Are Fitness Boot Camps The Answer For Quick Weight Loss?

Over the last few years there has been a rapid growth in the popularity of fitness boot camps. In fact, if you walk into any gym it is likely you'll meet at least one customer who likes to tell people how to lose weight with the type of HIIT style workouts associated with a boot camp.

There is one question on the lips of those who see adverts for this type of fitness class. Do they actually work as well as they claim to?


In short, yes. Once you get past all of the marketing hype and sales talk behind the product, a boot camp is merely offering advice which has existed in gyms worldwide for over twenty five years. Simply put, it's nothing new or ground-breaking.

The next time you workout at your local gym you should take a look around and see if you can spot somebody who is performing high intensity interval training or a circuit session. Essentially, this is exactly the same as a boot camp workout.

So if it's advice which has existed for years already, why are boot camps often billed as miracle weight loss solutions? Quite simply, it all comes down to marketing. By giving something a catchy name and making outrageous claims about the results you can achieve, you'll undoubtedly have something which appeals to a lot of people. This marketing tends to be misleading in a lot of cases, as it's often aimed at individuals who have never exercised before, with promises of instant results.

By exaggerating the truth, of course, these classes often make it tougher to succeed. Every class has to top it's rivals so you end up in a situation where everybody is claiming to be the best workout ever, even though all of them are essentially providing the same thing and if you stuck to any of them you'd see results.

Make no mistake about it, there is no miracle formula at it's root. Despite all of the claims about instant fat loss and promises of increasing your fitness by 200%, the workouts themselves are basic, primal affairs which often stick to the old classic moves. In most cases you don't need any equipment at all.

The one area which still stands in the boot camp's advantage, of course, is the group atmosphere it promotes. There are many people who find it difficult to push themselves without others around them doing the same thing. This is where boot camps and fitness classes are first rate. However, those looking to join purely because of the fitness benefits are quick to notice that the actual workouts are very basic. Because of this realization, the whole boot camp phenomenon is now dying off and people are beginning to get the same effective workouts at home without the need for memberships.


Ultimately, boot camps are a mixed bag. While the science behind their HIIT workouts is sound, if you ask a boot camp trainer how to lose weight you're not going to get a miracle answer and the marketing behind the whole gimmick often discredits it's product. While you could certainly get the same physical results by yourself, if you place a huge importance on working out in a group atmosphere then boot camps could be just what you're looking for.