Sweat Inequity and the Evolution of Group Fitness - by Lucinda LaRee

As Co-Owner of City Fitness Gym, Cleveland Park’s neighborhood gym, I take issue with the statement “Gyms suggest a lack of structure, intensity and discipline” in the article Sweat Equity in the December 3, 2015 Style section.

Workouts should have structure – the right variety of fitness classes, personal trainers, and tailored workouts provide that in a gym setting. Workouts should provide intensity – and that means different things to different participants, some want to feel the burn and scream, others find pain to be long-lasting and negative. Workouts do need discipline to be effective – trainers provide that for some; group fitness classes bring a social accountability to others.

The Council of the District of Columbia gave us a Resolution as the Longest-Standing Woman owned Fitness business in the District.  We have been in the fitness business for 33 years. We have survived all the fitness trends and continue in our commitment to improve the health and fitness of the community. We did not accomplish this longevity by promoting an elitist attitude, unrealistic physical appearance or a cult like atmosphere with short-term “Killer Workouts” that promise quick results and end in long-term overuse injury from unbalanced programming. Maybe our unique position of being a neighborhood “boutique” gym allows us to offer more attention and promotes adherence.

The article suggests that the Type-A personality is new to DC and that what they seek more stress and pressure. Type-A’s have been here from the beginning. Some thrive off of more stress, but many crave a haven from the storm. When 9-11 occurred, when the Wall Street collapse occurred, when other large stressors have affected our community, our attendance has gone up. What activities were busier? Yoga, group strength, and other mind-body modalities. People did not seek torture, they wanted nurturing and peace. We have many members, Type-A’s and not, who have been exercising in our friendly community for 25-30 years who could not have made it to their Silver years healthy and strong if they focused only on High-Intensity Training Trends.

Don’t get me started on some of the statements or words in this article that I found offensive: HURTS LIKE HELL.  HURTS SO GOOD.  POUNDING.  BODY-NUMBING. HATE IT OR HATE IT YOGA.  MISERABLE.  INSTURMENTS OF TORTURE.   S & M.   FIRE. SCREAMING, FIENDS, BLACK OUT, OBSESSION. These words belong in the article below RUN, HIDE, FIGHT. AND GET USED TO IT, about 355 mass shootings this year in the United States. This is an interesting juxtaposing of articles to say the least. This attitude is not a recipe for longevity but a set up for exercise burnout.

There is nothing new under the sun. What many of these programs have done is to rename and amp up already existing exercise practices. You can take Pilates and yoga, combine them (which has been done for decades) and “Power” market them with a new name…and they are still Pilates and yoga, but not necessarily safer or better. Add a celebrity smile to your marketing and suddenly you have a sensation. Kudos to their marketing teams, but one wonders if their safety guidelines and teacher training can properly keep up with the demand.

An interesting article to write might be the evolution of group exercise and what it does for people. In my 52 years, I have been in a Sports Illustrated workout video, I brought Ashtanga Yoga into the DC gym market, I have taught step, strength, slide, hi/lo, circuit classes, interval training, Pilates and now pole dancing. I get the need for variety and challenge the mind and the body. Our gym offers a huge variety of classes and types of trainers to provide that variety and structure to our clientele. We encourage everyone to work on all fitness components – cardio-respiratory, body composition, muscular strength, endurance, and flexibility. We also encourage balance – physical and mental. I personally use the Medicine Wheel as a guide for wholeness and wellness and we use these same principles to guide our members.

I end this with words that I feel would benefit the Type-A, work-obsessed people of this city and world at large:

BALANCED

GROUNDED

EMPOWERED

STRONG

FLEXIBLE

ENERGITIC

HAPPY

GRACEFUL

CONNECTED

PEACEFUL

How we journey there may be the most interesting story of all.

Lucinda LaRee

Co-Owner City Fitness Gym

Small Business – The Roots of a Community, by Lucinda LaRee

I come from working class roots, as does my business partner, Dega.  I grew up at the base of a 13,688-foot Mt. Tom in the Eastern High Sierra.  My father worked for Union Carbide, The Mine in the Sky.   One of the most productive tungsten mines during WW2.  We lived in a little mining village called Rovana.  At the heart of the community was the gymnasium and in close second, the baseball field.  It was here we gathered as a community to watch our father’s train with old leather boxing gloves and medicine balls and our fathers and our mothers play ball. It was here boys and girls alike learned to play basketball, volleyball, baseball, softball, football, as well as cheerleading and gymnastics.  It was here we gathered for the Halloween Carnival and the company Christmas party to sit on Santa’s Lap and Vacation Bible camp.  Because I grew up in a close-knit community that valued exercise and sports it was a natural fit for me, coming of age during the fitness boom to dream up a future in fitness.  I just wanted to continue running, dancing and “cheering” people on!

