Wednesday, 01Feb12

• 5 burpees
• 10 kettlebell snatches 5/r-5/l or snatch pulls
• 15 mountain climbers ( two legs is 1 rep)
• 20 kettlebell swings

Wednesday, 18Jan12

 BODY  SLAMMER

Perform the following exercises for time:

25 Squats

25 NLP Push-ups

25 Renegade row (no push-up)

25 Sit-ups

50 Squats

50 NLP Push-ups

50 Renegade rows (no push-up)

50 Sit-ups

75 Squats

75 NLP Push-ups

75 Renegade rows (no push up)

75 Sit-ups

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Drink Less Water?

Question:

I always hear that I should be drinking eight glasses of water a day, but it takes a lot of unnatural effort to get close to that. Is it just me? What’s your take on the water rule?

Answer:

As you know by now, my job is to question Conventional Wisdom. One of the classic health paradigms I’ve always had a problem with is the blanket recommendation by the general health community that we all should be consuming copious amounts of water. It just doesn’t make sense to me and it never has. Face it, Grok did NOT walk around with a canteen or an Evian bottle affixed to his loincloth. He and the Grok family thought Nalgene was the name of the tribe across the valley and they never owned a sippy cup with which to gulp down mass quantities of H20. Day after day it was a drop here and a mouthful there – if a source of water other than a dewy leaf was even available. Since Grok and his cadre probably didn’t spend too much time hanging around the water hole. (All those predators you know…) 8 glasses of water a day is unlikely a physiological necessity, not to mention an evolutionarily relevant model. Grok obtained most of his water directly from the food he ate, and I believe that we probably should, too.

I don’t get thirsty very often. I rarely drink so much as a single glass of water during my normal daily routine. When I was a runner, and later as a triathlete, I would go out for long runs or rides without much water – if any at all. Sure I’d drink a bit to recover lost sweat when I returned home, but if I was riding for less than two hours, or unless it was unusually hot, I didn’t even put a water bottle on my bike. Even today when we take a break playing Ultimate Frisbee on hot Sunday afternoons, I have to force myself to drink sometimes when I might just as easily skip the water altogether. Meanwhile, I see people at the gym with 2-gallon bottles of Arrowhead, fully intent on polishing them off before dinner, thirsty or not. So, am I flaunting conventional wisdom at my own peril? Or am I just doing what comes naturally to a Primal being?

Years ago someone put forth the idea that we all needed to drink 8 glasses of water a day. Perhaps it came from a series of studies in the 1940s after which the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine opined that the “RDA” for water should be roughly 1 ml per calorie consumed. At their recommended 2000 calories a day, that worked out to 2 liters a day, or roughly 8 eight-ounce glasses. Lost in the translation somewhere was an important caveat that much – if not most – of the water we required could actually be obtained from the foods we eat. In other words, it simply was not necessary to actually drink 8 glasses a day. And since the recommended diet at the time included substantial portions of water-sopping grains, maybe that initial recommendation was too high for someone eschewing grains altogether. (On a related note people will tend to drink more if the beverage is flavored. And, guess, what: carbohydrates (particularly sweet tastes) encourage increased fluid intake. So, it’s useful to ask if the hankering is real thirst or a flavor related craving.)

Nevertheless, over the years, this hydration mandate has become burned into the health consciousness of most people. It appears that nearly every health guru (except yours truly) hammers on this point. Food doesn’t seem to count at all anymore. Eight means eight. And forget including coffee, tea, soft drinks or beer because Conventional Wisdom says that these are diuretics and therefore only increase your requirement for pure water. Of course, that’s wrong, because coffee, tea, soft drinks and alcoholic beverages do actually add to water intake rather than detract from it. Alcohol and caffeine only become significantly diuretic in very large and otherwise dangerous amounts. But I really wonder if all that extra water – however you take it in – is necessary or even healthy if you are already consuming lots of vegetables and other healthy Primal Blueprint food. The average person is said to obtain 20% of his/her water from foods throughout the day. If the bulk of your diet is vegetables and fruit, this percentage is assuredly higher.

Contrary to what your neighbor might advise you, there is no evidence that drinking eight or more glasses prevents constipation, kidney stones, bladder cancer, urinary tract infections or that it guarantees you’ll have clear skin and a toxic-free liver. Yet these are often cited as the main reasons to drink so much. And forget the so-called hyper-hydration properties of “clustered water,” “ionized super waters,” “penta-water” and the rest of the scam-waters, about which I have blogged in past posts. Water is water is water.

