The Activelab story.

A famous writer once gave this advise young writers: “Write the book that you want to read”. The Activelab was conceived in much the same way. The story begins when I built a couple pieces of exercise equipment for my personal use in my garage, in order to do some exercises I couldn’t do at the gym I belonged to. Then I built a couple more. After a few years, my garage was getting crowded with apparatus and I needed a larger space. So I opened a business called Activelab, which is a pretty strange reason for anyone to open a business

Before Activelab even had a space, I laid down for myself some mandates. First, we wouldn’t do any exercises you can do at a conventional gym. My thinking was that there is no reason for anyone to come to Activelab if they can do the same stuff at other gyms. In the end, Activelab didn’t 100% comply with this mandate, but we came close.

Second, all the exercises had to feel right to my body. Someone had to be the judge of which exercises were right for the program, and since there was no one else around at the time, that role fell to myself. I do have a lifetime of experience in dance, pilates, running, weightlifting, as well as a PhD in Physics, so it seemed to me my judgement is as good as anyone’s.

Third, every exercise had to be interesting. In other words, they had to stimulate the mind as well as the body. Again, this is a subjective matter. What makes an exercise interesting? I know it when I see it.

As Activelab came together, we made some hard decisions. One decision was to emphasis lower body strength. Many people associate strength training with the arms, but we believe strength training for your lower body is more important. The reason for this is that as you age, you actually lose muscle, strength, and power in your legs faster than your arms. This fact surprises a lot of people, so check out the data for yourself here or here.

I’m often asked where the ideas for the Activelab apparatus come from. I’ll relate one story. At the gym a few years ago, I saw a young man, a teenager really, throwing a weighted rubber ball against the cinder block wall, catching it on the rebound, and throwing it back again. I have never seen anyone else before or since that day do this exercise, but what I had seen stuck in my head. Then I had an epiphany. What if instead of a cinder block wall, you threw the ball into a vertical trampoline? That would be interesting. So I found a used indoor mini-trampoline for sale on Craigslist, I went to the hardware store and bought some clamps. There is a squat rack in my garage, and I jerry-rigged a way of hanging this trampoline vertically. I found some plastic exercise balls, and the crazy thing is that the idea worked. This eventually led to the trampoline rack at Activelab.

Every piece of equipment at Activelab has a story like this, that often involves the question, “what if?”

I still regularly go to a conventional gym to lift weights - dumbbells mostly. Weight lifting is by far the most effective way of building muscle. At the same time, the traditional weight lifting paradigm is limiting. There are many other wonderful ways of moving your body, if that is important to you. I recommend to everyone, go to the gym and lift weights, and come to Activelab to move.