as most of you can tell, it changed the way we do things at Exercise Inc. We used to recommend our clients eat 5 servings of “healthy whole grains a day.” In fact, I have a very good hand-out I wrote about why I thought eating whole grains was so important. If you still have that article anywhere, just throw it away – I was only following conventional wisdom – the-world-is-flat kind of thinking. Gary’s book, along with Primal Blueprint, by Mark Sisson, and the DVD Fathead, by Tom Naughton, totally changed the way we think about carbohydrates and fat at Exercise Inc.
As good as Good Calories, Bad Calories is, I have only recommended this book to a few people. So what’s wrong with it you might ask; well, it’s 640 pages long and it’s not an easy read. There were parts that I had to read 3 times to fully understand. A book this big will eat into your Dancing with the Stars time.
For a while, medical and fitness professionals who follow Gary’s work have asked him to write a shorter, more consumer friendly version of Good Calories, Bad Calories. That’s exactly what he did with his new book Why We Get Fat: and What to Do About It.
This book is only 200 pages long, and it’s an easy read. This book is what I’ve been waiting for as a Fitness Professional. We now have a great, easy to read book that will help you (our clients) understand why we make the recommendations we do. Some of Gary’s basic theses in this book are:
• The calories-in/calories out model is wrong.
• Carbohydrates are the cause of obesity.
• A low-fat diet is not healthy.
• A low-carb diet is essential for good health.
• Carbohydrates are important causes of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and most of the diseases of civilization.
When you read this book understand that it’s not a “how-to” book, it’s a “why” book. Our Healthy Habits, which have helped hundreds of clients lose fat and keep it off long term, is the “how-to.” This is the best book I can recommend to help you understand why our nutrition program works. It’s also very motivational.
Soreness
A recurring theme in some of the questions I have been getting lately has been soreness and the level of soreness you should be experiencing
with your workouts. Beginners tend to be worried that they aren’t sore enough, intermediate clients are having trouble comprehending being
sore in some strange places (who would have thought we had muscles there?!) and advanced clients are confused about why there seems to be
no apparent rhyme or reason to the presence of soreness. I will confess that even I have long been prone to employing soreness as a gauge of how well a workout had gone. There were certain workouts that would induce soreness so severly that I was barely able to lift my arms, then there were times when I felt absolutely nothing except a little fatigue the day or two after a workout. So I went in search of an answer, and I now have one for all of you. Straight from Dr. Doug McGuff himself, here is how we should really think about soreness in relation to muscular growth:
“Sometimes you will have significant soreness after a workout and sometimes you won’t. It should be pointed out that if you are sore after a workout, this doesn’t mean that growth has taken place after the soreness goes away. It simply means that you are no longer sore nor that you’re ready to train again. Most often you will find soreness occurring in movements occurring over a bony prominence. For instance, it’s not uncommon for a trainee to experience soreness the day after a workout in which the Leg Press had been performed. In such instances, the trainee will experience soreness in the buttock muscles heavily involved, but also the buttocks are contracting while actively being pulled taut over the protuberance of the ischial tuberosity [a fancy way of saying "your butt muscles are being stretched over a sharp part of the hip"]… In other words, the soreness that is prodcued after a workout doesn’t necessarily have a correlation with anything. The truth is that soreness is not a valid measure of anything but soreness. You could make your biceps sore simply by working them over with a ball-peen hammer, but that would’nt necessarily correlate with anything productive having been stimulated. We understand that a degree of soreness can make you feel like you’ve been worked and that something has happened and, consequently, can be a positive workout experience for a lot of people- but please do not take it to be the only measure of a workout’s effectiveness because there is no data to correlate that notion at all. The only way you can determine if yo’ve made progress is whether or not your workout chart
indicates that you are stronger.”
So there you have it. Soreness is essentially meaningless unless you are simply trying to be sore. As the article says though, if that’s the case, head to the garage and beat your muscles into a pulp with a hammer. That would pretty much guarantee soreness (as a legal aside, please no one actually do this. I can’t really afford any lawsuits).
I sincerely hope that clarified a couple things. I think the biggest concern voiced lately has been by the new folks who were put through some pretty rough paces and then awoke the next day with little to no soreness in their body.
Submitted by: Alex Kissinger (Personal Fitness Coach)
Why Do We Work You So Hard?
If you’ve been a client at Exercise Inc for more than 6 months, you probably have a love/hate relationship with our program. In fact you may have canceled or missed a workout just because you didn’t feel up to being pushed really hard that day.
Our workout is really hard for a reason. Exercise isn’t supposed to be fun. In fact, at Exercise Inc we intentionally take the fun out, leaving nothing but 20 minutes of good hard work.
But let’s consider what you get for only 20 minutes of your time. You increase strength and endurance and you build a lot of muscle. All three of these benefits are pretty much one in the same.
As a result of building stronger muscles you also build stronger bones, tendons and ligaments, which helps prevent injury.
Another benefit of our 20 minute workout is an improved cardiovascular system. The most efficient way to improve the cardiovascular system is to find the best way to strengthen the muscular system. The vascular system exists to service working muscles, so stronger muscles will require your body to create a more efficient vascular system.
Also 20 minutes of gut wrenching exercise at Exercise Inc will increase your metabolism. The more muscles you have, the more calories you burn. Everyone knows that, but there is another calorie burning benefit to our workout that most people don’t realize. It takes a lot of calories to recover from and build stronger muscles as a result of our workout.
There is another big benefit you receive as a result of working so hard for 20 minutes a week – you get your life back. Because we only want you to exercise for 20 minutes, you have 167 hours and 40 minutes of your week left to live your life. That means more time for your kids, your spouse, your friends and all the other things you enjoy doing.
If you like to golf, you can get better at it because you’re not spending 5 hours a week in the gym. If you enjoy gardening, you have more time to grow vegetables. You even get more time for work . . . it that’s your thing.
So, next time you’re thinking about canceling your appointment. Think about everything you get from just 20 minutes a week.
Healthy Habit Reformation
The business that we all know and love as Exercise Inc actually started in 1993 as Railey Personal Training. I changed to name to Exercise Inc in 2004 because I wanted the business to have a team approach, focused around everyone and not just my name.
In the 17 years we have been in business we have always gotten great results for our clients, but in the last 5 years those results have been better than I ever imagined. What is more amazing is how our approach has changed.
I used to require clients to strength train 3 times a week and do “cardio” for minimum of 30 minutes at least five times a week.
I have always tried to make our program better, which is what got us to our current exercise program of 20 minutes once a week.
I used to ask our weight loss clients to keep a journal in which they recorded everything they ate and counted every calorie and every gram of fat. No one wanted to count calories, so that approach didn’t work.
It took me long time to understand that we needed to get people to change their habits. Since we introduced our Healthy Habits program 3 years ago our fat loss success has increased dramatically.
We are still constantly trying to improve our program, and because of that you may have noticed your coach is starting to give you some different advice about nutrition. We are gaining a better understanding of some very important aspects of nutrition.
We want to pass this new information on to you. There is really fun video on YouTube that I would like all of our clients to watch to gain a better understanding of where we are going with our Healthy Habits.
Click Here to check out the video!
