Back To School

Now that the kids are back to school it’s time to focus on you at Pivotal Fitness, your local Taylors gym. Begin your new lifestyle with our 30 Day Fitness Challenge.

To participate:

Find a non-member teammate
Register at Pivotal Fitness Ladies Desk between August 22nd through the 30th
Set the appointment for your initial assessment

This fitness program includes:

Fun atmosphere
Supportive environment
Food education
Before & after analysis of personal improvements
Complete access to Pivotal Fitness Taylors gym and childcare
Weekly and monthly prizes

To sign up call Raquel at 864-292-8873.

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5 Fitness Travel Tips

On your way out? Feeling a little bit anxious about leaving your Greenville Gym routine? Worry not. Here’s 5 travel tips to keep your waistline happy.

  1. Hydrate. Thirst often inaccurately manifests as hunger. If you’ve been eating enough (or too much) and hunger is still creeping in, think water. Proper hydration also helps to fight travel-related fatigue.
  2. Skip the 3 S’s: snacks, soda, and sugar. When you’re on the go, it can be tough to eat well. We know that. To keep things healthy say no to soda (even diet, because yuck), snacks (the sugar-dense ones), and sugar (the processed stuff found in your favorite candy bar). If you are thirsty, drink water. If you are hungry and need a snack, opt for a low-carb, high-protein snack, such as nuts. If you want something sugary, opt for natural fruits or dry fruits.
  3. Stand up and stretch. Sitting for long periods of time does you no good. Your posture is compromised. Lower back pain can start up. Plus, it can create restlessness, followed by anxiety. If you find yourself sitting around, get up and walk around a little bit to keep your muscles supple and your mind at ease. Do some light stretching. If standing and moving around isn’t an option, you can still do seated or chair exercises to loosen up and get the blood flowing. If flying for long periods of time, get up and walk the length of the plane every hour or two.
  4. Yoga. Missing out on your Greenville yoga routine? No problem. Try yoga online. There are plenty of online yoga resources out there featuring travel-friendly options and practice quickies for when you’re running short on time.
  5. Pick protein. Because it keeps the pounds off. Period. Choose snacks that are high in protein, but low in carbs (nuts, hard-boiled eggs, beef jerky, etc.). Choose meal options that are protein-packed (lean meats, eggs, beans, and greens). But don’t forget, you do need carbs for energy! Just try to keep you carb choices clean. Legumes, low glycemic fruits, and vegetables, are your best options.

When you are away, don’t undo all that hard work you’ve put in at the Greenville athletic club. Don’t be obsessive about it, but don’t be too loose about it either. Keep moving. Keep eating well. Keep as close to routine as possible, but also leave room for flexibility (and dessert…because YOLO!).

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Top 3 Fitness Inspirations

If I had to pick the top health and fitness inspirations, these three would be it. They’ve all put in years, if not decades, of work. They’ve tested. They’ve re-tested. And finally, they’ve developed mastery of not only their craft, but their teachings and delivery of information.

  • Tim Ferriss. Fast track your weight loss with the slow carb diet. No, this isn’t some atkins diet knock off. This is a healthy diet for those who really need to shed excess pounds or for those who aren’t too jazzed on putting in a lot of time at the Greenville athletic club, but still want to maintain a sculpted, lean physique. In his book, the 4 Hour Body, you’ll learn a lot more about how to effectively manage your efforts to maximize your gym results. If you are a serious athlete or lifter, slow carb probably isn’t an optimal diet plan for you. Tim gets into that in the book. He also presents lots of great exercises and therapeutics that you can perform at the Greenville health club.
  • Krissy Mae Cagney. If you want access to many FREE HIIT and metabolic circuit workouts, head over to Krissy Mae Cagney’s Facebook, where she posts new workouts several times per week and other valuable health and wellness information and inspiration. She’s no nonsense and knows a tank load when it comes to dieting and working out. She also offers multiple training/nutrition plans on her website. Check them out if you need more structure in your Greenville sports club routine. Greenville Gym has all of the tools you’ll need to follow through with these programs.
  • Kino MacGregor. This one’s for all the yogis or potential yogis out there. No one knows yoga like Kino. To build more strength, core intelligence, and confidence in super difficult postures, Kino is your girl. Not a yoga fanatic? That’s no problem. Kino instructs to all levels. The bulk of her teachings are on her YouTube channel. You can also find full-length classes with her on YogaVibes.com. If you’re interested in starting a yoga practice, check out our Greenville yoga options!
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5 Reasons to Take Advantage of Greenville Gym’s Ladies Only Area

For some women, the last place they want to be is a gym full of showy men pumping iron. If you don’t want testosterone distractions interrupting your flow, enjoy the privacy of our ladies only gym, a 4,000 square foot beautifully appointed and fully equipped facility.

