Letter from Sarah

Hi everyone! Thank you so much for swinging by to check this out. If not already, I hope soon you'll be swinging Steelhose too.

FitFighter's origin is in the 1980s in a warehouse in Timonium MD which housed Rebounders Gymnastics. I built my foundational strength there as a girl, and it planted the seeds of a lifelong obsession with movement skills that power our lives.

Fast forward to 2015 and I found the austere demands of firefighting movement to be the biggest strength challenge I'd ever faced. That says a lot. I was a 2-time All-American collegiate athlete and Army Captain. But I couldn't confidently execute my job skills with their unique requirements of heavy tools, compressed air, and 50+ LBs of personal gear.

Steelhose was born from this limitation. We tinkered in the truck bays with equipment we already had to create training tools for hose handling that didn't require hooking up to a hydrant and stretching line. My crew mate who worked in a sail-making shop suggested grommets could streamline my eye-hook / hose-clamp combination. I taught myself to sew and made the first 1000 Steelhoses in my garage for Long Island Fire Departments and the FDNY. The producers at Shark Tank called during the pandemic and put us on the map as a mainstream fitness tool.

In the early days after that TV limelight we were always asked to compare Steelhose to something else (i.e. name your favorite free weight). I am glad that we created a better alternative to other tools, and that our happy clients and customers have found that use. But that's not the essence of Steelhose, or FitFighter, and I'd like to share what is.

With Steelhose we were able to develop a protocol which I think of as an Open Source Software for teaching resisted movement with an end to end curriculum. This protocol is called Scrēm, which stands for Steelhose Continous Resisted Movement. It has 80 elements across 7 categories - 16 Movements (8 Base and 8 Escalation), 18 Load Positions, 18 Grip Placements, 16 Resistance Transfers, 6 Agility Applications, 6 Anchor Techniques, and 4 Teamwork, Reaction, and Response drills. Using infinite combinations of these elements, our Movement Framework to build continuous resisted movement sequences, and our suggested Session Layout, we can build infinite strength programs.

You can download a digital copy of our Protocol Poster below which shows the entire protocol in one place. We have these available in the shop printed on a high quality satin card stock and we have the protocol available in a simple booklet format and super rad poker-style deck of cards.

Using this protocol, we can teach all fundamental strength movements, exhaustively, to every full-bodied human starting at age 8, the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommended age for lifting external weight. We can also build any kind of strength program for any specialized audience.

Given our roots and our core programs, communities that mean a lot to us here are Servicemembers, Veterans, and First Responders, as well as other Front Liners. We can safely and effectively program strength sessions for those athletes with the use of fewer than four limbs, and whom are chair or bed-based.

And finally, on a purely practical level, Steelhose stacks up super small. I have our Starter Stack in my bedroom, the 5s used as our doorstop, and the 15 and 25 LB on our window sill. I exclusively work with Steelhose for my strength work, 3 times a week, the same sessions I upload to our program portal. You can stack 100x 15 LB Steelhoses in a 3'x3' cube. Or you can hang them up by their grommet. A decade in the making, we've just scratched the surface on the potential for serving strength with the publication of the Scrēm Protocol. Now let's go back to work! Thank you for joining the journey.

Cheers,
Sarah Apgar (Sap for short)
Inventor, Steelhose
Founder, FitFighter
Creator, Scrēm