Citrus Heights, CA Health and Fitness

After turning to Bikram yoga to ease her chronic hip, shoulder, and hand pains, seasoned yogi Patty Gray realized a dream in bringing this healing practice to her own community. At Bikram Yoga Granite Bay, she leads a diverse team of certified instructors—which includes a dietitian, a marathon runner, and a former DJ—that helps students of all ages and abilities reach their fitness goals with 26 dynamic postures. These postures, or asanas, include both seated and standing positions and are performed in the detoxifying humidity of a 105-degree room. During each 90-minute sweat session, instructors help students to let go of their competitive nature while improving their strength, balance, and ability to fold themselves neatly into a suitcase.

Like any good personal trainer, Get Fit Sacramento's staffers relentlessly pursue their clients’ fitness goals, but they don’t limit themselves to one-on-one sessions to do it. Instead, they supplement individual training with group fitness classes, Zumba, and R.I.P.P.E.D. workshops, all held within their fully equipped facility. They toss in even more benefits for members that work outside the gym, such as supplying an e-cookbook full of healthy recipes or teaching pet dogs to say “Feel the burn!” Inside the facility, students whip around jump ropes, use BOSU balls to deepen pushups, and grunt in time with the clangs of weight-training machines. Slate gray equipment punctuates the expanses of teal blue walls along with motivational posters picturing sweating, smiling exercisers being chased by a sleuth of bears.

A competitive runner and a figure-skating sports enthusiast respectively, Stacey Armijo and Sandra Lemos have always been physically active. However, it wasn’t until they discovered the Dailey Method’s unique blend of Pilates, ballet, and yoga that both realized their fitness regimens weren’t properly balanced. Both athletes went straight to the source—the method’s founder, Jill Dailey—to kick-start their teacher training, knowing even then that they had found their calling.

Following in Jill’s footsteps, Stacey and Sandra help students of all abilities strengthen and stretch their bodies’ major muscle groups. Their low-impact classes are designed to build up the core muscles, align the spine, and tone lean limbs, all while challenging the mind, body, and spirit to touch their proverbial toes. The instructors focus on proper posture and alignment throughout each class to stave off injury and improve their charges’ ability to walk a tightrope over flames while balancing a stack of books on their heads.

The Dailey Method’s Roseville and Folsom studios are equipped with locker rooms with full showers, and both offer complimentary childcare services.

The press certainly likes California Family Fitness, granting the exercise venue such awards as a top spot on KCRA-3’s 2012 A-List and Sacramento News and Review's Best of Sacramento 2012 Award. The press, however, isn’t the top priority for the gym's staff; they believe that, to quote their about CFF page, “awards don't greet you at the door.” Instead, they depend upon their dedicated staffers at the front desk, chaperones at the Kidz Club play zone, and personal trainers to make families of clients feel at home. Certified personal trainers take aspiring exercisers of all ages through regimens that make use of the 16 available locations’ ample workout machinery. Seasoned instructors, meanwhile, hold group fitness classes, free with a membership, fostering community as they incinerate calories during high-energy Zumba, step aerobics, Turbo Kick, and Hip Hop Hustle. Nine of the locations boast pools that host swim lessons taught by certified water-safety instructors.

While hitting the gym, parents can drop wee ones at childcare havens lined with playgrounds and age-appropriate investment manuals. After breaking a sweat on the exercise floor, clients can also shed excess body moisture in saunas and tanning beds.

Staffed by experienced professionals and computers who’ve sworn allegiance to the Three Laws of Golfing Robotics, GolfTec’s syndicate of golf training centers grooms games with a five-pronged approach enhanced by technological refinements. Score-shaving wisdom resonates within the walls of the indoor facilities, where certified personal coaches point out flaws and strengths while providing golfers with tips to permanently improve their game from tee to green. By utilizing video swing analysis and motion-measurement software, instructors can assess pupils’ abilities with objective data and a fact-based tact superior to traditional hearsay-oriented coaching strategies. To further enhance performance, GolfTec offers club-fitting services to match each swing profile with its ideal set of sticks.

After years of struggling with a negative body image and experimenting with fad diets in an attempt to control her weight, Cindy Blair packed her bags and set off on a health retreat that would change the course of her life. Thanks to a course of detoxifying treatments and adjustments to her nutritional habits, the retreat led to a revolution in Cindy’s self-perception. What she lost in weight, she gained in a curiosity for holistic health that would lead her to the National Holistic Institute of Hawaii and, later, to a certification in colon hydrotherapy.

Thirteen years later, as the owner of Pure Body Spa, Cindy helms a wellness staff that repairs rifts between minds, bodies, and spirits with a litany of holistic services. Massage therapy manipulates muscles to release latent anxieties, and infrared sauna sessions permeate the body’s tissues with heat to flush away toxins in beads of sweat. Ionic footbaths push pollutants out through gaps between the toes, and colon hydrotherapy cleanses the intestines with a stream of filtered water that picks up waste and accidentally swallowed tooth fairies on its way out.