About Brandon Locatell | The Strength Laboratory, La Habra

I did it by the book for years. The book did not work.

I trained people the way I was taught — percentages off a one-rep maximum, straight out of the textbook. That is still how most of this industry runs.

Here is what is wrong with that, and it took me years to see it. Your one-rep maximum is not a fixed number. It moves depending on how you slept, what your week has been like, and what is going on at your job. So a percentage of your maximum is a percentage of a number that was already wrong on the day you used it. Every weight I ever handed somebody that way was a guess with a decimal point on it.

Before this I owned a conditioning gym for ten years. Circuits, boot camp, the whole format. I watched people work as hard as anyone could ask and slowly wear out their shoulders, their knees and their backs, because there was no strength underneath any of it. I told my business partner the model had to change. He said no, because the bottom line might change with it.

So I left and built this. I had to get it wrong for a long time before I understood what to build.

Here is the part you can check for yourself. When I was a young trainer, the older guys told me that by the time I reached their age I would be beaten up the way they were. Bad shoulders, bad back. They said that is just what happens to you in this business.

I am stronger right now than I have ever been in my life.

You will meet me when you come in. Decide for yourself whether what I am selling worked on the person selling it.

Brandon Locatell, founder of The Strength Laboratory, with his family — Brandon Locatell. NASM Corrective Exercise Specialist and Performance Enhancement Specialist.

A private micro gym, and your own station in it.

At a large gym you share the floor with thirty other people, and you often wait for the equipment you need. That layout works for people who already know what they are doing and want to move at their own pace. It is not a good setting for learning, and it is not what we built.

You get your own station with commercial grade equipment on it, and everything you need for the session is within arm's reach. We use machines, free weights and functional training equipment, because the research shows machines and free weights build muscle and strength about equally, so the choice is made exercise by exercise rather than as a philosophy. A machine is what allows somebody who has not trained in fifteen years to work at a real load in their first week without needing a spotter.

Eight people in the room. That is the limit and it does not move.

We took the best parts of a commercial gym, a group workout and personal training, and put instruments on all three. You get the standard of coaching that wealthy people pay for, at a fraction of what they pay for it.

This is not a no pain, no gain approach to exercise. Every set here is hard enough to work and no harder.

The AI is what makes that possible.

The training floor at The Strength Laboratory — Four stations, eight people maximum.

Inside The Strength Laboratory in La Habra — The whole room. No queue, no waiting for a machine.

This room is where it is being proven.

The System of Everything is not something I read about somewhere. I am writing it, as a book, with Karsten Jensen, an exercise scientist who has spent his career on how training should be structured.

This gym is where it gets tested. The measurements are not a marketing feature. They are how a method gets documented, which means every claim on this page has to survive its own numbers.

I did not build the underlying technology. What I built is the system that uses it — the rules that decide what your body should be doing on a given day, what reading counts as hitting it, and what happens next. That part is mine, and it is the part that turns a reading into training.

Most gyms are running somebody else's finished program. Here you would be in the room where one is being written.

Members training at The Strength Laboratory in La Habra — A class on the floor in La Habra.

Could you do better than this? Yes, if you had the time.

If your week were completely open, you could train every one of these things separately. A day for conditioning. A day for strength. A day for power. A day for how you move. Somebody coaching each one. That would be excellent, and it would beat what I am giving you.

You do not have that week. Most people do not.

So the question is not what is theoretically best. It is what gives you the most for the three hours you actually have.

Is it perfect? No. Is it better than the alternative, which is cardio and stretching? The research is not close.

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