Designed with women in mind, this space features a 1,500 square foot group fitness area, separate strength and cardio equipment and spaces, and all of the gym essentials you could possibly desire.

Here’s 5 advantages of working out in Greenville’s ladies gym:

  1. Relaxed Atmosphere. No pressure here. No need to impress. Just do you.
  2. Limited Distractions. Better achieve your health objectives. Minimize distractions. Maximize results.
  3. Increased Comfortability. Sometimes it can be daunting to work out in a male-dominated realm. Insecurities bubble to the surface and all you want to do is walk out the door. This fem-friendly space makes working out feel more comfortable and less intimidating.
  4. VIP Attention. This beautiful space comes complete with a separate ladies service staff. You will love all of the VIP attention.
  5. Connection. Make new female connections with like-minded women.

Greenville Gym offers only the best in terms of cardiovascular and strength training equipment. Enjoy state-of-the art cardio machines, including treadmills, ellipticals, arc trainers, recumbent and upright bikes, and much more! Take advantage of top-of-the line strength training equipment, including circuit training equipment, functional training equipment, and free weights. Our ladies only area has it all!

What’s more, Greenville health club also boasts a full schedule of Group Fitness Classes, including Pilates and yoga. Click here for more information about the Greenville sports club Group Fitness Classes.

Plus, Greenville athletic club offers personal training sessions designed specifically to align with your training needs or objectives. Click here to learn more about our personal training services. 

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Fitness Tips for Women

Busting your behind on the elliptical and banging out a gazillion crunches isn’t going to cut it, ladies.

If you’re concerned with getting or staying in shape but don’t have countless hours to put in, here’s 6 gym tips on what you should be doing to maximize your Greenville health club workouts.

  • Up the Intensity: Coasting on the elliptical or treadmill at a cozy speed probably won’t do much for your bod. The biggest mistake women make in their training is failing to exercise with adequate intensity. High-intensity interval training, or HIIT, is typically a 10- to 20-minute routine that alternates short, intense bursts of activity with moderate-exertion recovery periods. It’s the optimal way to enhance your total-body fitness, torch calories, burn fat, and build strength.
  • Train Hard: Are you training hard enough at the Greenville health center? It’s pretty simple to assess your efforts. Sweat, an elevated heart rate, and lactic acid production (i.e., feeling the “burn”) are all indicators that you are putting in work that will pay off.
  • Balance Strength Training and Cardio: Ladies, you can’t get toned, lean muscle by limiting your workouts to cardio routines. You will burn up all the muscle that you have and end up looking stick thin. So, pick up a barbell or some free weights, and/or bust out some pushups and pullups, to kickstart the strength-building process. Check out the Greenville Sports Club Group Fitness schedule to find classes that feature a balance of strength training and cardio.
  • Modify. There’s no shame in modifying an exercise. Modified push-ups, for example, have long been considered the weak girl’s exercise. Just not so. If you have a difficult time doing the knees-off-the-ground variation – so much so that your form ends up suffering – the move is futile. Be smart, do the modified style, and get more bang for your bod, including a stronger upper body and core.
  • Eat to Win. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can eat whatever you want because you’ve put in a hard workout. Nutrition is a HUGE piece of the fitness puzzle. If your nutrition is off, you will not realize the results you want. What you eat and how much you eat matters, workout or no workout. Eat well. Eat clean. Eat enough. To put together a diet plan, consult an expert at the Greenville Gym Nutritional Center.
  • Minimize distractions; maximize results. To really get your head in the gym game, enjoy the privacy of the Greenville athletic club ladies only gym – a 4,000 square foot beautifully appointed and fully equipped facility complete with a separate ladies service staff. Featuring a 1,500 square foot group fitness area and separate strength and cardio equipment, this fem-friendly space boasts all of the gym essentials.
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5 Reasons to Work with a Personal Trainer

Simply stated, working with a trainer is a great way to know 1) where you are and 2) where you want to be. Also, working one on one with an exceptional certified personal trainer is a great way to:

