SINCE June, New Yorkers have been paying for the privilege of doing sprints and hills on treadmills, alternated with weightlifting, to the blare of nightclub music in a mirror-lined Chelsea studio. The class is Barry’s Bootcamp, a West Hollywood staple that migrated east in search of a wider audience, much like Spinning before it. The cost is $285 for 10 hourlong sessions, compared with $165 at the original outpost — this despite the absence of the instructor Barry Jay, a founder of the company with John Mumford, the chief executive, and his wife, Rachel Mumford, the president.
The move to New York, Mr. Mumford said in an interview, was prompted by encroaching competition. “To be honest, we were starting to see knockoffs,” he said. Instructors “left us and opened up some version of what we do.”
“Someone will try to rip us off in New York, and people in New York won’t know any better,” he said. “Those knockoffs put the fear in us.”
That fear is warranted, considering the continuing battle between two rival Marine-style boot camps that both offer indoor obstacle courses with shredded-rubber flooring. In Midtown, there is Pure Power Boot Camp, which was started in 2003 by Lauren Brenner, a former Wall Street trader, and Warrior Fitness Boot Camp, started in 2008 by two of Ms. Brenner’s ex-employees, former Marines who had never before trained civilians.
In September, Theodore H. Katz, a United States magistrate judge, ruled that the two former Pure Power employees, Alexander Fell and Ruben Belliard, breached their duty of loyalty to Pure Power and ordered them to pay nearly $250,000 total. According to the judgment, Mr. Belliard stole Ms. Brenner’s business plan, start-up manual and operations manual, and after destroying signed employee agreements, even bragged to Mr. Fell in an e-mail that the “cat is in the bag,” to which Mr. Fell replied “hallelujah.” (On Wednesday, Mr. Fell wrote in an e-mail that “the decision is under appeal.”)
It might seem surprising that boot camps, an evergreen, military-inflected concept featuring basic calisthenics like push-ups, are still popular in 2011, let alone that recruits are so sought after in Manhattan. But the term resonates powerfully with consumers because they think it means “a speedy way to get results that I want,” said Paul Estabrooks, an exercise professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. And from a management perspective, boot camps are easy to administer; many trainers run them in public parks, inclement weather only adding to the workout’s reputation for toughness.
But with so many, the question becomes: how to tell them apart?
Barry’s is an upbeat class populated by runners, the occasional celebrity like Kim Kardashian and other improbably pretty people. At one recent class, a female client was wearing a sparkly headband; a guy sprinting on a treadmill set to speed 10.5 had stars tattooed on his unseasonably tan chest. “It’s fun, sweaty, sceney,” said Samantha Warshauer, a 31-year-old lawyer in Manhattan. “I saw Puff Daddy.”
But Barry’s is no cute camp. The warm-up is brief; expect to go from jog to hustle in a few minutes. The locker room is so small, changing is a tangle of elbows, though there are Malin & Goetz products in the showers.
As One, a form of bare-bones training that’s beloved by triathletes, lawyers and doctors, has no showers on their premises, a 10- to 15-minute warm-up, a cool-down using foam rollers to promote muscle recovery and an emphasis on form. Mark Merchant, a certified strength and conditioning specialist, said he and his co-owner of As One, George Vafiades, a triathlon coach with a bachelor’s degree in physiology, don’t like to call the twice-a-week program a boot camp because too many of those “throw caution to the wind. People tend to be asked to do what they haven’t necessarily progressed to have the ability to do.”
Maritza Ospina, a 33-year-old financial consultant, likes As One and said that Mr. Merchant or Mr. Vafiades tells participants how heavy their weights should be, and when they should pile on more. “They do a good job of reading everyone’s ability,” Ms. Ospina said, adding that when she tried Barry’s, which can have 40 participants a class compared with 16 maximum at As One, she felt as if she had to guess between five- and eight- pound weights.
Then there is Warrior: a brutal hour of, for example, going from stairs to situps with a weighted medicine ball to monkey bars to scaling free-standing walls (some six feet tall), while often being asked to count repetitions in unison with other bedraggled recruits. “Their yelling keeps the class interactive,” Mr. Belliard said.
“You are there to work,” Caroline Limpert, a co-founder of Fitist, a Web site that offers cross-training plans at studios citywide, said of Warrior. Not for the “gray ratty towels” (or, this reporter would add, for the dead cockroaches in the stairwell). Yet the program’s three-month $1,500 unlimited plan is its most popular, Mr. Fell said. During one class, an incredible hulk named Johnny Garcia did clapping push-ups so high, he looked like a fish bouncing on land. After his first time, Mr. Garcia, 44, a business owner, said, “My legs were spaghetti.”
Warrior likes to play up its authenticity. “What separates us, and differentiates us from Barry’s and all the others, is we are Marines,” Mr. Fell said. “Our clients know they are getting the real deal.”
The real deal is elsewhere, too, though. Five former Marines and a reservist teach at Pure Power, including their location in Jericho, N.Y. Kenny Wong, a former Marine who used to be a personal trainer at DavidBartonGym, runs a Peace Core Fitcamp on the High Line year-round (10 classes for $250). And the Beast Boot Camp at Chelsea Piers is led by a former Army sergeant; his assistant is in the Air Force Reserves (three days a week for two months is $720 for nonmembers).
At both Warrior and Pure Power, the class had the super fit and stragglers, but Ms. Brenner of Pure Power was more attentive to helping and teaching slower-pokes, who sometimes grumbled (out of earshot) as they tried to hang on to a wall with rock-climbing handles, “Oh, my God, I’m so tired.” During a recent class, participants — who all wear fatigues and Pure Power T-shirts — seemed unafraid to expose sometimes saggy midriffs in the name of finishing a set of “mountain” climbers, and encouraged one another as they carried 25-pound sandbags. People of “different shapes and sizes can come and feel part of a platoon, a family,” Ms. Brenner said after class.
Nicole Blum, 32, a publicist for Guerlain, said that a year of prewedding workouts at Pure Power made her “teeny and rock-solid,” and she added that instructors are “not mean just for the sake of being mean.”
For now, the competition among the different classes seems healthy. These days, Barry’s gets 2,000 weekly visits in Manhattan, up from roughly 1,200 in August, according to Joey Gonzalez, the chief operating officer who is pictured on the company’s Web site tugging at a black tank to reveal his musculature (and a nipple). Asked about the infighting in the boot-camp market, Mr. Gonzalez, with a sunny disposition befitting Barry’s Californian origins, said: “I’ve done a really good job of trying to not get involved with those politics. To be quite honest, I didn’t come to New York to play games.”
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