Everyone knows that the only way to get to the gym week after week is to schedule an appointment with a personal trainer. It’s pure motivation to know that someone is waiting for you ready to work you out. Who hasn’t paid a huge yearly fee to a gym and gone once or twice during the entire year. The guilt, the waste, the sense that there’s somewhere you should be but you just can’t get yourself over there.

Awful. 

The Park Slope Fitness Collective, located at 366 Seventh Avenue at 11th Street, is a perfect antidote to this problem. It’s a gym owned and run by personal trainers. It has two rooms with most of the equipment you’ll find at a gym plus free weights, mats and balls. There’s no membership fee or yearly dues. You simply pay for your training session and that’s that. The sessions are reasonably priced and the trainers are top notch. Most of them used to work at The Slope Health Club on Union Street.

Apparently, trainers at gyms like the Slope are low men and women on the totem pole; they only see a fraction of what the client is paying and they aren’t well treated by management.

For me, it’s refreshing to see a group of trainers with a healthy
entrepreneruial spirit, working for themselves, and running the show
the way it should be run.

My trainer, Elizabeth Pongo is the cat’s meow. She’s a very smart person who knows a great deal about the body. She also happens to be a stand-up comedian. She keeps me moving non-stop for a full hour; I feel like I’m really learning the correct way to do weight training and exercises. Each session ends with something she calls an "assisted stretch," which is a massage merged with a body lengthening the likes of which I’ve never experienced. What’s more, she takes my goals: to get definition in my upper arms, to look good in tank tops, and to lose weight very, very seriously. Plus, she cheers me on when I tell her about my running, my kids, my newest running bra. She’s really great.

I think the Fitness Collective is really on to something. If you want information about the Collective or a free first session with Elizabeth you can e-mail her at pongofitness.yahoo.com

Yours from Brooklyn,
OTBKB