Health Club News…. Gyms go niche with full body boot camps, stripper poles and ‘hot, hot ,hot’ yoga!

Guy Battista likes working out at 1 a.m. at Anytime Fitness. Jesse Davis likes to bash huge tractor tires with sledgehammers at Powerhouse Gym.
And now comes the growing Orangetheory Fitness gym chain where everyone’s heart rate is electronically monitored and displayed on huge HDTVs.Lately, the biggest thing in workout gyms are the little things, and offering ever-narrower niche workouts to appeal to smaller segments of society. Martial-arts gyms, kickboxing clubs, spinning studios with extra oxygen pumped into the air, yoga studios heated to 105 degrees, stripper pole fitness classes and bare bones gyms charging just $10 a month.
Perhaps it’s a general yearning for variety, or a reflection of an American culture accustomed to hundreds of options in everything from restaurants to cable TV channels. But these new gyms are a huge departure from past years, when national gym chains were building single-site, hangar-sized buildings equipped with something for everyone — from child care to pizza shops.
“At a typical club, you just scan your keytag, walk past the desk, go on a treadmill and you end up not engaged,” said Terry Blachuk, who helped expand the Crunch and Lifestyle Family Fitness gym chains, and is now launching a new Orangetheory club.
More often, new clubs find a way to offer group personal training — whether that’s on a rowing machine or flipping tractor tires in the park with a trainer cheering along.
At Orangetheory, members attend group classes and wear wireless heart-rate monitors as personal trainers shift them through intervals at weights, rowing machines and suspension cables from the ceiling.As you work out, you look up and can see immediately how hard you’re actually working — 63 percent of your maximum, 75 percent,” Blachuk said. “When you just run down Bayshore, you might be at 60 or 75 percent of your target zone,” Blachuk said. “But you don’t really know. There’s no sensation or anything specific you feel. Here, the trainers can tell exactly how many minutes you’re in the perfect zone.”Orangetheory is opening three locations in the Tampa Bay area, and plans 25 along Florida’s west coast in the next four years, all priced somewhere between a no-frills gym and a personal trainer. A membership costs $99, and comes with six sessions, or customers can buy sessions in blocks. Powerhouse Gym in Tampa takes a more hard-core approach, and has expanded its Channelside District location several times, and will add 6,000 square feet of workout space this summer. “It’s about the atmosphere as much as anything else, the people around you,” said Leonard “Joe” Hill, a championship weightlifter and Powerhouse member. “You’re going to work out differently in a prison weight yard than you would at a senior citizens swim class.”There are Santa Monica Steps stretching up two stories for athletes to climb while carrying weights. In the bike spinning room, machines pump in extra oxygen to so spinners can push even harder. There are lengths of 50-pound anchor chain to carry, tractor tires to flip, sand pits to sprint down and water jet massage tables to help recover.Among the members, the gym counts Buccaneer players, swimsuit models and mixed martial-arts fighters.The overall gym industry is staging something of a recovery from the recession, when many customers dropped their memberships along with anything else that smacked of discretionary spending.

Gyms of narrow niche appeal are among the fastest growing in the health club industry.

“The gyms that are doing especially well are the ones that differentiate themselves from the competition and speak to the members’ interests and passions,” said Meredith Poppler, spokeswoman for the IHRSA. “Many club operators have realized that a growing number of club members have grown weary of the big box gyms, and can save time and money by joining the smaller, more sport or hobby specific options.”Group classes, in particular, are staging a massive comeback, she said. From 2008 to 2009, participation in cardio kickboxing was up 20.1 percent, high-impact aerobics was up 8.1 percent, low-impact aerobics up 6.3 percent and step aerobics was up 4.5 percent.
For instance, the Body Construction gym opened in Tampa offering very intense personal training with unusual methods: Running while carrying kegs, sprinting against bungee cords, bear crawls with partners on their backs and smashing tires with sledgehammers.The Kiss & Tale gym offers a blend of exotic dance instruction and physical fitness — focused around the kind of brass poles found in strip clubs. Besides the “Pole 101” classes there are men’s pole classes and divorce parties.
Evolation Yoga opened a year ago in south Tampa offering “Hot Yoga” based in the Bikram Method. There, a guide leads students through 90 minutes of a pre-set series of yoga poses and breathing exercises, but the room is heated to 105 degrees.”The heat promotes increased circulation, breathing and builds stamina, flushes out your organs and promotes willpower,” said gym manager Abby Becker. “In some ways, people can be overwhelmed by it.”But once students grow accustomed to the heat, they have better mental strength, focus and suffer less anxiety and stress, she said, partly because they’ve trained themselves to focus that intensely for 90 minutes.Sometimes, students go right from a hot yoga studio to the Beef O’ Brady’s bar next door, Becker said, but not often. “If this is your first time trying it,” she said, “you’re going to get some good sleep.”