This past summer I visited Rovana on my way into the backcountry for a backpacking trip.  The mine closed over 20 years ago and the village has found itself populated with a different community. Since its back yard consists of some of the best rock climbing and mountain climbing in the world, you can find mountain and rock climbers from all over the world.  I was heart broken when I saw the little gym had been torn down. 

The fitness business has changed so much over the past 31 years (the lifetime of our business). The industry started out primarily as small independently owned fitness studios, offering aerobics “Jane Fonda” style and gyms for weight training, in the style of bodybuilding like Arnold Swartzneger.   The studio trend is making a comeback in the yoga and specialty class world although their fiscal wellness is being compromised by the name brand/elite celebrity sponsored fitness trend businesses like Soul Cycle and Balanced Core. 

The health and fitness business has grown into large, corporate, impersonal box gyms that are doing their best to not only gobble up the market share of memberships and personal training, but are now going after the yoga and specialty market too.  These gyms focus on quantity of membership over quality of member service.

  

We are “The Little Gym That Could.”   Our roots go deep.  We got our start as a business offering fitness at the work site, grew into a fitness studio and then a neighborhood gym.

We have keep our doors open despite the competition because we focus on the people first.  We believe in paying a living wage and want to help our employees grow their fitness careers and be successful. We believe in our members and we want to see them in the gym, working out and getting stronger. We believe in relationships.  In a world that promotes isolation and individualism we go against the grain.    We have purposefully resisted some of the tech trends like TVs everywhere in the gym, and key cards to check members in by sliding their card through a scanner.  We check everyone in by their name, we want to get to know you and we want to create a community where people can come and feel welcome and make friends. 

This can’t happen if everyone is into himself or herself and their own technology just tuned out with their headphones or watching TV or IPADS.  We hope to continue to be a place neighbors want to gather and motivate each other to stay strong mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually.  Many studies show that friendship makes people happier and happy people live longer!

But the truth is that staying vibrant in this business means keeping up with the trends, staying innovative in training methods and fitness class offerings as well as equipment.  We have been doing business in Cleveland Park for 21 years and our business needs a facelift.   We are grateful recipients of the Great Streets Grant and this has allowed us to make some much needed faculty upgrades from our locker room renovations, to new very expensive HVAC units.  Not so glamorous but necessary.  Now we need working capital to upgrade our weight equipment and other facility needs.

To do this, we have become a part of this DC Crowd Funding Challenge. This is an exciting fundraising program allowing staff, members and friends of City Fitness Gym to give us that little extra financial help to reach our goals as we continue to go the extra mile to help them reach theirs. Check out our Crowdfunding website and please consider being a part of maintaining our special community. http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-little-gym-that-could

Join City Fitness' Crowdfunding Project!

Click to See Our Indiegogo Crowdfunding Project!

Just like many of you, City Fitness has goals for the New Year. To expand on our 2014 renovations, the next round of the Great Streets Grant will help us with some further modernization and equipment upgrades. But we want to do more…a lot more. 

City Fitness is a small business founded in 1983 with the simple beginning of providing on-site fitness instructors to places of business. Considered cutting edge at the time, work site fitness is now considered a mainstay and we have persevered. We provide fitness classes to the US Supreme Court, National Gallery of Art, World Bank, the Holocaust Museum, and the National Zoo to this day.

Our gym has been serving the fitness needs of the Cleveland Park community in Washington, DC for over 21 years. We have awesome long-term members, some of who have been with us since we opened, and this stability and co-support has created a thriving community where we serve people of all ages and abilities. We are a home-away-from-home where members feel safe, connected and welcome.  We maintain a quality member service mindset in an era where customer service has diminished, priding ourselves on providing personal attention.  City Fitness is the "Cheers" of Fitness because, unlike other gyms, we actually “know your name.”


Being small in a world of big box facilities, a woman-owned gym in a male-dominated field, and a friendly, neighborhood business in an ever- growing isolated world, we face the challenge of staying competitive. We have invested in our physical space constantly through the years with new equipment, new floors, painting, updating our accessories, and improving our customer service and staff education. In 2014, we began a major capital improvement campaign: with assistance from the Great Streets Grant we partially refurbished our locker rooms and replaced our aged fitness floor A/V equipment. In 2015, we are poised to finish the locker room upgrades, replace our HVAC system, upgrade our cardiovascular machines and more. The Great Streets Grant will help us with some of this, but we want to do so much more.


