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Dear Reader,

20 years ago I decided to take Kieser Training beyond Switzerland. As a first step, I granted a Master Franchise License for my home market to free me up for the new challenge.

Now I want to take direct control again to further develop my concept in its country of origin and will therefore not renew the expiring agreement at the end of this year. No deal could be reached on taking over the existing facilities in Switzerland. These facilities will contnue operations under a new name.

Kieser Training AG will start a new Swiss chain from January 2011. It is our aim to cover the entire country in a few years, including regions where we have not been present to date.

While the proven concept of Kieser Training will remain unchanged, the new facilities will have the newest machines, including types currently being developed. Some conceptual developments of the past years will now be introduced in Switzerland as well. Swiss Kieser Training customers will continue to benefit from access to over 130 facilities across Europe, in Australia and Singapore.

Werner Kieser

The lack of movement myth

Seemingly all health experts continue to purport the myth that any kind of movement is your key to physical health. This makes it easy for all sorts of fads and trends in sport and fitness to sell themselves, regardless of their actual benefit. Not unlike some medieval recipes for potions.


Much of current understanding of health and fitness is still medieval
(Illustrations from “Hieronymi Mercuriulus De Arte Gymnastica Libri Sex”, by Girolamo Mercuricole,
published in Venice in 1659)

The healing effect of certain plants has been known for many centuries but it was years before we identified the active ingredients that produced this effect. Finding, preparing and using medicinal herbs was always a ritual affair. Certain herbs could only be plucked at certain times – at full moon or on specific Christian holy days, for example. Their preparation, chopping, cooking and mixing with other ingredients, was accompanied by all kinds of magic spells, prayers and invocations of the spirits. The Middle Ages have bequeathed unto us so many recipes, from which we can clearly see that attendant circumstances and rituals were often awarded the same if not higher importance as the substance itself. Science, progressively on the march forward, gradually did away with all this. Chemists isolated the active ingredients, and industry produced them synthetically in large volumes. The triumphant progress of modern medicine had begun.

If we apply the same logic to our knowledge of physical culture, we soon realise that our current understanding is similar in its extent to Man’s understanding of plants in the Middle Ages. Somehow everyone simply “knows” about the healthpromoting values of physical activity, but nobody is sure about precisely what produces these effects. Of course there are theories, and theses and other enthusiastic works that do illuminate partial aspects of the “whole”. An overall concept, however, has yet to be provided. In practice a dervish-like actionism dominates, as if to say: “Just do something – that’s the main thing!” So it can hardly be any surprise that year-by-year, season-by-season, “new” types of sport are thought up, fitness fashions are created and trends sent spinning through the world. It might well be that an inclination to all things “new” and the need for variety is just human nature, but the extent to which this happens betrays its lack of depth. The essence of the matter has not yet been identified – neither by supposed laypeople, nor by the experts that often view their specialist area from an astonishingly narrow perspective.

Doctors still recommend “sport” to combat the lack of movement from which we allegedly suffer. However, even this choice of words misses the point. Would you say to the hungry that what they lack is crockery? The problem is not a lack of movement. Movements per se have no intrinsic quality. But because movement – contingent on the earth’s gravitational pull – mostly involves overcoming resistance and therefore can trigger a training effect, we have once again confused matters and think that movement in itself is the “substance”.

We suffer from a lack of resistance! That is all. Only resistance forces the muscles to tension and therefore triggers a training effect. The notion of complaining about the lack of movement is actually only one of numerous misconstructions1 in the field of fitness training – but it is possibly the one with the most serious consequences, because it has caused armies of fitness freaks to literally run in the wrong direction for almost 30 years now.

1 These kinds of misconstructions are common practice. A typical example is the opinion that sweating is “healthy”. Here, too, we bestow causal and health-promoting importance on an accessory symptom (which is counterproductive from a physiological point of view).

Excerpt from “Die Seele der Muskeln”/ “The soul of the muscles” by Werner Kieser first published in 1997 to be published in English in 2011

Strength …

… for posture


Stop reading for just a moment and think about your posture! Then, continue reading. How would you describe your posture – is it more akin to a wet rag? If so, why not try a small experiment: first of all, raise your shoulders towards your ears, then roll them back and down. Now imagine a piece of string is attached to the top of your head pulling you gently upwards. Your back is straightened and your rib cage is raised. The base of your spine is stretched as far as the pelvic floor with both feet firmly on the ground. You are suddenly aware of muscles working together to straighten you.

You are already demonstrating a stance to both yourself and those around you. The message conveyed is not just one of good body posture. Those who stride upright through life display self-confidence and courage. In contrast, if you let your shoulders sag, you convey a lack of self-esteem or even anxiety. That’s why a person who displays courage is described as having backbone. Muscles do indeed strengthen the back but they also allow us to hold our head high and face the world with equanimity

Muscles bestow on our inner being that expressive strength that allows us to convince those around us. In the final analysis, posture is not just what we have but what we express.