A new fitness facility, Concept 1010, has no entertainment system or mirrors. Yet it promises results by eliminating distractions and maximising intensity. Stephen Snowball reports.

"Cardio is a waste of time at best, and fitness clubs are more club than fitness. If you want strength and fitness, but don't have the time for the treadmills, TVs, and dilly-dally of the fitness club formula, come to us."

Tough words from tough Scandinavian entrepreneur Jorgen Albrechtsen, founder of Concept 1010 fitness facilities that have just made Healthcare City their international base.

Concept 1010 doesn't do music, and you won't find a line of stair-masters in their gym area. Instead you enter a quiet, air-conditioned alley furnished only with six workout machines, privacy and a personal trainer. This focused arrangement of mechanics and commitment is intended to turn your weekly 20-minute session into a painful, push-your-limits one.

The six machines stand like a high-tech gauntlet, precision tools designed to isolate and overwhelm every muscle in your body. And the personal trainer will make sure they do just that.

So Concept 1010 warns its potential members, "This is not fun. You're not going to find anything enjoyable. There are no TV screens. We have no music. We have no pampering, no windows and no mirrors. If you value entertainment, you probably will not like it, but you will love the results."

What's the difference?

If you are anything like me, then even hearing that little voice in your head perking up at the thought of "joining a gym" makes you want to laugh out loud. How many times has that failed? Too quickly, the vision vanishes and inspiration fades, leaving those few unsightly pounds unscathed.

So what is the fuss about this new fitness centre really about, and will I be able to hear it over my own laughter at the thought of another half-hearted attempt at physical fitness?
The "concept" of Concept 1010 is simple: intensity.

Save for the exercise you are performing in that instant, everything else must be blocked from your mind. Take 20 minutes a week and micromanage your concentration to ensure that each 10-second interval of those aching minutes is used to push every muscle in your body to the limit.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines intensity as "aiming to achieve maximum production in a limited area". Through Concept 1010, I define it as 20 minutes of pain. To achieve this, they have had to modify the stereotypical workout environment.
 

All systems go

Every member is allotted a 30-minute slot. Before he arrives, a personal trainer adjusts all the machines to the height, weight and proportion of each member. This sets the stage for an uninterrupted period. Since highest intensity is the key, removing all downtime is vital.

Non-stop flexing and no mirrors to enjoy it? That means no sparkling reflection to seduce me into spending
a few minutes admiring my Greek-sculpted guns all a-flare in the halogen lights overhead. And no queuing up for the treadmill, finding or fastening free-weights and locker room chitchat.

What a shame. But there's no time for distractions.
By cutting out all these in-between steps, the high level of energy output remains constant, and so builds the entire time to enhance each exercise, optimising each 20-second repetition, 10-second extension and 10-second retraction.

Slowly does it

"Several factors combine to make Concept 1010 such an effective way of training," says Jorgen. "The member must move very slowly during the exercises, 10 seconds each way, hence the name Concept '1010'.

"This means that your muscles work to the maximum during the entire movement and a maximum number of muscle fibres are involved," he continues, stressing the importance of performing the motions of a lightning quick workout at a snail's pace. "The slow, controlled movement yields much better results with less risk of injury." The result is a very quick workout regime built of painfully slowly executed exercises.

As for meddlesome, intensity diminishing middlemen, the Concept 1010 programme even insists that members move between machines with speed and without refreshment.

It's 20 minutes dedicated to the body: a condensed boot camp, only without the fighting and with a trainer reminding you to breathe.

No sweat

Is the prospect of subjecting yourself to weekly boot camps causing you to sweat a little? Well forget about it; another step they've cut out is sweat! Instead of interpreting sweat as an indication of progress on the pounds, Jorgen is adamant that sweat is simply the body's air-conditioning function kicking into high gear. We all know air-conditioning requires a lot of energy. (The summer electricity bills say it all!).

Concept 1010 believes this energy is better spent fuelling muscle mass. To circumvent this, the gym is air conditioned and powerful fans wrap the machines in a current of refreshment.

By eliminating sweat, not only is more energy free for intensive physical exertion, but members remain cool throughout the process, so there's no need for a shower on completion. The 20-minute workout doesn't create the need for a 20-minute shower afterwards.

"Ideally," and Jorgen employs a generous interpretation of that word, "every exercise is repeated until it is impossible to continue movement in a technically correct manner, that is, until the involved muscles fail." That is the goal. The whole goal. To bring your entire musculature system to the brink and break it. Or, as Jorgen puts it, to achieve "muscular failure".

Concept 1010 understands fitness as the result of attacking the body; that training is actually the body reacting as it's being attacked. A successful training period is one where each part of the muscular system has been exhausted.
"At that point," Jorgen says, "a number of chemical processes are triggered in your body, and with a sufficient break before your next training, your body will produce improvements such as increased strength and better function."

They encourage people to only work out at the facility once a week, but with a very high intensity, so as to fully trigger all the chemical processes in the body. Quite on its own, the body will attend to its restoration: better, stronger, faster.

And a weekly burst of this sort is all that is truly necessary, assures Jorgen, for "if you do too much of a good thing, it will give the opposite results, or at best be a waste of time".
Come minute 21, you're ready to return to enjoying your week and leisure time. By then, your body is long triggered into self-restoration, a process it undergoes during the rest of the week. "That's when you should be socialising," Jorgen says.

No fun in failure

"The biggest mistake is to combine training with socialisation," insists Jorgen. "You cannot combine these things. Serious training of your body cannot be fun.

There cannot be distractions. If you are in a gym, you talk to the people, you look at the people, you listen to music." All fun activities, but not training as such – and all ultimately counterproductive, according to him.

"Here, it may be boring, but it's only 20 minutes," he rationalises. Members are able to mentally relax because they don't have to toy with conjuring up any self-discipline, as "everything is set for them and the instructor is standing right there. Always one-on-one in total privacy."

Take the test

Well, like it or leave it, during our interview and the promises of fitness, Jorgen challenged me to put his theory and company to the test.

"We take our own medicine. Everyone here does. All our staff; me, everyone," Jorgen says as he sits in his office answering my many questions. Indeed, he reversed our roles and put a big question to me: could I handle the Concept 1010 programme? Would I be up to the challenge?

At first, I thought he was implying that I was overweight. (Which, in all fairness, I am. But still, you don't point things like that out to strangers!) Small tears of self-pity to one side, after learning of all his work and the philosophy of the organisation, I couldn't resist.

I put down my cupcake and shook his hand. We left the office area and he signed me up. My trainer, Mincy (such a deceptively soft name), came over and the process began.What happened next? How did it go? Well, back in an upcoming issue of Friday, I will report (with all the juicy details!)