Kieser Training review, and the fitness lobby

Unfair contract terms, marketing brainwashing, and questionable strength training exercises that might do more harm than good. While we need better regulations to prevent fitness companies from doing what they want with their customers, we can also defend ourselves by knowing how they lure us into trusting them.

Contract terms against customers

When I signed up to a one-year contract at my local Kieser Training gym, I knew there was no other option than a 12-months minimum commitment, take it or leave it: no short-term option, no pay as you go. What they didn’t mention is a subtle condition according to which you might end up paying them for a whole new year even if you just decided to cancel your membership.

So after paying about 50 euros a month for 12 months, I decided that I could not afford it any more. With my new training regimen, very intense and with long periods of rest, this is equivalent to me paying 15–25 euros each time that I go to the gym. Compare that to any swimming pool, where you pay no more than 5 euros per entry. Or any entrance fee that you can think of, other than a rock concert or a night at the opera (certainly more entertaining than a session at the gym). The situation is clearly progressing towards a complete oligopoly. Once you signed that contract that gave you no choice, companies feel free to blatantly apply unreasonable conditions against you, and their employees look as if they are instructed to ignore the situation they are dealing with, and mask their lack of ethics behind rigid formalism that leaves no space for humanity.

This is in fact what happened. When I went and asked politely to cancel my membership, I was told — to my big surprise — that it would run for another 11 months and there was no way to change that, since I signed the contract that says that the subscription gets automatically renovated for a whole year, unless you give a 2 months notice. We are not talking about 2 months from the day when you decide to cancel, which would still be a lot, but let’s call it “reasonably fair”. What we are talking about, instead, is two months before the end of the first year. That means, if you decide to cancel the contract one month before — or after — the end of the first 12 months, it’s too late and you have no other choice than to pay for the whole year to come.

I tried to point out how unfair it is to impose on their customers a condition that has no reason to exist, but they didn’t want to hear any reason. Like robots unable to listen, they kept repeating that I made a conscious decision and signed a contract, and these are the rules and have to be respected. In my view, unless the rules are clear and discussed together, with a possibility to adjust them according to the expectations of both sides, this is what a lawyer would call “undue influence”: taking an advantage on another person, mostly unaware, based on a position of power or the impossibility of the other person to do otherwise. And in fact, the law often allows people to escape such contracts, but how many are willing to go and speak to an expert?

Flexibility is a human virtue and it should be the norm more than the exception. There’s a powerful, fascinating talk by psychologist Barry Schwartz about the lack of empathy that vexes modern societies: it says that rules are not a substitute for wisdom.

Wondering why you are paying so much?

There are several reasons why we pay so much for such services, and certainly one has to do with the fact that they need to carpet market themselves, and convince you and other people that their bandwagon is the best one. Here is their latest inspirational video of the company I signed my contract with, Kieser Training — directly from their homepage and youtube channel:

“Put your heart into it!”. Such a jumble of nothingness and corporate garbage that I can hardly believe that anyone would get inspired by it. Images and music are overused in order to generate emotions and create an association between the sense of happiness and their brand. With this respect, they are very similar to mobile operators and Internet providers, also very keen on polluting all available information spaces with their junk: street, magazines, news sites, and television. And doing so is very expensive. Many companies that don’t have their core business in the digital space often rely on external agencies to get the job done, and these agencies don’t do it without demanding a large slice of the cake. That could be, let’s say, a budget of 10.000 euros a day, going on for several weeks — while the developers, designers and video editors probably get one tenth of that money, and can be made redundant at any moment by the company they are employed with. It’s a system where a minority of people get rich by producing nothing that has real value, and the majority has to work hard in order to be able to afford overly priced services.

Anyway, let’s not take this too far now. Let’s rather look at some facts.

Is it going to reduce your back pain, or enhance it?

The case that I am describing is emblematic because their training methodology is described as safe and science-based, so they promote themselves as being at the highest spectrum of fitness centres. But is it for real? Should you trust companies that claim to offer a safe training regimen, or is it another marketing game?

