As a world-class athlete and five-time Olympian, Jorge Bonnet has seen the inside of a lot of fitness gyms.
He spent countless hours lifting weights and working exercise equipment to give him the strength to drop opponents on the judo mat and the power to drive his legs faster down a bobsled track.
He followed the workout formulas his Puerto Rican national team coaches laid out for him and qualified for two Summer Olympics judo competitions (Los Angeles in 1984; Seoul in 1988; and Barcelona in 1992). After nearly 20 years in judo he retired and a year switched to bobsled, going on to compete in three Winter Olympics (Albertville in 1992, Lillehammer in 1994 and Nagano in 1998).
Competing for his native Puerto Rico, Bonnet achieved success, finishing seventh in judo in 1984, but something was missing in his development, which he discovered when he visited Cuba and East Germany and saw with his own eyes how athletes in those countries were training. Instead of traditional bench presses and arm curls with dumbells and barbells, which force weight room users to follow single-plane movements, they were using their own body weight as resistance while moving their muscles multidirectionally at high intensity, simulating natural real-life movements. It taught Bonnet to literally think outside the box.
"I went from a sport that was highly intense, highly metabolic to a sport that was very explosive, so my whole training had to change," said Bonnet, 48, a strength and conditioning coach now based in Alabama. "I've been exposed to every training modality out there that relates to athletic performance and I never saw a true carryover or transferability for what happened in the gym versus what happened on the mat, on the court, on the ice.
"It's all machine-defined, and in all the machines about 95 per cent of the movement is square or north-south. The world is not square, it's rounded. Why do we keep training square in the gym when the world comes to you in every direction -- north, south, east, west and rotational planes of direction?"
Having started judo at a young age to protect himself from the neighbourhood bullies, Bonnet gained an early understanding of human biomechanics and applied that to the design of his PurMotion exercise equipment, which he began marketing in 2010. PurMotion utilizes a series of bars, handholds, cables, ropes, pulleys and harnesses, all attached in a cage design which allows users to perform a wide range of exercises, most performed while in a standing or prone position.
Bonnet is critical of traditional weight training approaches to powerlifting and Olympic lifting which he says are not sustainable and put people at risk of injuries because they involve unnatural movements. Rather than users having to adapt themselves to the equipment, he designed PurMotion equipment to cater to the natural movements of its users.
"When we were 20 years old we were doing all these lifts and all these exercises and if they are functional then you should be able to do it in your 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s," he said. "Why is that not happening, because it hurts. Why does it hurt, because it doesn't follow proper joint alignment, it's not natural.
"It's not normal to feel joint pain in our 30s from lifting the wrong way and so it's our goal to shift that mentality and change that mindset. There's no reason as we age to not be able to exercise with light or heavy weight. If the joint hurts you have to change something, the grip, the footprint or the body alignment."
Bonnet spent an eight-hour day at Gold's Gym in Prince George last weekend to demonstrate to a group of personal trainers from Gold's and Women's Zone how to use the PurMotion equipment. "I think it's just the way the fitness industry has evolved," said Gold's Gym/Women's Zone owner Roger Creuzot. "We want to make sure our trainers are right up to speed about the multiple exercises you can do with this piece of equipment, especially with the free-motion movement."
The cage assembly design allows multiple users at any one time and the gyms will be offering group training sessions with coaches beginning in the new year.
"The real motivating thing is you do this with a coach working out with other people, you're always going to push yourself and evolve a lot quicker than if you were by yourself," said Gold's manager Trevor Muxlow. "A lot of it is just body movements, the natural physical things you do in your normal life, like lifting a box or a bag of groceries. You use every single plane, you're not just lifting or pressing, you're doing it all."