  1. Push past plateaus. Maybe you’ve hit a roadblock in your training. One of our Greenville health club trainers can help pull you out of your fitness rut, determine areas of weakness, and implement a combination of concentrated fitness and nutrition coaching specifically designed for you.
  2. Receive expert guidance. Maybe it’s your first foray into fitness. If you’ve limited gym experience, a Greenville sports club personal trainer can be incredibly valuable. Learn how to use the equipment effectively. Learn how to design a workout effectively. Learn how to make the most of your gym time so you can realize results in no time!
  3. Sharpen your focus. Maybe group fitness classes and standard gym settings are overwhelming or distracting for you. A more private, intimate training experience can definitely bring more focus and comfortability to your workouts.
  4. Tackle your fitness obstacles. Whether it be fat loss, strength, mobility, body transformation, sports performance, and/or injury rehab or intervention, we’ve got you covered.
  5. Exercise on your schedule. Personal training aligns with your schedule and needs.

Want to give personal training a whirl?

When you join the Greenville gym, we schedule a free initial personal training session so you can test out this service. During your intro session, your trainer will perform some basic fitness assessments and discuss your goals/background/nutritional habits to create a recommended training trajectory. No commitments to packages are necessary until you are sure this special service is for you.

Whatever your health and wellness goals, our Greenville athletic club trainers can help.

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4 Group Fitness Classes to Boost Your Cardio

Elevate your heart rate, torch calories, and broaden your athletic abilities. Upgrade your cardio in all capacities and choose from one of these group fitness cardio classes, all available at the Greenville health club!

  1. Spinning or Cycle. If you want a motivating workout, try this “spin” on indoor cycling at the Greenville sports club. This cardio workout is low-impact, so it’s very suitable for those who want to counter higher-impact exercises (like running) or for those who have some joint problems. If you think you’re only in for a leg workout, you’re in for a surprise. This is a full-body workout that will not only define and lean out your legs, but sculpt and strengthen all over. Greenville athletic club offers Cycle classes of varying levels and lengths to suit your individual needs. Put on your athletic shoes and get to pedaling!
  2. Zumba. Ditch the workout; hit the dance floor! Cha cha it out in this fun atmosphere set to hypnotic Latin, hip hop, and international rhythms. Combine fast and slow rhythms for an effective, easy-to-follow dance-like aerobic workout sure to target and tone your legs, abs, glutes, and arms. There’s no need for any previous dance experience to reap the benefits of this fat-burning, energizing form of interval training.
  3. Step. Move and groove! Step aerobics caught on in the 80’s as part of the aerobics craze and still prevails as a popular, complete full-body workout. Perform choreographed movements accompanied to music on a raised platform as you boost your cardio, strengthen your lower/upper body, increase coordination and muscular endurance, torch calories, and burn fat. We offer classes for all levels at the Greenville health center. For the beginner/intermediate stepper, join Jessica for a fun-filled hour-long STEP IT routine!
  4. Martial Arts. Everyone from elite athletes to supermodels have long been touting the benefits of Martial Arts as a complete body workout. Develop superior upper body and core strength, quickness and agility, and cardiovascular fitness, enhance posture, and relieve stress simultaneously! Our Martial Arts inspired classes, with programming for all ages and fitness levels, focus on specific techniques and drills. Test out an Air Boxing class with Greenville Gym Coach Dustin or an all levels Cardio Kick class to hone in on your boxing skills. End your session feeling physically and mentally empowered!
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Upgrade Your Fitness with Greenville Yoga

You’re bound to hit a point in your fitness journey where boredom begins to creep its way in. All of the familiar activities – treadmill/elliptical/rowing workouts and picking things up and putting them down – as beneficial as they are, are going to get redundant at some point. Of course, boredom serves as no excuse to just up and drop your Greenville gym fitness routine. But boredom may well serve as a signal that it’s time to switch things up with an unfamiliar Greenville athletic club activity, such as a Greenville yoga class.

Not only will yoga breathe new life into your fitness routine, but it will also complement all of those familiar gym activities. Yoga targets imbalances in the body, with its heavy emphasis on alignment. Yoga steadies the mind, with its emphasis on the breath. Yoga de-stresses the physical and mental body. Yoga strengthens, opens up, and detoxes the body. All of these yoga benefits are sure to boon your traditional Greenville health club routine.

