Category: fitness

by Dave Chesser, owner of Formosa Fitness, Kettlebell Taiwan and Kettlebell Quest
This is one of the most common questions we get but I really wish it wasn’t. The problem is that few people have been exposed to real training so they don’t understand it. Training and exercising are not the same thing. Training is getting better at doing something. Exercising is simply random movement. Every time I hear the above question, the first thing that comes to my mind is,”Have you done this workout 2-3 days a week consistently?” and the answer is always no. If you haven’t done the workout 2-3x consistently then what would make a person think they can do it every single day and get good results?
Every workout that I write is based on training instead of exercising and that means a few things must be in place first.
One, are you doing the exercises correctly? If not, then you must learn how to do them. Doing them poorly will never get you results and yet I consistently see terrible form in every single group class and from every Facebook fitness guru. Seriously, this is the path to no where. Slow things down and do the exercises correctly and then you’ll see that you very rarely need to do them everyday to get results. It’s when people do exercises poorly that they think they have to do them everyday. If you have poor quality, you have to make up for it with quantity and that’s how people get hurt. I saw one Youtube fitness guru telling everyone to do situps every single day and the form was poor. A lot of people complained about how much their backs hurt. That’s what people get from following that guy.

Two, you must turn off the volume monkeys that tell you to do more. Facebook and Youtube fitness gurus tell you to do the same stuff everyday because it’s a good way to get you hooked into watching their nonsensical videos or reading their posts everyday, which drives up their site traffic. That’s the real reason behind all of this – to get more site traffic from gullible beginners that don’t know better. Once they get more site traffic and fans, companies will ask them to sell products they’ve never used in their lives and the fans buy whatever they are told to buy. It’s insane. But their popularity makes people think that the same exercises or workout must be done every single day. In order to change your thinking, you have to be smart and turn off the people telling you to do crazy volume all the time.

Three, you must use a weight that challenges your movement ability and that allows you to keep getting better. Using an 8kg kettlebell is easy and sure, you could probably do the same workout everyday with it eventually, but so what? Where are the results? You will stop getting them because your body has already adapted to the weight through those exercises in that workout. You must progress to a heavier weight in order to keep getting results. No, doing more and more and more of the same thing will not keep working. To all the people that ask can they do this workout every single day, what are you going to do after that stops working, do the workout twice a day?

Most beginners are greedy for results and are way too focused on the short term. They want maximum results right now without having to earn them but that doesn’t work. Most serious workouts should be done three times a week with good form if you are at the beginning level. Any more than that and you likely won’t be doing quality training. You need to EARN the right to train every day through getting the exercises correct and building a body that can withstand consistent, daily training. Don’t worry, with a consistent three times a week effort, you will get good results that you can continue to work on for a lifetime if you do it right. If you need more guidance, my Kettlebell Quest DVD has all the three-times-a-week workouts you will ever need. All you have to do is follow the program. Good luck in training.

Normal gyms couldn’t care less if you showed up or not. In fact, their business model depends on you quitting while continuing to pay. As a results-based business, you quitting doesn’t do us any good. In fact, the only thing that really helps our business is <gasp!> you actually getting in shape.
But it’s more than that: you are here to contribute to the athleticism and the power of the group.
Everyone starts somewhere and I get that but I like to say that we only have two groups of people at Formosa Fitness: winners and those that want to be winners. I don’t have time for anyone else and I put this opinion out there to scare off people that aren’t sincere in the first place. I’ve talked to many people who say they are interested in joining the gym and within 10:00 of talking to them, it’s clear to me and sometimes even to them that they have no intention of going through with joining the gym. I encourage those people to go to the treadmill-Zumba-nightclub down the street.
But even some people that join still don’t get it. We teach private sessions and group class in such as way to empower you to do it yourself! Yes, if you follow what we teach, you will eventually not need us to guide you. You not only can do it on your own, if you stay in any of our sessions or even if you stay in our gym, period, you will be expected to contribute to the gym, not just take from it.
What does that mean? It means being pro-active and not waiting for others to tell you what to do. It means helping others out. It means not making excuses and not being a drag on the group every time you come in. It means learning the exercises and LEADING the group! Yes, your fitness in Formosa Fitness isn’t just about you, it’s about you getting fit so you can help us with the newbies that need you to lead by example. It’s about you being a role-model for those that come after you. It’s about you breaking away from a weak society that tells you that you don’t need to be strong and joining your brothers and sisters in the tribe in developing and sharing the values that we hold dear.
What is it not about? It’s not about free towels, free water, and “light” fitness. It’s not about “where do I do cardio?” And it’s certainly not about, “But I don’t want to get strong.” Plenty of places dedicated to being weak. Please join one of those.
So if getting strong is important to you, this is where you belong. But the strong contribute to the group, only the weak detract from it and take what they can. Choose strength over weakness.

