This week, we’ll be putting together a series of blog posts about our Five Foundations. The Five Foundations concept isn’t new to physical fitness, but it’s almost always been used to describe end-state properties like strength, cardiovascular fitness, and the like.

Of course, we exercise and train to get stronger, fitter, and healthier. These aims should never be minimized; if we aren’t maintaining or improving physically, an audit of our program is probably in order.

But we rarely approach these qualities in service of themselves. We might want to be stronger, for instance, because it helps us with daily tasks. We might approach cardiovascular fitness and endurance with an eye on longevity.

Over the last four months of shutdown, we’ve had occasion to have some more in-depth conversations with our members about their reasons for training at our gym. What we’ve learned from listening, and connecting some dots from Mike Michalowicz’s timely new book “Fix This Next,” is that these reasons adhere pretty congruently to Maslow’s old hierarchy of needs–safety and physical wellbeing chief among them.

We won’t bore you with those details today as we’ll be rolling them out one at a time for the rest of the week, but we will mention how excited we are to simplify this process for you. The Five Foundations might sound like an undiscovered vocal group from the early 60s, but they’re far less esoteric. These are real problems with real solutions, and tomorrow we’ll get started with Foundation One.

And like almost everything worthwhile, that one starts with “why”…