On the other hand, there are some possible health consequences of overdoing this hydration thing. Chronic over-consumption of water can cause the relative concentration of important electrolytes in the blood to drop, a condition called hyponatremia (Wikipedia), which in turn forces water out of the bloodstream and into cells, causing them to swell. Not a big deal for a muscle cell, but catastrophic when it’s a brain cell and there’s no extra space to expand into. Each year we read about people in endurance contests who sweat profusely, overcompensate by replacing the water but not the salts and wind up with cerebral edema. Last year a woman died in a radio-sponsored “water drinking contest,” drinking only about two gallons in a short period of time. Of course, those are extreme examples, but I do have several readers who have shared with me their intent on getting “100 ounces a day”, and I have to advise them to cut way back.

(The following contains my own personal hypotheses. I would love to see some research done in these areas. If anyone is aware of any please drop me a line.)

Conventional Wisdom suggests that drinking water with your meals is fine – even recommended. But I suspect that some heretofore undiagnosed digestive issues may arise when people drink significant amounts of water or other fluids with their meals. The digestive process starts with, and depends on, a very acidic environment in the stomach (a pH of 1 to 2 ideally). That highly acidic environment also controls the timing of when the stomach empties. When you drink lots of fluid at a meal, you are substantially diluting the stomach acid and diminishing its ability to effectively digest your food. I would guess that many cases of GERD, gas, stomach upset and other common complaints might be addressed simply by NOT drinking so much water throughout the day and refraining entirely from drinking while eating. (Except maybe a little wine, which, having a pH closer to stomach acid has been shown to aid in digestion) This might also explain why some proteins that only break down under optimum acid conditions pass into the intestines only partially digested and thus might be recognized by the immune system as “foreign invaders”, setting up some immune response that gets diagnosed as a food allergy.

Furthermore, unbeknownst to many people, the stomach is one of the first lines of defense in your immune system. Bacteria and yeast that are regularly consumed along with your food can be quickly and easily dispensed with in a very acidic stomach, preventing what might otherwise become a short term bout of food poisoning or a possible longer term GI tract infection. Dilute all your meals with water, however, and the pH rises enough to possibly allow those same bacteria to pass through to the intestines where all hell can break loose. Literally.

Even cold and flu viruses that permeate the air around us are generally rendered harmless when they reach a normally acidic stomach, (after being breathed in and drained with mucous into the stomach). Drinking a ton of water all day long just might disarm that security measure as well.

So how much water does a person need? I think this question exemplifies our tendency to over-think many aspects of our health and well-being. I’ve mentioned on a number of occasions that animals seem to get along just fine on their own instinct. Do we really think we evolved any differently? Thirst is a physiological instinct that is there for a reason. Still, the makers of this bogus rule also tell us that the thirst instinct comes “too late”: we’re already on our way to dehydration once we get to that point! This is where the paleo-perspective comes in handy. Has our “defective” thirst instinct been leading us wrong – for tens of millions of years? I think you know where I stand on this one. So if you actually feel thirsty, by all means have a drink. For anyone interested in a little history of the rule (and confirmation that thirst doesn’t signal dehydration), check this (PDF) out.

Our individual need for water depends on numerous factors. Activity level, body size, environment (humidity level and altitude, most significantly), quality of health, age, and pregnancy/breastfeeding impose the most legitimate variations. In general, we want to replace the fluids we lose in a day, and intensive activity (with its accompanying sweat) will increase the amount of fluid we need. (For prolonged, intensive exercise and/or significant water intake, it’s essential to balance salt/electrolytes with water.) The drier our climate, the more water we tend to lose, but unless you’re sitting out in the blazing sun for hours at a time, it doesn’t make a huge difference. Altitude, because of the body’s more laborious breathing, can increase our need. Those who are ill can require more, depending on their condition and any treatments they’re receiving. (People with kidney disease, kidney stones, a history of bladder cancer, or a tendency for urinary tract infections are usually advised to drink more.) Women who are pregnant or nursing definitely need to drink more. Finally, I mention age not because older men and women necessarily need more water. In fact, if they’re more sedentary, they probably need less. However, some research has shown that as we age our thirst instinct may not be quite as sharp as it used to be.