Our budget does not allow for the upgrades to our weight room equipment and other parts of our A/V systems. There are 4 weight room pieces that could be more user-friendly - especially for our more mature members while, at the same time, still serving our elite athletes.  Our televisions are very old and are difficult to see on some cardio machines. Our campaign to raise $10,000.00 will allow us to begin the effort of replacing these items. Help us achieve this goal while still allowing us to optimally service the diverse demographics that our gym proudly attracts. If we don't reach our goal, we will purchase as many pieces of equipment as we can with the money we raise. So, no amount is too small to help and every bit of it will help with working capital toward our upgrades.


We are very happy to provide wonderful perks from the local neighborhood businesses of Cleveland Park as well as from our own staff. As a “Thank You” for your contribution, we are offering discounted personal training packages, massage specials, and much more. Or, give the gift of fitness with a discounted membership! City Fitness Gym is proud to continue to be your neighborhood gym. Lift Locally, Think Globally.

Thank you,
Dega and Lucinda

Real Women Deadlift at City Fitness Gym - Just Ask Heide Herrmann!

I stand five foot three inches tall on a good day.  I am a 40-year-old woman who wears pink shirts and pigtails to the gym.  At first glance you might think I’m the kind of person who spends most of her workout time on the elliptical, with maybe a few triceps dips thrown in because someone told me that’s how you get "Michelle Obama arms."  You might assume that the weight room is foreign territory for me.  But you would be wrong.

So far, my heaviest deadlift is 230 lbs. I squat 185 lbs. for reps.  When I lift, I wear a heavy-duty belt around my waist and straps around my wrists.  Both are pink.  I’ve been an attorney for fifteen years, and I’m very proud of what I do for a living.  But I’ve never been more proud of anything than I am of the work I’m doing in the gym.  There is no rush like setting a new personal record, and then looking up to see that all the guys in the weight room were watching when I did it.  There is no better feeling than the soreness that comes from working my muscles to failure and then letting them rebuild themselves, bigger and stronger than before. 

And no, I am not “bulking up.”  That’s a myth that keeps countless women away from strength training, which is unfortunate, because we need it.  Over the last two years I’ve lost just over 50 lbs. I’ve gone down five dress sizes. I was curvy before and I always will be.  But they’re better curves now, trust me.

My newfound love of weightlifting began when I met Phil, my personal trainer at City Fitness.  I would never and could never push myself the way Phil pushes me.  I used to get frustrated when I had eked out what I thought was the last rep I could possibly manage, just to hear Phil tell me “only five more.”  Now I might laugh, or I might curse him under my breath, but I keep going, because I know he’s right – if Phil says I can do five more, I can do five more.  I’ve come to trust him implicitly, and he has convinced me that I am capable of performing feats I once thought impossible. 

So I’m going to stick with this.  This is not like the piano lessons when I was eight, the scarf I started knitting when I was ten and still haven’t finished, or the book I always say I’m going to write.  I already know I will never stop lifting.  It makes me happier, healthier, and more energetic than I’ve ever been, and now I can never go back.

Making Sense of Fitness - by City Fitness, Washington, DC. Cleveland Park's neighborhood gym!

Each week we are bombarded with infomercials, new studies, and hyped up trends in exercise.   The conflicting messages (often accompanying a sales pitch) convolute a simple idea- that anyone can improve their fitness through effort and a little knowledge.  This column will provide a starting point to beginning a sensible exercise program, and later examine some of the trends, studies and options we hear so much about.

In order to get a grasp of what we need to do, lets look at what makes up the “fitness” we seek.  At City Fitness, we believe a complete fitness program must include emphasis on the following four areas: cardiovascular capacity, strength training, flexibility and nutrition.   Working towards change in these four areas will bring about positive changes in a host of health markers, from bodyfat % to triglyceride levels, bone density to basic ability to run, lift, hike or play.   Ignoring any of these components will dramatically lessen the overall benefit, as there is a synergy to a well-rounded program.

Cardiovascular exercise (“cardio”) is simply working to elevate and maintain the heart rate, creating an increased demand for oxygen.   The benefits of cardio are well documented, including heart health, controlling blood pressure, and increased lung capacity.  This is also what most people consider “calorie burning”, although strength training plays a crucial role in that as well.  Typically exercises such as running, biking or cardio machines come to mind, although circuit training, swimming, jumping rope and a number of other options can provide excellent cardiovascular training.

