Bucket List at the MovementLink Gym

Here at the MovementLink.FIT gym in Austin, TX, there are a ton of things that come (included for free) with membership to experience and try-out and this MovementLink “Bucket List” is intended to guide you through taking advantage of everything we have to offer! Our ultimate goal is to help you in every way we can and we hope you use this guide sort of like a scavenger hunt to help you kick off your fitness journey with us in the most positive way possible!

Here are our Top 12 Things at the MovementLink.FIT gym that will Supercharge your Results:



1. Complete 50 Classes

There is something magical that happens around the 50 class mark with us. Our best guess is that is around the time people have completed around 10,000 quality reps of various functional exercises. The coaches have always been able to see a stark difference between those who have just started with us and those who have attended at least 50 classes. Reaching the 50 class mark will surely come with tons of benefits and is something to be very proud of.

Additional Note: For most people’s goals and the life they want to live, exercising 4-6 days a week is right in the sweet spot of incredible results while balancing long-term sustainability. Exercise can take place in the gym, on your own (running, biking, padleing, rucking, etc.), or playing a sport. It’s as simple as this: Fit people are active most days of the week, most weeks.

4 classes a week for just over 12 weeks will put you at 50 classes. We don’t know if you’ll stick with us forever, but we do know that if you attend 4 classes a week, consistently for 4 weeks, you will learn things about fitness and yourself that you never expected while making tremendous progress towards your goals. If you’re interested in trying out 4 or more classes a week (it’s more achievable than you think), we’ll upgrade your membership to unlimited for free for 4 weeks (you just need pay whatever membership price you’re currently paying). Just shoot us an email and we’ll set your account up!

2. Book Your Free Strategy Session with Coach Kyle

The fitness, nutrition, and mobility worlds are full of myths, misconceptions, and just bells and whistles that look cool, but are not very effective. Book your free 1 hour strategy session with Coach Kyle, talk through your goals and work on a plan together that will avoid all the common pitfalls and traps people fall for and supercharge your fitness journey. It’s not simply about effort, it’s about the right amounts and types of efforts, pointed in the right direction.

Book your free session here (Members only): https://calendly.com/kyleligon/goal-coaching

3. Go All-In on one of our Monthly Health Challenges

Each month, we post a health challenge designed to challenge our membership base to experiment with simple lifestyle habits that can have a major impact on performance, aesthetics, joint and tissue health and overall health and wellness. These challenges revolve around sleep, nutrition, and other daily habits that can snowball into huge results. You’ll see these health challenges posted on the whiteboard at the gym. When one of these health challenges resonates with you even a little bit, go all in and experiment with it for the month. Even if it’s not something you continue on past that month, the experience you’ll gain during the month challenge will be carried with you for the rest of your life.

4. Attend a Lactate Zone 2 Workout

Every Tuesday our workouts are a long, slow, Lactate Zone 2 workout with a very short, but very high intensity finish. To oversimplify Lactate Zone 2: it is cardio performed at a talkable pace that puts specific stress on your cells’ mitochondria as they work to use fat and lactate as a fuel source, thus improving their ability to do so. In doing so, you’ll increase your mitochondria amount and function while boosting your ability to clear lactate during high intensity workouts. For a deeper dive into the enormous benefits of some Lactate Zone 2 training, check out our article here: Surprising Benefits of Low Intensity Exercise - Lactate Zone 2

Come experience a few Tuesday classes and see why Tuesdays are slowly becoming our most popular classes of the week!

5. Attend a Friday, 30-Minute Cardio HIIT Class

Fridays afternoons have always been lightly attended. By Friday, we’ve had a long week and we are ready to start our weekends. Our 30 minute classes on Fridays are not only a quick get in, workout, and get out to still enjoy your Friday, but the workouts are TOUGH!!! We’ve seen a hesitancy from our punch card, 2x a week, and 3x a week members to join us on Fridays due to the classes only being 30 minutes and people thinking it’s not “worth it”, but those who have been to one know they are getting an hour’s worth of workout packed into a tight little class. You don’t have to be a regular on Fridays, but you should definitely come once and experience what a rower, an air bike, and an amazing coach can do for you in a 30-minute class.

6. Participate in our First Saturday DUBS Partner Workouts and join us for Brunch at Easy Tiger Afterwards

Come join us the first Saturday of each month for our DUBS partner workouts!!! DUBS is short for doubles, which is our goofy way of referring to partner workouts. These First Saturday DUBS workouts are not just any partner workouts. Like regular classes, everything will be able to be scaled to your level, but these workouts will challenge you a bit more than our usual classes. Our typical hour-long class is extended into an hour and a half, typically including 3 different partner workouts. Don't worry, these workouts are designed to be accessible to everyone while also challenging the more fit in the gym.

People will come with someone they are going to partner with already and people just show up solo needing a partner. The coach is always there solo and would LOVE a partner. Because of this, there is ALWAYS at least 1 person who needs a partner, so do us a favor and even if you don't already have a partner, come on in and lend a hand!!!

Note: First Saturday DUBS is not a regular class. There will be a coach talking through the workouts and helping everyone scale to appropriate levels, but that coach is going to be working out with everyone that day, so DUBS is more about putting what you’ve learned to the test instead of receiving tons of coaching on your technique like usual classes.

After DUBS, people usually head over to Easy Tiger, the Linc for coffee and brunch, so come join us for that too!