For most of us, however, we can safely rely on that brain stem of ours to tell us when it’s time to belly up to the drinking fountain.

One final word on water intake:

Bottled water is a joke. If you don’t trust your tap, get a simple Reverse Osmosis filtering system.

Read more: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/

Wednesday, 11Jan12

Four Round Power Circuit

30/25, 30/20, 25/20, 25/15 w/ 1 minute rest between

• TRX Body saws
• TRX Finishers
• Split squat jumps
• Hold to figure 8
• Push-ups
• DB 3 way punches
• KB Swings
• DB Thrusters

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Cold Water Therapy

You’re in the middle of a nice, hot shower, feeling your muscles relax, the day’s tension (or night’s sleepiness) melt away. As you bask in the quiet moment of repose, suddenly your body gets a startling jolt. After a second of disoriented shock, you realize something has happened to the hot water. Did someone start the washer? Is the water heater going berserk? Your hopes of relaxation now dashed, your stress level through the roof, you finish only the most obligatory rinsing and step out of the shower cursing, muttering and shivering as you reach for your towel.

But does a cold shower need to ruin the day? Can they actually be more than a nuisance, but a legitimate health therapy as some say? We thought we’d do some digging to explore the notion MDA reader Alex recently put forth: “The way Grok kept himself clean sure wasn’t with sustained periods of temperature controlled hot water. Maybe we shouldn’t either.” The results we found were very intriguing (and encouraging) indeed.

The underlying premise of cold water therapy is that briefly and somewhat regularly exposing the body to certain kinds of natural stresses (like cold water) can enhance health. Promoters of cold water therapy say that it can boost immune function, decrease inflammation and pain, and increase blood flow. Some argue that a shower setting is suitable, while others say some level of immersion is necessary for real benefit. What does the research say? Here’s what we found.

The benefits of cold water therapy appear to depend on the subject’s adaptation over time. In other words, regular polar dips seem to enhance long term health, but a single cold burst in the shower won’t offer much beyond a good wake-up jolt. The power of cold water therapy, it seems, is in the habituation itself.

In studies comparing regular winter swimmers with subjects not adapted to cold immersion, winter swimmers showed an ability “to survive a significantly greater temperature gradient between body and environment than non-cold-adapted subjects.” Their advantage over the non-adapted subjects was a modification of the “sensory functions of hypothalamic thermoregulatory centres to lower heat loss and produce less heat during cold exposure.” The researchers concluded that regular winter swimmers show “metabolic, hypothermic and insulative” kinds of adaptation to cold temperatures.

Cold showers, research shows, can help this habituation process, but only water at 10 degrees Celsius (as opposed to 15 degrees C) made a difference. Habituation also seems to be somewhat long-term. In a British study, subjects’ responses showed that habituation to cold water lasted 7-14 months as measured by respiration and heart rate.

Some of the specific benefits? A German study examined oxidative stress associated with ice-bathing in regular winter swimmers and found these swimmers showed an “adaptive response” through enhanced “antioxidative defense” as measured by several blood markers.

Other research highlighting cold water’s effect on immunity shows an increase in both the number and activity of peripheral cytotoxic T lymphocytes in those regularly exposed to cold therapies.

Full body cold water immersion and cryotherapy (cold air chamber) also resulted in a sustained increase in norepinephrine, which substantiates the long-term pain relief touted by cold therapy promoters. Exposure to cold also increases metabolic rate.

Finally, the benefits of cold water therapy show promise for those with chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic heart failure, and some (non-lymphoid) types of cancers.

So, are you intrigued yet? Though the jury may still be out on some of the findings related to specific medical conditions, healthy individuals seem to have much to gain from the cold. It’s all about upregulating our systems, taxing them in a healthy, natural way like intermittent fasting. While the findings don’t suggest people should, in the name of health, give up hot showers altogether (who would give them up even if they did!) Alex may have a legitimate point after all. We will be keeping our eyes and ears open for new research around cold water therapy for future posts.

Some specific suggestions based on the findings? Very cold showers appear to be beneficial for the purpose of habituation, but we’d recommend alternating them occasionally with immersion when you can. Those of you in Northern climates might have more fun and social occasions (e.g. New Year’s polar dips) for such an exercise, but we can all spare the water heater for a day now and then for a nice cold dip in the old tub.

