Your Goals. Your Body. Your Workout.

Your goals are unique; your workout should be too. And that’s exactly what you get at Custom Strength. Come train with us and let us help you workout to your ability, and with your goals, health, and schedule in mind.

Start with a free consultation

Your initial consultation is your chance to share your goals, health history, and any injuries you may have that could affect how you should train. We’ll also use this time to take you through the Functional Movement Screen so that we can see how you move (please don’t be nervous about this. It’s not a strength contest, it’s a way for us to find out whether and where you have differences left to right and whether or how much we should focus on flexibility in addition to strength and fitness).

This consultation allows us to put together a fitness plan for you based on your strengths and weaknesses (we all have both!), your current fitness level, your goals, your schedule, and your budget.

Semi-private training

It’s a lot like “regular” personal training in that you do a workout that’s created specifically for you and your trainer coaches you through your program. In other words, it’s not group or class training where everyone is doing the same thing. But unlike “regular” personal training, your trainer also trains up to two other people at the same time.

It works well because there are lots of exercises where you really don’t need your trainer to stand there and watch every rep or stare at the stopwatch while you hold a position. You do want them there a lot of the time to teach proper form, check to make sure you’ve got it, and help make decisions about whether to add weight. Semi-private training allows us to provide all of this without being in your face all the time. And because you’re sharing your trainer with up to two other people, we’re able to keep our rates lower than “regular” personal trainers can.

Note: you don’t have to find other people to share the trainer with – we take care of that.

And our gym is set up so that each person has their own workout zone, so if you’re not the social type, you don’t have to be (but you can be).

Our training approach

While we personalize semi-private training sessions for each client to their goals and their body, there is a training philosophy at the foundation of all our training. Your session will start with a warm-up that includes some combination of foam rolling, stretching, muscle activation, and dynamic movement.

Then, depending on the needs and goals of the individual, you will do some combination of the following:

• A warm-up featuring foam rolling, static and dynamic stretches, muscle activation, and a focus on movement quality.
• Power & agility featuring plyo boxes, Olympic lifts, hurdles, and agility ladders.
• Movement-based strength circuits featuring free weights, TRX, kettlebells, bands, and cable columns.

Because you will adapt to the exercise you do (translation: you’ll get stronger, fitter, faster…), we re-evaluate and adjust all programs every three to six weeks to ensure you get the most out of your training.

Getting strong and fit

If getting strong and fit is your goal, then you’ll fit right in at Custom Strength. We have A LOT of clients for whom this is the answer when we ask why they’re here.

We’ll make specific recommendations during your assessment that will be based on how well you move and how fit you and any specific goals you have. Typically we recommend one to three training sessions per week.

Now if you’re someone who wants to get a bit stronger and healthier but has never liked the gym, then you will really fit in. We seem to have developed an environment and approach that really speaks to (former) gym-haters. I’m not saying we convert people into fitness freaks; I’m just saying we’ve got a place where people who don’t love exercise enjoy spending an hour or two each week.

Training after (or around) an Injury

One of our specialties at Custom Strength is training clients who have unique needs as a result of injury. We have experience training clients with a variety of injuries and dysfunction, and at virtually all phases of injury (including pre and post surgery). In fact 33% of our clients are referrals from health care practitioners, including doctors, physical therapists, massage therapists, chiropractors, athletic therapists, and osteopaths. In other words, the people you trust to treat your injury, trust us to train you.

There are four primary reasons that we have success with clients who have injuries and physical limitations:

• We understand that “No pain, no gain” is a misunderstood concept. People often interpret it as meaning you should push through anything for the sake of results. Wrong! Joint pain, for instance, is not okay in the gym.
• We understand how the body is supposed to move and how the body often compensates in the presence of pain, injury, or dysfunction. This means that when you tell us about an injury you have, we understand which exercises you should do more, which you should avoid (for now), and which ones may need some form corrections.
• When necessary, we are open-minded and creative with our exercise selection, meaning that we can help you come up with the right exercises to help you get strong and stay fit even if you are unable to use parts of your body due to injury.
• We have a strict “do no harm” policy.

Training while pregnant

We’ve been fortunate to have many of our clients share their pregnancy news with us, and then ask us to continue training them through their pregnancy, and then they often came back after a sleep-less period to come train with us to help get their pre-pregnancy body back.

How do we train pregnant clients? The short answer is that it’s conceptually not that different from training clients who aren’t pregnant. There actually aren’t many exercises that are bad for you when you’re pregnant. In the past there was some concern about exercises that have you lying on your back when you’re pregnant, but since most exercises that have you on your back only last a minute or two, it’s not considered an issue. Exercising in extreme heat is not ideal during pregnancy, but the level of heat required for that to be a problem is not something you’d ever encounter in a regular gym. Some suggest that crunches aren’t great during pregnancy, but we don’t use them anyhow. Other than that, I am not aware of any exercises that are “bad” for women who are pregnant.

The main difference is that as the baby gets bigger, some exercises are not going to feel great, at which point we will replace them with exercises that do feel great. As a person gets closer to their delivery date, the body does start to release a hormone called relaxin that increases flexibility. When this happens, some people start to find that some of the single leg exercises stop feeling great because the ligaments around the pelvis loosen, so we adjust or replace them. Lastly, during the first and third trimester, there tend to be some days when energy levels are lower, in which case we tend to adjust by having you take more rest between exercises, or if you’re not feeling it, cutting the workout short.

We tend to shift the focus a bit during pregnancy, moving the goal from getting stronger and more fit, to maintaining strength and fitness as much as possible. Lastly, we also try to include some exercises that still make you feel like a badass because we know that there’s a lot of stuff you can’t do any more. I love bench press for pregnant clients for this reason. It’s completely safe (we always give you a spotter) and is still doable when someone is very far along in their pregnancy. Although we’ll often provide risers for under the feet to reduce the arch in your back.

If you’re interested, Exercising Through Your Pregnancy by James Clapp is a great read. I love it because it goes over the research as it pertains to exercise and pregnancy.

Training post-partum

How we approach your training post-pregnancy will partly depend on your delivery, on whether you have a diastasis, and on how fit you were during your pregnancy. We’ll meet with you before training to get a sense of this, and if you have a diastasis and are seeing a physical therapist or other health care practitioner for this, we will happily correspond with them as their input is invaluable to guide your training.

As with training during pregnancy, there aren’t really any exercises that are fundamentally bad post-pregnancy; it’s a matter of finding what is most appropriate for you. We do recognize that, early on at least, your ligaments may still be looser than normal, and your core has been through a lot, which will impact what is appropriate for you. We also recognize that there will be days when you’re really tired and just showing up for the workout is an accomplishment. We’ll help you sort out what the best workout is on those days.

Seniors training

Our clients vary in age from teens to late seventies. The majority are over 40 and we’ve got a great contingent of clients in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. Our approach to training “mature” clients follows a similar approach to training younger clients, with a few key differences.

The most important thing we’ve noticed with training older clients is that the differences between two people of the same age gets greater and greater with age. There are 80 year olds who still ski, and there are 60 year olds who notice it’s difficult to get up the stairs. We get that you’re different, and so we don’t try to presume to know what you need (and what you want) without meeting you first.

We’ll make specific recommendations during your assessment that will be based on how well you move, how fit you are, and any specific goals you have. We’ll also get you to share any injury issues that may have crept up over the years. All of this allows us to put together the most appropriate program for you. We also take all of this into account as we coach you through your workouts. You will see noticeable improvements in your physical ability from training with us, but we make sure that you progress at the right pace for you. We view getting stronger and more fit as a long game, not a quick fix.

Training for sports

If your goals include improving performance in your sport of choice, then we will build your program to reflect that. All training programs at Custom Strength are customized to the unique needs of your body; athlete programs are customized to your body AND your sport. This involves:

• periodizing your training around your competitive season,
• additional power and agility training,
• ensuring your strength training addresses what your body needs to do on the field, the court, the road, the snow, or the ice.
• customizing your energy system development to the needs of your sport, and
• adjusting the flexibility and warm-up exercises to address any individual needs you have as well as common imbalances that can result from your sport.

Training for weight loss

Contrary to popular belief, if your goal is weight loss, strength training is more effective than cardio. For three primary reasons:

1. Strength training builds lean muscle, and lean muscle burns calories. So the stronger you are, the more calories you burn and thus the easier it is to lose fat.
2. Muscle takes less space than fat, so if you build muscle while you lose fat, you can shrink your waistline without even losing weight.
3. Strength training or intense interval training cause a neat effect where you continue to burn more weight after you finish your workout, where cardio burns calories while you workout but then stops. For the geeks out there, this effect is called Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption or EPOC.

Our approach to training for fat loss follows similar principles to all of our other training: Progress according to each persons ability and needs. Your assessment and each training session will help us determine both. On top of that, we also recommend that clients interested in fat loss follow a nutrition program. While exercise can help with fat loss, the reality is that nutrition will have a much bigger impact on fat loss than exercise will. “Abs are made in the kitchen” is a popular expression among trainers. For that reason, we encourage our fat loss clients to follow Lean Out, our healthier habits program in addition to training with us.