Check out our Events Calendar for the next First Saturday DUBS Workouts: https://movementlink.fit/austin-tx-workshop-calendar

7. Take an Ice Bath with Coach Kyle

The benefits of deliberate cold exposure are many. Not just that, the ice bath experience is something you will remember for the rest of your life. Not only is Coach Kyle always down for an ice bath, but we’ll schedule a time that works for us and then invite the rest of the community to join! Just let Kyle know you may be interested!

8. Register for an Event and Get a Free Strategy Session with Coach Kyle

Is there a 5k, 10k, 1/2 Marathon, Marathon, Triathlon, Spartan Race, GORUCK Challenge, Bike Race, or anything else you’ve been wanting to try? If so, we think you should go ahead and embrace the challenge and sign up for it!!! To help you prepare, Coach Kyle offers a free 1-hour meeting to help you strategize your training plan to make sure you are peaked and prepared for your event in the most effective way possible!

9. Progress through Your First Round of Push-up and Pull-up Progressions

For most people, especially starting out, the bodyweight exercises we perform in classes need to be scaled down a bit as we progress our way towards the full exercise. With the coaches’ guidance, most people change the number of reps in a workout and/or modify the exercise down to match their current fitness level. As time goes on, the reps and progressions increase. Our recommended progression is as follows:

Step 1: Test out variations (see below) of the exercise. For the above example, let's say that you think you are going to scale the Strict Pull-ups with Banded Pull-ups. A great way to test out your scaling choice is to perform a set of 3 reps as part of your warm-up. 3 reps should feel very easy, but not a complete joke. Let’s say you are using one thick band and 3 reps was hard. No problem, we’d just add another band and test that out. Let’s say with 2 bands, 3 reps feels easy.

Step 2: In your first workout with a new exercise, perform 50% of the suggested reps each round. For example, if the workout called for 16 Strict Pull-ups each round, you would modify the exercise and the reps to be 8 Banded Pull-ups with 2 Bands (8 is 50% of 16).

Step 3: After the workout, review how it went. If you or the coach feel like you scaled too much, then, make note of it and for the next workout with strict pull-ups, you'll do 75% of the prescribed reps with the same scaling method. For the example above, that would be 12 Banded Pull-ups with 2 Bands.

Step 4: Keep repeating this process until you are doing 100% of the prescribed reps (so until you work towards 16 Banded Pull-ups with 2 Bands.). Note: You will be doing workouts with many different prescribed number of reps, so your total number of reps used each workout will change, but, relative to the prescribed number of reps, you’ll be using 50%, 75%, or 100% of the number listed.

Step 5: Once you are doing 100% of the prescribed reps and are ready for the next progression, choose the next hardest variation of the exercise, knock the reps back down to 50%, and start at Step 2 above again. So, using the same example, next you'll be doing 8 Banded Pull-ups with 1 Band. Keep repeating the process until you are doing the hardest variation of the exercise.

For a deeper look check out this article: Scaling Bodyweight Exercises in Workouts

In summary, to check this off the list, be patient and go through steps 1-5 and back to 2 to get a feel for how to gain proficiency in body weight exercises as quickly and effectively as possible.

10. Attend 3 Mondays in a Row During a Cycle

If you haven’t checked it out yet, you can see all of our day types explained in this article: Choosing Which Days to Workout

Within each cycle, Monday’s workouts and Wednesday’s workouts will build on one another for 3-4 weeks. You’ll know where we are in a cycle because, on the workout blog posts and the whiteboard at the gym, you’ll see things like “Base Week 1 of 3”, “Strength Week 1 of 3”, or “Peaking Week 1 of 3”. Mondays are our primary lower body days and the progress that can be made and the technique gained by repeating and focusing on an exercise for a few weeks in a row is tremendous and not only does wonders for strength, but also to build a solid foundation of movement that transfers into all other exercises and classes.

If lower body strength is something you’re interested in, you’ve got to try out Mondays for a complete cycle. Record notes from the strength section on Mondays to better guide your upcoming weeks!

If you really want to deep dive into how we design our workout program, check out our Movement Link Workout Programming article here: https://movementlink.fit/programming-big-picture

11. Attend 3 Wednesdays in a Row During a Cycle

Just like Mondays above, but Wednesdays are designed to target upper body. Try coming to every Wednesday for a 3-week cycle and watch your upper body strength skyrocket. Record notes from the strength section on Wednesdays to better guide your upcoming weeks!

12. Book a Skills Personal Training Session with one of our Amazing Coaches

There’s a ton of 1-on-1 work in classes, but there’s just no substitute for an entire hour with a coach dedicated to working on skills. Most people are interested in barbell skills, helping them get more comfortable with the front rack position, the hook grip, deadlifts and cleans, re-establishing the hook-grip after a clean, and getting back to the front rack from overhead like a pro. There also kipping pull-ups, muscle-ups, double unders, handstands, running form, and many other things our coaches can dramatically boost your technique on with an hour session, so if there’s something you’d like to deep dive further with in person, keep this bucket list item in mind! These session are not free, but better technique lays the foundation for more results from your efforts and can really fast-track success. $115 per session or $95 if you’d like multiple sessions.

13. Explore all the Free Resources on MovementLink.FIT

Can’t find what you’re looking for? Just let us know!

More MovementLink Articles:

Exercise Habit, The ProgramMovement LinkComment