Read more: http://www.marksdailyapple.com

Sunday, 08Jan12

Rest Day

Saturday, 31Dec11

Last Blast ROD of 2011

Four rounds of: 30/15,  then 20/10 for 2 rounds  ~ no rest

• Push ups
• Box jumps
• KB swings
• Walkouts
• DB Push Presses
• Burpees
• TRX finishers

2012: What Will The New Year Bring? May It Bring You Peace, Prosperity And Happiness

Coach Donald

Friday, 30Dec11

Classic Static

30 seconds work/15 seconds rest for 6 rounds

• Recline hold
• Goblet Squat hold
• Leg raise hold
• Overhead press hold w/kb or db
• Lunge hold w/overhead MB (alt. legs)

We’ll rest for one minute between rounds

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Thursday, 29Dec11

REMINDER:

Tonights schedule is ;

Athletes at 6pm

NLP Boxing at 7:30pm

This is our modified schedule for the holidays.  We will resume our normal schedule on Tuesday January 3, 2012.

Ready for Anything Training!!!!!

This class is a 1 hour ass kicking circuit that will leave you in a puddle of sweat.

Your cardio-respiratory and muscle strength will benefit from our motivational, challenging and fun circuit training set to energetic music.

Let’s see what you’ve got!!!!

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2012 Lifelong Health Starts Here…..

I’m going to ask a question, and I want your gut response. Answer fast.

What do you feed a lion?

Meat.

Meat is the obviously correct answer. You would feed the lion raw meat. I think even the most ardent vegan would admit that lions are supposed to eat meat.

But why are they “supposed” to eat meat? How do we determine what a living thing is supposed to eat?

Obviously, lions are predators. They hunt and eat prey animals in the wild. But that’s not the whole story.

Lions hunt and eat animals, and they and their feline ancestors have been doing so for hundreds of thousands of years. Millions, even. That’s the key.

The hunting, killing, and raw meat-eating informed the evolution of the lion over many millions of years. The lion’s genetic makeup was shaped by meat-eating. Its teeth and claws are made for killing, its digestive tract is meant to process protein and fat. You might even say the lion’s genes expect the ancestral lion diet of raw meat and function best on such a diet. Conversely, a diet that diverges dramatically from the ancestral lion diet will probably be harmful, with the harm incurred proportional to the degree of divergence. A vegetarian diet will make your lion sick, weak, and probably overweight; a vegan diet will probably kill your lion.

No one would argue against feeding lions raw meat, and anyone who understands natural selection (and as a subscriber to this newsletter I’m sure you do) would agree that lions function best on a raw meat diet because they evolved on one.

This works with other animals, too. Cows eat grass, not meat. Cats, those little house lions, eat meat, not grain and vegetable.

And humans? Humans eat chicken nuggets, soda, and white bread. Wait. (Record scratch.) That’s not right.

Humans are animals, too. We may be relative newcomers to this planet, but we’ve been around for a good 200,000 years, and our ancestors have been around for millions of years. And for a good 190,000 years of that, we were hunter-gatherers, living off the land, big game hunters who feasted on plant and animal alike.

Then we developed agriculture, and for the next 9,900 years, grains ruled the human diet.

100 years ago, food production industrialized, giving us vegetable oil, man-made trans fats, cheap white flour, and inexpensive refined sugar.

Now, we may not know exactly what our Paleolithic ancestors ate, day in and day out. We don’t have menus or food logs. But we do know what they did not eat.

Our ancestors did not eat grains, legumes, refined sugar, or processed vegetable oils.

The thing about people is that we are smart enough to exploit everything offered by the natural world. We don’t just stick to one source of food, like lions and their meat or cows and their grass. We branch out. We pick edible vegetation, we hunt large and small animals, we fish, we dig up edible roots, and we pluck berries from bushes. The wide variety available makes it difficult to pin down the specific evolutionary diet for humans… but that doesn’t prevent us from knowing what wasn’t available.

Here’s what we know:

Grains, beans, and legumes were not readily available until we developed agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago. Fossil records suggest that human health took a hit with the advent of agriculture, as much as you can tell from bones. Agriculturalists were shorter than and had more cavities, smaller brains, and weaker bones than hunter-gatherers. Life expectancy also dropped.

