We succeed only when you succeed
Our professional success depends on your personal sports, fitness and life achievements. Our client’s physical and mental well-being is our best advertising.
It is very important to surround yourself with people with positive influence — we will motivate you every day, providing with an optimistic winning attitude because we love what we do and we are good at it! Sports, Martial Arts and Fitness lifestyle are our passion and we will share with you our knowledge and enthusiasm.
Exercising is what the majority of people that go to health clubs do to FEEL themselves fit: few sets of ten to twenty repetitions on a circuit of selectorized machines and half an hour on the stationary bike after that, all while reading a magazine.
Sadly, never mind the long hours they put in, those people are usually the ones that don’t get any results. Also they usually end up hating their “fitness routine” (that exactly what it becomes – something that they HAVE to do during a certain period of time) and quitting for good.
What’s even sadder that kids as well as young athletes copy these routines and we are in process of developing an entire generation unable to produce quality movement and injury-prone.
Training, on the other end, is what MAKES you fit. It requires your full concentration and promotes a never-ending fun because it’s progressively more challenging. You will never see any of our clients “exercising” on a selectorized machine that does most of the work for you. Nor you will see them doing “cardio” reading a newspaper.
Our workouts are intense and athletic in nature – challenging you to do things you would never thought possible before. Our workouts are also progressive – meaning we have a progression for ANY level (varied in difficulty and intensity) starting from a complete beginner and to the most advanced athlete.
Training will require you to be fully alert and present and will call and improve upon a multitude of attributes including mental focus, creativity, strength, quickness, agility, flexibility, stamina, power, cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, coordination, balance and accuracy. In other words it will make you FEEL ALIVE and achieve your full potential both mentally and physically.
Movement Selection vs. Exercise Selection
At The Underground Gym we focus our workouts on natural movement patterns of the human body: pushing, pulling, squatting, bending, twisting, flexing, moving, carrying, throwing, punching, kicking and jumping.
Selectorized machines were designed on the other end to simulate the isolated movements of individual muscles in a single plane of motion. In everyday life, sports and combat though you have to use your body as a unit in a multi-dimensional environment.
When you train individual muscles instead of functional movements, your applicable, real-world strength becomes handicapped. If you train with only one plane of motion, your body becomes. one-dimensional and injury-prone.
Therefore we concentrate on compound, multi-plane movements that will improve useful strength, core stability, flexibility, coordination, endurance and, ultimately, health.
Additional benefits will include a noticeable neuroendocrine response, meaning that they will alter you neurologically and hormonally. It’s like being on performance enhancing and anti-aging drugs, but completely naturally and legal. And a lean athletic body as the only side effect! That response is the one to blame for quick results you will get with Movement-Oriented Training.
Open Space vs. Clotted Space
When you come into the vast majority of gyms you will see dozens of weight and cardio machines stuffed as close as possible to fit as many people as possible. There is usually very little room space available to perform any kind of athletic movements unless it’s in the middle of a walkway.
At The Underground Gym we emphasize the room space and use it to the utmost: to move, jump, lift, throw, tumble, box and wrestle – in other words, to train in an athletic manner, because it is simply the best way to train.
Coaching You vs. Training You
We teach proper natural biomechanics to increase your daily performance and free your potential, while keeping you injury free and healthy as a number one priority as opposed to training you to learn the selectorized machines functions and set-ups.
The truth is that success in sports, fitness and combat, just like anywhere else, very commonly requires some effective coaching. Every great athlete and trainee in the world have professional coaches that plan out the best possible training schedules and workouts according to their students individual needs. A great coach will inspire, motivate and lead to success with confident competence, acquired through years of experience, theoretical research and practical application.
Through our coaching you will be able to apply the learned universal biomechanical principals and acquired mental edge to ANY other activity as well as continue to train and progress on your own, if you decide to stop training with us (although, why would you — it’s so much fun!) or move to a different location.
Our method of training is functional, has real world applications and will quickly take you on the next level. We practice what we preach and always continue to learn from the worlds best coaches, pioneers and practitioners of various fitness, nutrition, sports and combat disciplines and arts to make sure that you get the latest invitational methods combined with our “secret” tried-and-proven “twists”, quickly and efficiently leading you directly to your goals.
Practical Applications vs. Dogmatic Forms
Just like we put practical efficiency, natural movements and common sense above theoretical nonsense and unrealistic solutions in sports and fitness training, we do the same in our approach to Combat Arts training. Our Combat Principles and their Direct Applications are constantly tested by us and our clients in Boxing and Thaiboxing bouts, Grappling matches, No-Holds-Barred Fights and daily Police and Military work.
We don’t practice standing in horse stances for hours, predetermined katas (forms), step sparring or bowing to each other every thirty seconds. Instead we concentrate on achieving maximum proficiency (what we call “Flow”) in Stand Up, Clinch and Ground (both sport and street applications) by utilizing a variety of continuous, progressively harder partner and equipment drills with and without weapons designed to find and sharpen your individual style of fighting. Working with another resisting human being forms a cornerstone for our training. And, of course, we spar.
That doesn’t mean that we beat the hell out of each other. We need our training partners to be unhurt and healthy in order to continue to grow as fighters. Also, we have a variety of people (both guys and girls) with different goals and not all of them are looking to become a professional fighter or a cop.
Therefore everybody leaves their ego at the door and comes in to help one another to progress. Every drill has a specific purpose and the amount of contact is varied for your specific goal and is different for the more experienced and a beginner who decided to just give it a try. It’s up to you where you want to take it.
But we can assure you in one thing: whether you decide to practice Combat Arts as a hobby, to stay sharp and fit, to fight in a competition or your job requires you to be proficient at it, the training at The Underground Gym is serious, professional and effective. You will be receiving a high-quality instruction in the most efficient combat-proven techniques of Muay Thai kickboxing, Grappling, Russian Combat Systema and Kali.