Strength training is crucial in maintaining and increasing the ability to perform day-to-day tasks, as well as promoting bone density and boosting the metabolism.   In active athletic populations, muscle acts to protect the joints in vigorous activity.   In older people, strength training is crucial in promoting bone density, as well as maintaining functional ability.   Muscle mass protects bones in the event of a fall, and plays a large role in the bodies ability to recover from chronic illness.

Building muscle is also responsible for the aesthetic changes that are often sought.  Definition or “tone” are achieved through a combination of muscle building and leanness.   Muscle is also metabolically active tissue, therefore helping raise the metabolism and promotes calorie burning.    In order to be effective, strength training should progressively introduce heavier weights and more challenging movements.   That is; the body adapts when it is challenged, and needs constant stimulus to continually progress.

Our third pillar is flexibility.   Often people confuse the need for basic range of motion and joint mobility with advanced yoga poses bordering on contortionism.  In reality, basic flexibility allows us to move with ease, protects against injury, and makes us feel better.   As fitness professionals, we see a strong correlation between time spent sitting at a desk and back pain in our clients.   Students and even children are more sedentary than ever, and the lack of activity directly affects the ability to move comfortably.   Rather than face a lifetime of limited activity, discomfort and possible need for surgery, spend fifteen minutes a day working on flexibility.

Finally, we come to the often most confusing aspect of fitness: nutrition.  Fad diets come and go, doctors change their minds, and the public is left scratching their heads.   We get told (and sold) so many different things, its no wonder many people have no plan when it comes to nutrition.   In fact, there are some ground rules for nutrition that are relatively simple, and a few changes can make a profound effect.  

Nutrition should be based around real, unprocessed foods.   Each meal should have a balance of lean protein, carbohydrates and fat, and should leave you satisfied but not overly full.  Carbs should come from colorful vegetables, and starch should be kept to a minimum.  Replacing breads, pasta, rice or potatoes with a more nutritious choice can have a dramatic effect.   Fat is also an essential part of a healthy diet, but should come from specific sources, not fried foods or additives.  Unsaturated fats, especially those higher in Omega 3 fatty acids are preferable.   Examples include flax seeds, walnuts and coldwater fish (salmon, halibut and sardines).

Three basic skills are vital to empower you to reap the health and fitness benefits of good nutrition.   First is the ability to read labels and understand what to look for, and what to avoid.   The drawback is, most people are shocked to realize how much sugar, saturated fat, and sodium are added to seemingly healthy choices.  Understanding this is essential in taking charge of what you ingest.   Inevitably, this will steer you away from processed and fast foods.  

The second skill is learning to prepare your own healthy meals and plan ahead.   To do this is to take responsibility for your nutrition, remove excuses and set yourself up for success.   Basic meal planning for the week ahead allows you to shop accordingly   Not every meal has to be planned ahead of course, but often the more forethought, the better the results.   This also helps to avoid making bad last minute choices.   Coming home tired from a stressful day at work without a healthy option is one of the major pitfalls to avoid.

Now that we have an idea of how to choose food, and plan it out, we come to portion control.   The final piece of the puzzle is often a challenge in a society where over-consumption is not just rampant, but culturally accepted.   Once we understand how much food we actually need, it’s easy to see how common overeating is.  A good meal should leave you satisfied, but comfortable and not “stuffed”.   It takes a while to realize that the feeling of “not hungry” is different than full.

Hopefully this provides a reasonable starting point for those interested in taking charge of their fitness.  The four components we’ve discussed (cardio, strength, flexibility and nutrition) all play an important role in overall well being.

At City Fitness, we believe that even a basic approach to exercise and nutrition can have profound benefits, and encourage everyone to make this a part of their life.  Sometimes the amount of information on fitness can be overwhelming, but like most things, its best to start simple. 

The Ladder Pushup Workout featured in Washingtonian

http://www.washingtonian.com/blogs/wellbeing/fit-check/the-ladder-pushup-workout.php#more

Read this article submitted by City Fitness Gym General Manager, Tom Brose, in the Washingtonian Well+Being E-Magazine.

Congratulations to City Fitness' Washingtonian Top Trainers - Tom Brose & Elie Cossa

City Fitness gym is proud to have two of our Master Trainers, Tom Brose and Elie Cossa, both featured in the current Washingtonian as Top Personal Trainers in Washington, DC. Check out the current issue!!