High-fructose corn syrup and vegetable oils were only made available in the last 100 years, with HFCS coming  just 30 odd years ago. Today, people are fatter, more diabetic, and get more cancer and heart disease than people living 100 years ago, even if you account for differences in lifespan. Most, if not all of those illnesses are directly attributed to our poor modern lifestyles and diets.

If you accept that the biology of animals, like lions, functions best on ancestral, evolutionary diets, wouldn’t the same likely be true for humans?

That maybe we should take a closer, slightly skeptical look at the foods that have only been available to humans for the last 10,000, 1,000, and 100 years? That maybe the meat, fish, fowl, nuts, seeds, fruits, roots and tubers that were available to hunter-gatherers for millions of years are actually good for us?

That’s what I call “Grok logic“. Grok, my fun name for the archetypal hunter-gatherer ancestor, is us.

We are Grok. Well, our bodies want to be, anyway. Our genes certainly think we’re still hunting and gathering because they’ve hardly changed in the last 10,000 years. Our genes expect certain things, certain foods, activity levels, and amounts of sleep. They function best when exposed to the same or similar conditions as under which they evolved.

And here’s the thing about genes. Genes can be turned on and off. They can be expressed. Just because you “have” a gene for, say, breast cancer or type 2 diabetes, it doesn’t mean you are destined to get breast cancer or type 2 diabetes. It simply means that if triggered by something in your environment, that gene will switch on (or off) and you will have a higher (or lower) chance of getting the disease.

This is called gene expression.

The things we eat, the amount of sleep we get, our stress levels, how we exercise, whether or not we get sunlight exposure – all of these environmental factors can trigger gene expression – for good or bad. And while just about everything we do can trigger gene expression, the list of things we really need to pay attention is quite short. In fact, it can be summarized in 10 simple laws. (Read more about the 10 Primal Blueprint Laws here.)

This is why I like Grok logic as a starting point when thinking about human health. It comes down to a pretty simple observation. When humans began diverting from their ancestral hunter-gatherer lifestyle, health suffered. When industrially processed food began crowding out natural, whole food, health suffered even more.

Today, people obtain most of their calories from refined grains, sugar, and vegetable oils. They endure chronic stress, lead sedentary lives, work jobs they hate, and live indoors. Today, people have more diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and obesity than ever before.

Correlation? Certainly.

Coincidence? I doubt it.

Causation? I think it’s worth investigating.

In future lessons, we’re going to do that investigating. We’re going to look at many of the ways in which our modern lifestyles divert from our evolutionary past and how our health suffers for it. Everything from the food we eat, the shoes we wear, the sunscreen we slather, the chairs we sit in, and the exercise we do (or don’t do) is fair game.

I think you’re going to learn a lot about how to recapture the health of you and yours by following your Primal Blueprint and nurturing positive gene expression, and I think you’re going to love what you learn.

Visit www.marksdailyapple.com for more information

Thursday, 17Nov11

H.I.I.T.

It’s Kettlebell time, again. Not only do we learn Olympic lifts but also kettlebell work. Because most of you in this class are advanced we will be doing some technical KB stuff. There will be No Gloves used or modification of the exercises. If you can only get 5 reps and you have to stop, then rest until you can continue the set. Thats what it’s all about. So that the next time we perform this ROD you will see and feel the improvements in both increased strength and decreased time. Please, Please!! make sure you post your time to comments. This is mandatory for this class. We need a reference we can come back to.

X-treme ROD

This is a 40 sec effort and 20 sec rest timed set.

• KB Single alternating arm swing
• Contralateral KB squat and kick r & l (switch at 20 sec)
• Squat, sot press and stand r & l (switch at 20 sec)
• Squat thrust to snatch (alt.)
• Windmills r & l (switch at 20 sec)
• KB sit-ups
• KB rows r & l (switch at 20 sec)

____________________________________________________________________________

Ready for Anything Training!!!!!

This class is a 1 hour ass kicking circuit that will leave you in a puddle of sweat.

Your cardiorespiratory and muscle strength will benefit from our motivational, challenging and fun circuit training set to energetic music.

Let’s see what you’ve got!!!!

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This mornings 10am class has been canceled due to circumstances  beyond our control. Sorry for the inconvienence.

We are adding more morning classes starting next week…. working through the bugs. The new morning schedule will be out soon.

TY

 ROD

Wednesday, 09Nov11

•    5 Burpees
• 10 Kettlebell snatches 
• 15 Mountain climbers
• 20 Kettlebell swings / newbies will perform 20 KB Deadlifts

 This is a NLP favorite and a benchmark workout.

