By C S
If you’re a bride, then you want to be “fit to be wed.” The founder of the bridal bootcamp “Fit To Be Wed” (FTBW), Doug Rice, has trained many brides-to-be to achieve a body that’s wedding-worthy through his instruction at his training center in Los Angeles.
“I had the idea to do this for a long time,” he says. “I trained several brides in Texas, and there was this one woman who lost 42 pounds and looked great. She invited me to her wedding, and told all her friends about how I made her thinner, and my phone starting ringing.”
Doug took this idea when he moved, and set up his athletic facility in the West part of Los Angeles. “I needed to separate myself from 18,000 trainers in LA,” he said, explaining why his focus was on bridal fitness. The way brides get trained is to work in a group of six or seven (at the most twenty at one time), and do high intensity interval training (HIIT).
Brides (and non-brides too) with varying athletic abilities are welcomed, and Doug always keeps his eye on the new people, and makes sure he watches them and sees that they’re doing the exercises correctly. The intervals are usually 20-25 minutes; the rest of the time is spent on balance disks, body bars, elastic-tubing exercises etc.
“The typical bride wants to lose 5-10 pounds, but there have been people who have come in whose ideal weight loss was 30 pounds,” Doug says. “I become like a life coach to some brides,” he says.
The bridal boot camp began in May 2005. The program lasts for four weeks and costs $360 (3 sessions per week). Brides get a one-on-one consultation with Doug, the FTBW bible, which is a booklet containing a “before” photo, nutrition log, goal listing and more. Brides even get to sign a contract of commitment (a dry run before the “real” contract on the wedding day)! Doug says he feels most comfortable doing interval training, and was always intrigued by plyometrics, outdoor training, and was confident that women would benefit from HIIT.
“Losing weight has more to do with desire than with discipline”, he says. So brides do chose to come back after their honeymoon, to make sure that their body is just as fit post-wedding cake as it was pre.
For more information, visit www.fittobewedlive.com
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