My new trainer Dylan has been training hard with the kettlebell and barbell following my training protocols and in two months. Below are his results:

As you can see, that’s pretty impressive! He works hard and has been very diligent in following my protocols. It’s amazing what you can do in a short time when you show up consistently and just stick to the plan. I don’t know why more people don’t try that. If you want results like this, come visit either of our locations and we’ll get you started!

I’m going to start announcing some of the new stuff you’ll see at our new location in Hsin Dian. We’re pleased to have this opportunity to bring stuff in that is quite rare in Taiwan and we’ll have many examples to show you. The first is the Air Assualt bike on the right. It’s a fan bike specifically designed for metabolic conditioning workouts and was field tested at Crossfit gyms in the States. It’s got hot buttons for Tabata, reverse Tabata, and other intervals preset on the display. All you have to do it hit the button and go.

Intervals on this thing are extremely hard and I’m not sure why. You can feel the resistance but at first it doesn’t seem too bad. But when you go all out as you should when doing a true, REAL Tabata, then this thing gets scary hard very quickly.

In the picture above on the left, you’ll see a local fan bike that we bought years ago. I’ve been looking for a good fan bike in Asia since we opened. It was one of the main things I wanted in the gym. We bought three of those models on the left and all three broke in a matter of months. I was really disappointed but we were trying new things out to bring them to you guys. There were no reviews so we took a chance and got burned. This is what we do to bring good stuff to our gymgoers.

The workout that really inspired me to want to get a fan bike was the Gym Jones workout 300FY. Mark Twight runs Gym Jones and he was the guy that trained the cast and crew of the movie 300 and it’s sequel. I was a member of the Gym Jones insider website for a while because I wanted to better understand their programming and inside the pay site, he was very clear that he wasn’t happy with all the “300 workouts” that came out after the movie that looked nothing like what he put the real cast and crew through. So he wanted a workout that people couldn’t duplicate easily that still used 300 in the name. He came up with a brutal workout called the 300 FY cause you need to burn 300 calories in 10:00 on the fan bike or “f_ck you.” That last part was a message to the wannabe’s that he wasn’t happy with. Burning 300 calories in 10:00 on a fan bike is no joke. Check it out:

It’s a serious test, for sure. The fan bikes we had earlier would never had stood up to a workout like that. But the Assault Air Bike is made specifically for that kind of stuff. It’s the most solid stable air bike I’ve ever been on. Even going all out, the bike is very stable, which allows all of your force to go into the equipment instead of getting leaked out.

Basically, the air bike is the kind of equipment made specifically for HIIT (high intensity interval training) and it’s the first piece of gym “cardio” equipment I’ve ever seen made specifically for that. The calories you can burn on this thing are tremendous and I felt an upperbody pump just from doing the intervals. My guess is you can get simultaneous musclebuilding, fat burning, and power results all at the same time by doing intervals on the air bike. That’s nothing to sneeze at, especially in 4:00!

Anyway, we have four of these going into the HsinDian location and one going in at our XiaMen/HePing location. If you want to experience this awesome workout, give us a visit. More equipment details coming soon!

I’ve given up talking about training instead of exercising because I often feel like I’m wasting my breath. Instead, I’m working personally with people that are likely to understand the concept. But I also wrote the Kettlebell Quest DVD for people at home that want to train instead of exercise. The point of the DVD program isn’t just to lose fat or entertain you or anything else. The point of the program is for you to MASTER the exercises and the entire program. You train each level in order to reach the next level workout. You then progress through the program until you reach the end. Not one…single…exercise is in there randomly. Everything was planned out very meticulously to help you reach kettlebell mastery. The goal is to reach the last workout. That’s why it’s called Kettlebell Quest.

And when you reach the end, what is the result? Outstanding fat loss and conditioning. The result comes from the process of training!