We’re the gym for busy people.

Our intention is simple – cut out the fluff, and help clients get the most out of each training session. The ideal session for us might be quite different from what you’d expect: we’re interested in helping you get the appropriate dose of exercise today, not the maximum dose possible. In other words, we’re here to help you get an effective workout that complements the rest of your life, not one that requires unnecessary sacrifice in other areas of your life. This doesn’t mean workouts are easy – it simply means they are rational and personalised to suit what you need today, which is probably a better approach if you’re trying to stay healthy and active for a long time.

In a nutshell, we combine cardio and resistance training into one efficient 20-minute session, so you can get both fat loss and strength benefits each time you show up. We use functional exercises so you can focus on performing efficient movement, instead of having to think about individual muscles in isolation. Thanks to this, every session is a full-body workout, no matter which day or what time you come to the gym. Broadly speaking, this sort of efficiency is possible because of a method of training known as High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), which is best known in the fitness world as an excellent fat loss tool.

It’s often assumed that all HIIT is the same, but it’s not. There are many ways to do HIIT, yet the general assumption is that ‘High Intensity’ implies nausea-inducing workouts, an over-enthusiastic or unnecessarily aggressive instructor in a cut-off shirt yelling at you, and walking out the door with wobbly legs.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

You see, there is not a single study that mentions “I feel like I might need to throw up” as an appropriate indicator of a successful training session. In addition, there is absolutely nothing in the literature that suggests that the inability to focus at your important 2pm meeting because of a crazy lunchtime workout is a sign of accelerated fat loss.

There is no research on how fitness should be an exercise in torture, and we don’t take it upon ourselves to try to torture people. In fact, our approach is quite the opposite – we choose to play a supportive role, with a focus on helping you find your best strategy for today.

Don’t get me wrong – training at Ritual isn’t easy by any means. It’s just probably more rational than you’d expect or than you are used to. For example, we care far more about the quality of your repetitions than the number of repetitions you perform. Instead of mindlessly pushing for ‘faster’, ‘heavier’ and ‘more’, we encourage mindful, focused effort. Instead of letting clients get lured into the senseless pursuit of fatigue, we help craft a much more purposeful and productive approach to training.

Exercise ‘intensity’ is a far broader category than people realize, and is dependent on a lot more variables than how fast you do a movement. The combination of these variables provide the ‘stress’, or ‘intensity’, necessary to bring positive change to your body (like fat loss). It’s a complex topic, and we’ll save that story for another day – what’s important for this article is understanding that 5 push-ups done well can often bring you much more benefit than 15 push-ups done poorly.

Not only does our approach to exercise give you access to the well-established benefits of HIIT, it also allows you to get them safely. Besides the obvious fat loss and lean muscle development benefits that we’re known for, we’re also here to help you build a balanced, efficient, and resilient body, with strength that carries over into the rest of your life. For us, it’s less about the ‘fanciness’ and ‘sexiness’ of an exercise, and more about the effectiveness of each exercise.

Life is busy, don’t overthink it – come in, get your dose of exercise safely, and move on with the rest of your day.

Be Brave,
Ian