To find the answer, one should listen to what biomechanics experts say. People such as Bill DeSimone, author of Congruent exercise — How to make weight training easier on your joints , or Dr. Stuart McGill, professor of spine biomechanics and world-renowned expert in spine function and injury prevention. One paramount question we want to answer to is: to which degree are weight machines joint friendly, as some fitness experts claim?

Take for example the leg press. If you use the MedX leg press at Kieser Training, maybe you won’t overload your knee joint in the initial phase (presumed the angle that you choose for the exercise is right), because the cam profile of that machine is designed to prevent injury. Problem is, due to the lack of a proper lumbar support, it’s relatively easy to stress your disks. In his book Low Back Disorders, Dr McGill says: “The leg press sometimes causes the pelvis to rotate away from the back rest when the weight is lowered. The resultant lumbar flexion produces herniating conditions for the disc”. None of that was I told by the Kieser Training instructor, who apparently thought he should not give me any warning. Or take the lumbar extension machine that they advertise as their most important piece of equipment. When the Kieser Training instructor assisted me during the trial, I felt like the machine did not match at all how my spine would safely work, and in fact I ended up the exercise with some minor back pain. Only later I found out that many doctors never accepted this exercise, as the machine is by definition loading your spine in flexion. According to many, this is a classic bad position for the spine, and the number one way to herniate a disk. Crunch exercises are also problematic, and for the same reason. Dr McGill suggests replacing them with exercises to strengthen the core while not bending the spine: bridges, planks, leg extensions, bird dogs, and “stir the pot” (see the article The man who wants to kill crunches). Needless to say, at Kieser Training you can find a crunch machine, and there’s a chance that you will get back pain at some point, if you commit yourself to train with it regularly.

The MedEx overhead press is also another example of equipment that may pose problems. In fact, not only it lacks an inclined back support, which would lower the pressure on the disks of the upper back (not suited for heavy loads), but it also includes a wide grip, thus giving people an option to do the exercise in a potentially harmful way. Hold the grip with hands wide apart and you’ll find yourself flaring the elbows out and rotating the shoulder externally, a habit that in the long run may enhance the risk of impingement of the rotatory cuff tendons. The MedEx Chest fly machine can also result in bad exercise shape, especially at the end of the set, when the pec deck pulls your arms backward, overstretching the pectoralis muscles. Biceps curl machines have straight handles that don’t allow for the natural movement to occur. Torso rotations machines have to also be used with consideration, as it’s very clear that twisting the spine wrings the disks. And how about neck flexions and extensions? The more I read about biomechanics, the more I believe that the risks of using such machines outdo the benefits.

We all know how easy it is to cherry-pick scientific studies if you want to convince people that your training regimen is the best. Especially when those studies are funded by big companies. I don’t know if that’s the case here, and the topic is highly controversial, but the overall impression about Kieser Training certainly doesn’t get any better at the realisation that they include on their site dry needling as a way to treat sport injuries. For a training and rehabilitation regimen that claims to be science-based, that’s quite surprising. There is in fact little evidence that dry needling works. According to by Professor Lorimer Moseley, “dry needling is not convincingly superior to sham/control conditions and possibly worse than comparative interventions. At best, the effectiveness of dry needling remains uncertain […]. To base a clinical recommendation on such fragile evidence seems rash and risks exposing patients to an unnecessary invasive procedure” (source: Dry needling for myofascial pain. Does the evidence make the grade?). Paul Ingraham from painscience.com (also a top source of science-based, high quality information), claims that “digging into the actual results, it doesn’t take me long to start rolling my eyes and sympathising with BIM’s opinion: there’s not much here”.

At the end of this, if not certainty, at least there’s space for doubts: isn’t maybe the case that the Kieser Training principles in the end boil down to the simplistic idea that everything is fine, as long as you move slowly (and pay quickly without complain)? That could actually be the most appropriate tagline for their next inspirational video.