Monday, July 1, 2013

Are Fitness Boot Camps The Answer For Quick Weight Loss?

By Howe Russ


These days, boot camp classes are everywhere. Offering HIIT workouts with minimal equipment, they often bill themselves as the easy answer for people trying to figure out how to lose weight quickly and effectively.

There is one question on the lips of those who see adverts for this type of fitness class. Do they actually work as well as they claim to?

In short, yes. Once you get past all of the marketing hype and sales talk behind the product, a boot camp is merely offering advice which has existed in gyms worldwide for over twenty five years. Simply put, it's nothing new or ground-breaking.

In fact, if you stroll into any gym in your local area you will see countless fitness enthusiasts putting the foundations of a boot camp workout into their regular gym routine. Circuit classes have existed for decades. Likewise, high intensity interval training has been around for years. Both principles are widely adopted by outdoor fitness classes.

So if it's advice which has existed for years already, why are boot camps often billed as miracle weight loss solutions? Quite simply, it all comes down to marketing. By giving something a catchy name and making outrageous claims about the results you can achieve, you'll undoubtedly have something which appeals to a lot of people. This marketing tends to be misleading in a lot of cases, as it's often aimed at individuals who have never exercised before, with promises of instant results.

Although a lot of the promotion behind these classes can be seen as misleading or exaggerating the foundation the training is built upon is solid. If you perform regular high intensity activity you will lose unwanted body fat. The reason it's billed as a miracle solution often comes down to the fact that it's targeted at people who have never exercised effectively before, so they quickly label it a 'miracle solution' and generate hype.

All of the hype surrounding this type of training, which is often merely a company's attempt at competing with it's rivals, can lead to the whole thing being labelled a fitness fad. Yet the workouts themselves are proven and they tend to stick to the basic exercises such as squats and push-ups.

The biggest problem boot camp classes face is customer retention. While some of this comes down to the fact that they often target their marketing efforts at individuals who are looking for a quick fix, who therefore quit quite fast, there is also a problem with people who actually see results. It doesn't take long for an individual who is serious about his or her fitness to realize they could get just as good a workout without paying for a class. This is why boot camps begin hyping up the group atmosphere they offer, trying to get members to work together as a team in a bid to keep them coming in.

Ultimately, boot camps are a mixed bag. While the science behind their HIIT workouts is sound, if you ask a boot camp trainer how to lose weight you're not going to get a miracle answer and the marketing behind the whole gimmick often discredits it's product. While you could certainly get the same physical results by yourself, if you place a huge importance on working out in a group atmosphere then boot camps could be just what you're looking for.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment