Lexington, KY - Walk into J&M Strength and Conditioning and you just might be told to stop working out so much.
"We actually encourage a lot of our clients to train less, which you don't hear a lot," said Molly Galbraith, who owns J&M Strength and Conditioning with Jim Laird.
The studio gym, which is located off of Lane Allen Road, opened in May and already is running out of room, regardless of what may seem like counterintuitive advice for an exercise facility.
What Laird and Galbraith are all about is training smart and training efficiently, not training more. Some gyms, Galbraith explained, play off of the common notion that working out until exhaustion is the most effective way to get in shape.
"They do stuff that makes people tired, but they don't so much focus on doing stuff that makes them better," she said. "They think it is (working) because they're getting tired, they're sweating or they couldn't walk for three days afterward. And that's so not our goal."
With decades of experience between them, Laird and Galbraith work to change the mindset of their clients, and the benefits to their business have reflected that the change in mentality is successful.
What started as a boot camp operation run out of other gym facilities in Lexington grew into J&M Strength and Conditioning.
The "buzz word," Galbraith said, has been boot camp.
"When people see 'boot camp,' they get a vision of 20 to 30 people in a room working out together," she said. "If you say group personal training, they don't really envision what that means, and that's more truly what our stuff is - group personal training. But again, we kind of call it boot camp; that's the buzz word."
The studio also offers private personal training and semi-private training sessions while building a culture of correct workout habits and overall lifestyle changes. In fact, Laird and Galbraith are so in tune to the lives and habits of their clients that they will even go as far as encouraging someone who does not fit into their philosophy to workout somewhere else.
"If you're always kind of waxing and waning and going back and forth on your philosophy to appease your customers, then they're going to get what they want and not necessarily what they need," Galbraith said. "And so we try not to be mean, but we're pretty hard core. Our clients are walking billboards for us, and we want to see them get healthy. We've been really blessed to get a lot of good clients."
Some of that client-building success is due in part to using Groupon.
"We opened in May and did another Groupon in July, and I think now we've got about 95 people signed up for our group personal training classes and probably about 35 or 40 signed up as private clients," Galbraith said.
She said the Groupon system has worked wonders for their business, as long as they immediately educate people who purchase the coupons on how their philosophy works. Nearly every Saturday, J&M Strength and Conditioning holds an orientation.
"We really set ourselves up for success with the orientation," Galbraith said. "We know how many people to expect, and we can staff ourselves appropriately."
She said one of the first things they tell people is that if they expect to be "crawling out the door after the first session," they're in the wrong place.
"If we didn't have the chance to explain that to people, they might be like, 'This sucks,' or 'This isn't hard'," she said, and they would therefore lose business. "If they know what to expect, they're more satisfied."
In the long run, training at J&M Strength and Conditioning gives customers a chance to dig deeper into nutrition, stress management, sleep, hormones and supplements. They frequently discuss daily habits with the people they train.
"And we let them know that 90 percent of our success is going to happen outside of here and not in here," Galbraith said. "We get people in shape before they workout ... Everything we do sets you up to progress to something else."
Laird added that most people are not eating well or sleeping well and that they focus on correcting movements and muscles.
"Very rarely is it that somebody needs the death beaten out of them; it's usually something simple," he said.
Studio gyms like theirs are becoming more prevalent, and Laird and Galbraith agreed that it is due to the fact that people want to workout with true professionals and because good trainers want to get properly compensated for their expertise.
And with that expertise comes the ability to pinpoint problems. Galbraith and Laird are extremely focused on correcting misuse injuries or improper muscle conditions.
"No one's glutes work," Galbraith said with a laugh. "You bring me 100 people off the street and 99 of them, their glutes do not fire at all. It's called gluteal amnesia, and it's from sitting all day."
Galbraith and Laird want to get Lexington healthier, one gluteus maximus at a time.
For more information on the studio gym,check online at j-mstrength.com.