Meet Our Advertiser: Q&A With Anytime Fitness’ Daniella Harris

Daniella Harris of Anytime Fitness.

We recently sat down with Daniella Harris, owner of Anytime Fitness at 920 Hamilton St., to talk about Anytime’s unique outlook on personal training.

Q: What’s your businesses’ philosophy?
A: We’re solutions-focused. We focus in getting results for our clients. We do that primarily through guided training. So whether it be one-on-one personal training or small group or team training, that’s primarily how we deliver the best results. For us, it’s all about support, personal support. That what I think we do better than most everybody.

People come into a gym with awesome intentions, and that first week they come in and get on a treadmill and say, what do I do? We want to avoid that. That’s why we get new members in front of somebody, usually a trainer, as soon as possible. The last thing we want is for somebody to feel like they don’t know what to do. If they feel like they don’t know what to do, they don’t come.

Q: What about clients who want to work by themselves?
A: There are people that only want that. We like to think we give folks like that a little bit more help, too. We do a fitness consult so we can establish a baseline for them, then we say, based on your goals, here’s what we think you should be doing. We want to keep checking in with you over time to make sure you understand what all our equipment can do for you. We bring them back every 6 to 8 weeks, and say, based on what you said what your goal was, here’s where we think you ought to be, so let’s check.

Q: Tell us about the MyZone system.
A: MyZone helps users see their effort. I don’t know how many times I’m on a treadmill and I think I’m working hard, but I’m not really working that hard. So you see it, and you know that if you want to achieve your goal, maybe you need to step up a little bit more. MyZone is a heart rate-based training system. It uses a heart rate monitor belt. The users wear this, and this records your heart rate. It’s cloud based, so it sends information up into the cloud and brings it back down onto MyZone screens. It shows you in color where you are relative to your max heart rate. To achieve the best weight loss, you have to keep your heart rate within a certain percentage of max for a given period of time. It visualizes that for you.

A big thing in training these days is interval training, you don’t want to be on any piece of equipment and be at, let’s say, 70 percent of your max for an hour, because what you want to do is you want to be able to bring your heart rate up and then back down in intervals, because you burn more calories that way.

If you understand those concepts, you can design programs around it. That’s essentially what trainers do. Trainers never really know if the person they’re working with is working hard. It’s mostly a guessing game. It’s just a way to help you understand what your effort is. It’s effort that gets you your reward.

Q: You’ve been open for about a year, are there any changes in your offerings?
A: We’ve used the first year to try to grow our membership, now we’re introducing other options as well. One of the things we started doing, is we wanted to offer more value for our memberships. We included live classes, group fitness classes, into our memberships, like Zumba, cardio kickboxing. We’re growing our group class options, the freebies that we’ll throw in with membership and we’re building out our paid training offerings.

We also have virtual classes, using Les Mills training. We have 8 or 9 different types of programming, including a kickboxing option. We have people who just do only that. We have multiple ways for people who are interested in getting to their goals.

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