Kieser Training: history, protocol, and the UK studios
Kieser Training is a Swiss strength-rehabilitation method developed in Zurich from the late 1960s onward. This page covers what it is, where it came from, what the protocol looks like in practice, and what happened to the UK studios.
What Kieser Training is
Kieser Training is a Swiss strength-rehabilitation method developed in Zurich in the late 1960s. The company was founded in 1967 by Werner Kieser, who had opened his first studio on Nordstrasse a year earlier. The originating insight was unusual for the time: as a teenage amateur boxer, Kieser had used strength training to recover from a rib injury faster than rest alone would have allowed, and concluded that strength was a clinical variable rather than a fitness one. He built a business around that thesis.
By the time Kieser sold the company in 2017, it had grown to 159 studios across eight countries, most heavily concentrated in German-speaking Europe - Switzerland, Germany and Austria - with later expansion into the Netherlands, the UK and Australia. Werner Kieser died in Zurich in May 2021.
The studios are distinguishable from a conventional gym in nearly every visible respect. There is no sauna, no juice bar, no music and no class timetable. Sessions are by appointment, one client per machine, with close supervision and a medical or physiotherapy orientation. The larger studios have an in-house doctor. Training itself is brief: one session a week, forty-five minutes, on the same six to eight machines.
The MedX lineage
The machines that came to define Kieser Training are American in origin. Arthur Jones, the engineer who founded Nautilus in the early 1970s, developed his successor company MedX through the 1980s. His central observation was that most strength equipment failed to load muscle groups in isolation, because the adjacent joints would compensate. The MedX Core Lumbar Strength machine, designed around a mechanical pelvic restraint, was his answer for the lower spine. With the pelvis fixed, the lumbar erectors are loaded directly rather than spared by the hips and hamstrings.
This is the apparatus that produced the largest body of peer-reviewed back-pain research on any single piece of strength equipment. More than thirty studies came out of the Pollock and Graves group at the University of Florida from the late 1980s onward, alongside parallel work in Europe.
Werner Kieser first encountered Jones through an article in Iron Man magazine, travelled to the United States to meet him, and from 1980 to 1990 served as Nautilus's European general representative. After Jones founded MedX, Kieser acquired a licence to produce MedX machines in Europe, with manufacturing in Dieburg, Germany. In 2003, he acquired full production and distribution rights from Jones's companies. From that point Kieser developed all its machines in-house, though the design lineage remains MedX.
The protocol, in practice
The shape of a Kieser session is consistent across studios and decades. One session per week, forty-five minutes, by appointment. The trainee works through six to eight machines covering the lumbar spine, trunk, hips, lower body and upper body - usually the MedX Core Lumbar Strength, a paired hip-flexion and hip-extension station, the Nautilus-lineage leg press, a chest press, a pulldown, and a small set of supporting movements.
Each machine is performed for a single set, taken to controlled momentary muscular failure - the point at which another full-range repetition can no longer be completed. A typical set lasts between ninety and one hundred and twenty seconds.
The cadence is deliberately slow. In the super-slow variant that Kieser adopted, the repetition is approximately ten seconds in the lifting phase and ten seconds in the lowering phase. No momentum, full anatomical range of motion. The lifter does not chase the load; the cadence is the metronome.
Every weight and repetition count is recorded by hand at the end of the set, on a card that follows the client from week to week. The following session's load is calibrated against the previous one rather than against how the trainee feels on the day.
Supervision is one-to-one in the rehabilitation tier of the studios. In the standard tier, supervision is closer than a conventional gym but not necessarily one coach per client. The studios operate by appointment in either case.
Why this shape
Each element of the protocol has a reason behind it.
Why isolation. The lumbar erectors are not adequately trained by general exercise because the pelvis compensates. Without restraint, the gluteus maximus and hamstrings act as the prime movers and the lumbar erectors function largely as isometric stabilisers. Research from the University of Florida group found that twelve weeks of training on conventional, non-pelvic-restrained back machines produced no measurable strength gain in the lumbar extensors themselves, despite significant gains at the hips.
Why once a week. The Kieser thesis treats the training session as the imposed stress and the days between sessions as the period in which the adaptation actually happens. More frequent sessions interrupt the supercompensation that produces the gain.
Why slow cadence. Removing momentum keeps tension on the target muscles for the full range, and removes the impulse loading that compromises joints over a long career of training.
Why the written record. Removing "how do I feel today" from session-to-session calibration is the corrective to the single largest source of error in self-directed strength training.
The UK studios
Kieser Training opened its first UK studio on Hampstead Road in London NW1, near Mornington Crescent, in 1999. A second London site followed in Fulham around 2004. The two studios served the city for the better part of two decades.
The London operation closed on 31 August 2016. Membership at the Hampstead Road site was reported at the time as around nine hundred, which was insufficient to cover the costs of the lease and the staffing model. A "Save Kieser Training London" campaign formed among former members in the weeks that followed but did not succeed in reopening the studio. No licensed Kieser Training studio has operated in the UK since.
The Swiss, German, Austrian, Dutch and Australian operations continue. The current company website is kieser.com .
No licensed Kieser Training studio currently operates in the UK. The London studios closed in 2016 and no franchise or successor has opened since. Kieser Training AG continues in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Australia, but no longer in the UK.
A small number of independent studios in the UK practise substantial parts of the protocol that Kieser used: MedX-based equipment, one-to-one supervision, a single 45-minute session a week, slow cadence to controlled failure, and written records calibrated week to week. They are independent businesses; none of them is a Kieser studio.
Ultimate Strength in East Finchley, North London (N2) is one of them. Yoram Sher , the coach, trained at Kieser between 1999 and 2004 before opening Ultimate Strength in 2005.
No. Ultimate Strength is an independent studio in East Finchley, North London. It is not licensed by, franchised from, affiliated with or endorsed by Kieser Training AG.
The protocol on our floor shares structural elements with the Kieser approach - one-to-one supervision, MedX-based equipment, a single 45-minute session a week, written records, slow cadence - because the coach trained at Kieser before opening the studio. Equipment choices, pricing, programming and clinical decisions are made independently by Ultimate Strength and are not authorised, supervised or controlled by Kieser Training AG.
High Intensity Training (HIT) is the broad category - brief, infrequent, hard, machine-based strength training, usually traced to Arthur Jones’s writings in the 1970s. HIT is not a trademark; it is a training tradition.
Super-slow is a cadence variant within HIT - typically ten seconds in the lifting phase and ten seconds in the lowering phase - formalised by Ken Hutchins in the early 1980s during osteoporosis research at the University of Florida that was funded by Nautilus.
Kieser Training is one particular expression of HIT, with a strong emphasis on lumbar rehabilitation, MedX equipment, and the Swiss medical-rehabilitation tradition that grew up around the studios. The underlying logic - single set to failure, weekly frequency, full anatomical range - is shared with the wider HIT tradition.
"Kieser" and "Kieser Training" are registered trademarks of Kieser Training AG, headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland. This page is published by Ultimate Strength, an independent strength-training studio in East Finchley, North London. Ultimate Strength is not licensed by, franchised from, affiliated with or endorsed by Kieser Training AG.
The Kieser Training name is used on this page in the factual sense - to identify the company at which our coach trained, and to provide accurate information for readers researching the method. For the current operations of Kieser Training AG, see kieser.com .