When the apocalypse comes, will you be ready? At the very least, will you be able to climb the stairs without getting out of breath?
The Pack, a new group workout class, is betting that when the aliens come, or the AIs decide to bite back, you’ll want to feel your best. “The body is the one piece of real estate we truly own. Everything else is pretty much owned by the banks, or we’re leasing it. This is what we have,” Noah Neiman, the founder of The Pack, told me this week.
The website for The Pack claims the workout is aimed at “GO muscle, not SHOW muscle,” and that “We’re not chasing beach bodies. We’re forging battlefield bodies.” In other words, function over form. The “real world” approach is also a hedge against the threat of weight-loss drugs to the entire workout industry. You can get skinny with a push of a button; so now there’s a new anxiety that’s risen up to replace the desire to be thin, and that’s the desire to be strong, and ready. If the Big One—whether of a natural, political, or economic variety—is coming sooner than we thought, it makes sense to have a fitness regimen that, according to the letters pasted on the gym’s window, is “built for the fight before the fight comes to us.”
Neiman opened the studio in Chelsea last month (it’s only in New York now, but his last venture, Rumble, a boxing gym, has outposts all over the world). When I called him to ask him why he started The Pack, he said: “If you have the Citizen app, if you look at the news, you know that it’s a little crazy out there.” He had just done a two-hour Muay Thai training. “There’s a lot of angst, there’s a lot of murder porn, and hostility.”
Neiman is a celebrity trainer, meaning he trained celebrities—like Justin Bieber—and became one in the process. He started Rumble in 2017, but now, he’s all in with self-defense.
