If hurling truck tires, swinging a sledgehammer and lugging around enormous water jugs doesn’t sound like parts of a workout to you, you may not be doing it right.
Lee Davy and Jared Postance are co-founding CEOs of the Dynamic Conditioning Centre (DCC), a gym that swaps out individual exercise machines for Herculean feats of strength and endurance.
You won’t find bench presses or arm curl machine in DCC’s 5,400-square-foot facility — instead you will find an obstacle course that includes an enormous truck tire that members flip down a track, a sledgehammer used to knock a car tire forward, thick ropes for climbing and harnesses for pulling large weights across the floor in a crawl. The simple exercises are all designed to train the whole body, and from the looks of the exhausted members milling about after doing a run through the obstacle course, they are effective.
Davy adds that the focus is on whole-body training rather than the abstract method of training individual muscle groups, which is so prevalent at most gyms.
“It’s practical, it’s functional and it transfers over to everyday life. If you’re training the body as a whole you’re going to have a stronger body overall,” Davy said.
While the gym officially opened in April 2005, the original facility was only 2,400-square-feet and was poorly located.
“We were down an alleyway — even people who were looking for us couldn’t find us,” Davy joked.
This summer Davy and Postance decided to move to the larger 5,400-square-foot facility just south of Bloor and Yonge streets. The extra space has meant more activities offered, a longer obstacle course and more room for members to exercise at the same time.
DCC has roughly 250 members — its owners actually hope membership numbers stay relatively small due to their training philosophy of making sure every single member is being motivated to train. Davy and Postance aren’t the types to sit back and let members procrastinate — they make a point to hound members to come in for workouts and make use of their paid memberships.
“We want people to be a part of the lifestyle and the community,” Davy said.
Running the gym has been a challenge, as is the case with any small business, but Davy and Postance expect the new, renovated location will continue to help them grow.
“We’ve been pumping a lot of our sweat and finances into this place and this site has breathed new life into DCC,” Postance said.
Sitting on a tire after a visibly gruelling run through the obstacle course, DCC member and 35-year-old marketing manager Tracy Li-Moshenko is tired but determined.
“It was hard, but I could have done better,” she said.
