The 8-Hour Workout

I’ve been doing full blown fitness shoots for a good four years now. Hard to believe, but we never really had them on the site before… MENSFITNESS.com that is. Everything was shot in stills for the magazine, then carried over to the website and social media. But no one wants to see still images really. They want to see how to do the exercises. But on top of that, they want to be inspired by the videos to get out there and do it themselves. 

My thought process has to been to shoot workouts in as real-life style as possible. While watching someone demonstrate a single exercise I’ve never seen before in front of a white screen is helpful, that’s just one piece. There’s no inspiration factor. The inspiration factor comes in with the real-life, fly-on-the-wall style of shooting and editing. That’s why we see certain accounts with tons of followers on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Vine, YouTube, etc. People that post real video clips. Real life stuff. Real life workouts.

But what I thought would be a cool little insider snippet was the the idea of a director’s workout. What the viewers see on our site or social media feeds are new programs such as The Specifics, The Dude Workouts, Strong and Lean, Trim in Six, The 21-Day Shred, etc. These programs typically consist of multiple videos because they are multiple workouts and loads of exercises. What viewers don’t see, is the fact that they also are more than likely shot in one to two days. Now, the first, and most important thing I need to relay is that just because we shoot them all in 1-2 days, does not mean we don’t actually do or use these programs. We all use them, and test them. If we produce and share an 8-week program. We’ve done it.

But something I think that is personally kind of cool, and an interesting part of the job is that shooting the programs themselves in their “condensed versions” are an actual workout themselves. I remember I shot 7 days of the 21-Day Shred in 1 day. I was sore for 4 days. I guess it’s The Director’s Workout, but it’s also The 8-Hour Workout.

This is a compilation of one day of shooting. Pieces of this went into The Muscle Shocker Workouts and The Elimination Workouts.