But how do you start?

If a total newbie to the practice, start in a class designed for beginners. Like anything, it’s best to get familiar with the basics to ensure a strong, intelligent foundation before you approach more advanced practices and poses. If you jump right into an advanced practice, you’re bound to get overwhelmed, and even worst, injured. Ease into a practice that has you – a beginner – in mind.

If you want to cultivate a home practice, the Sun Salutations are a great starting point. A complete practice in itself, the energetic and accessible Sun Salutation sequence offers all of the benefits of yoga. You’ll sweat and detox, strengthen all of your muscles, stretch it out, and steady the mind through a focused, controlled breath. The Sun Salutations can also be a great warm-up for your workout. Hammer out a handful as quickly and mindfully as possible to wake up, warm up, and open up for your Greenville sports club workout ahead!

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4 Basic Ways to Build Even MORE Strength

Have you hit a strength building plateau?

Here are 4 fundamental ways to train for even more strength at the Greenville gym.

  1. Add Load. Adding load (or increasing resistance) to a lift/exercise is a classic way to create more strength and build more muscle. Weight training, for example, employs the principle of progressive overload, in which the muscles are overloaded by striving to lift at least as much weight as they are capable. Sets pile up, and so does the weight. Muscles respond by growing larger and stronger. This process is repeated with progressively heavier weights as the lifter gains more strength and endurance.
  2. Increase Time Under Tension. This can be achieved by performing more reps or performing an exercise longer. This adds to the total work done in your Greenville health club training session.
  3. Increase Range of Motion. In lifting, this is a style of training called progressive movement training, in which the lifter aims to gradually increase the range of motion throughout a training cycle. The lifter will start with a much heavier weight than they could manage in the full range of motion, only moving through a portion of the movement. As the training cycle progresses, the lifter will gingerly increase the range of motion until the joint moves through the full range of the exercise.
  4. Speed Up! Another way to train for more strength, is to increase the tempo of the movement. In lifting, for example, move the bar as fast as possible through the concentric (up) phase of the motion regardless of the load involved. To observers, the increased tempo might not look impressively speedy, but the intention is to explode through the movement as quickly as possible. The workout remains the same in terms of sets, reps and load, but the quality of effort is much greater, as are the training results.

Go heavier, longer and faster to boost your Greenville athletic club training results and create a stronger you. If you need help developing a strength training routine, call on the fitness experts at the Greenville sports club!

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5 Reasons to Hire a Greenville Gym Personal Trainer

Sometimes, the do-it-yourself route just isn’t gonna cut it at the gym. Sometimes, it pays to invest in a professional.

Reasons to Hire a Personal Trainer

  1. Injury Rehab: Are you in recovery mode from an injury and/or accident? Anxious to get back into your normal Greenville health club routine? An experienced personal trainer can enhance the road to recovery by recommending appropriate, muscular-balancing exercises to prevent future injuries.
  2. Safety: If you’re going to train, train right. If you don’t know how to use certain pieces of gym equipment or how to properly perform specific exercises, it’s wise to turn to a personal trainer. Learn how to to perform exercises safely and properly (including which exercises to avoid for your body). Plus, get familiar with the proper and safe use of exercise equipment. Build a strong foundation so you can remain safe and injury-free.
  3. Accountability: Do you find it tough to commit to a regular exercise program? Scheduling regular appointments with a Greenville health center personal trainer will hold you accountable and limit those anti-exercise excuses from cropping up. What’s more, a personal trainer will serve as a motivating, empowering force. It’s always nice to have someone cheering you along on the road to success!
  4. Efficiency: Not seeing results? Hit a training plateau? Don’t waste your time and energy on ineffective exercise routines. Maximize your time and training by turning to a professional. A Greenville sports club personal trainer will customize your workouts so that you can meet your health and wellness goals as quickly and effectively as possible.
  5. Sports-Specific Training: Training for a specific event or sport? Workout with a personal trainer to best prepare yourself for competition. Whether you want to shave some time off of your triathlon or rock your first 5K, a Greenville health center personal trainer can design a program aligned with your sport of choice.

When you join Pivotal Fitness Greenville athletic club, we schedule a free initial personal training session for you to assess your fitness levels, set measurable Greenville gym goals, and discuss nutritional habits. Our personal training services ensure a stronger, healthier you!

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