Call me old-fashioned, but my first reaction to the idea of shelling out a few hundred bucks for a fitness boot camp that requires me to wake up at 5 a.m. and perform deep lunges and endless push-ups before the sun rises just, well, isn’t a high priority on my spending list. Especially when said workout also involves some perfect-bodied instructor yelling at me like I’m an army recruit. I know I’m not good at doing push-ups—I don’t need a 5 a.m. reminder. So when a friend recently asked me to sign up for an early-morning boot camp with her, my first reaction was a polite “I’ll have to think about it.”
Yet somehow, from classes at gyms to expensive weeklong camps, these hardcore workouts have become a fad-defying fitness trend with staying power—and for good reason, I discovered after a little research. Studies show that boot camps can offer long-term physical and mental advantages. Does everyone reap these rewards, though? As someone who feels slightly averse to the whole idea, will I benefit by merely signing up and showing up? Or does it take certain a personality type to get the most out of a boot camp?
Effectiveness
The American Council on Exercise decided it was also interested in this whole army-inspired phenomenon and conducted a study to look at just how effective these instructor-led workouts actually are.
Exercise scientists at the Exercise and Health Program of the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, studied six men and six women ages nineteen to twenty-nine as they added a boot camp workout to their fitness regime. They found that the average exerciser burned about ten calories per minute during the workout, or about four hundred calories in just forty minutes.
“That’s obviously going to benefit you in terms of weight loss,” says Ashley Perez, a Bay Area–based personal trainer and boot camp instructor. “But it does more. In addition to a big calorie burn, you’re also building muscle, which makes it unique.”