Benchmark workouts are not usually repeated often. This allows you to track your progress, while still not falling into a routine.  To track your progress, we ask that you post your completed rounds to comments on our website.  If you don’t know how to post to comments ask Donald, Chris or Juan before you leave.

Let’s get after this ROD and don’t forget to post your rounds.

If you read our article in the SI Advance and want to know more click on GETTING STARTED if you dare.

Staten Island’s Next Level Performance caters to hard-core exercisers seeking an alternative to the average gym

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — The cinder block walls of Next Level Performance in Rossville are painted black, gray and red. The workout facility doesn’t have any televisions, cushy chairs, mirrors, or even exercise machines.

Here, the people are the machines as they sweat, pant and groan while performing the rigorous tasks assigned to them.

The atmosphere inside the off-the-beaten-path warehouse-turned-gym known as “the box” to those who frequent it, screams hard-core.

Danielle Senatore of Woodrow learned of the facility from her sister and boss. Told it was hard to finish the workout and that participants were even known to vomit, she wanted to find out for herself what was so terrible. She joined eight months back and now, she said, “I wouldn’t go back to a regular gym.”

That’s the reaction business partners Juan Becerra and Chris Brown wanted when they opened their facility in November 2008. With growing interest in their type of training — membership stands at around 100 adults and growing — they recently expanded to a bigger location at 115 Industrial Loop, and are looking to bring their brand of workout to Staten Island’s North Shore.

“It’s for anyone who is serious about fitness. And you don’t have to be 21 years old to be serious about fitness,” Becerra said. “You can be 45 or 55 and just want to change the way you look, way you feel and the way you move.”

“If we were able to keep everyone who came through our doors, we would be extremely successful,” he said, explaining, “The problem is people don’t want to do that much work.”

HIGH INTENSITY

The partners, along with trainer Donald Girard, use High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), which involves timed sets of maximum-intensity exercise followed by short intervals of rest, which act as a recovery period.

The exercises used during group circuit training also work the entire body and involve both cardiorespiratory fitness and strength training. This, the trainers noted, is different from traditional gyms that tend to focus on just cardio machines or training isolated muscle groups.

“Basically, we’re forcing people to do a short burst of energy at maximum capacity to get the best results,” Brown explained. “It burns fat and builds muscle more quickly,” he continued. “People don’t realize that by doing these exercises, they’re also building up their endurance.”

The gym isn’t always open — the trainers have day jobs and classes are held mainly in the mornings and at night — and the workout is never the same. Each day, a Routine of the Day, or ROD, is posted on a board at the front of the class and put online in the morning.

“Muscle confusion is the key to really changing your body and getting results,” Becerra said by way of explaining why it’s important to change up the routine.

“Every once in awhile, we get a new person who says ‘it really killed me,’” Brown chimed in. “You may work out every day, but you’re probably doing the same thing over and over again and have muscle memory,” he said. “We want to make sure you’re reaching your full potential.”

Girard, who previously owned a CrossFit affiliate on the Island, noted many of the exercises reinforce functional training, which mimics real-life movements. Exercises like basic squats and deadlifts are actions people do regularly, but have more trouble with as they age and muscles become less flexible and tonic.

“We give them back the basic foundation movements,” Girard said.

FAMILY ATMOSPHERE

During a recent session, the first ROD circuit consisted of four rounds of TRX suspension training reclines, kettlebell swings, diamond sit-ups and kettlebell front squats, done for 30 seconds each with 20 seconds rest between exercises. The second circuit had kettlebell high pulls, burpees, thrusters and mountain climbers.

The atmosphere is like a boot camp, with trainers pushing participants to continue. But there’s also a sense of camaraderie.

“It’s like a family. We all work out together,” said Sean Cusick of Huguenot, who has been a member for more than a year. “It’s not like going to a regular gym where you do your routine and leave.”

Newcomers Janeth Toro and Hector Nieves were going to a different gym and decided to switch up their routine. The Tottenville couple are training to get in shape for their April wedding.

“I wanted something that would really involve cardio and was not just lifting [weights] or running on a treadmill, which gets boring,” Nieves said.

“I used to have to drag him to the gym. Now, he wants to come,” Ms. Toro said. As for herself, “I like the sense of community. It’s different than being by yourself on the elliptical.”