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Midtown exercise guru Chip Conrad doesn't talk about exercise routines — he talks about rituals.

“A ritual is what inspires progress," he said. "Routine just meets base needs. And the only way for movement to empower the body is if it's progressive. You have to get better at it."

Conrad’s gym, Body Tribe on 21st Street in Midtown, is surely Sacramento's most unique gym. It doubles as a social center and even art gallery on Second Saturdays. But the real difference is that he takes his acolytes through workouts that eschew weight machines and counting reps and instead focuses on movement.

“I try to get people to move in the ways the body is supposed to move," he said. "I won't let a machine dictate how I'm going to move. It's about freeing yourself. Machines do not teach you how to stabilize and control your body."

Worse, he said, machines can lead you astray and cause you to hurt yourself in unexpected ways.

"You feel a false sense of security using a machine, because the machine is doing the work of supporting you, but it's not actually giving you a foundation of strength," he said. "You don't support yourself, the machine does. You're more prone to hurt yourself. I've seen just as many injuries on machines as on anything else."

Conrad and his gym are well-known in town, especially among artists and others who don't feel comfortable in traditional gyms. He has also written a book, the 2007 publication Lift with Your Head, which digs into the mental and even spiritual disciplines that can help people get stronger in ways that matter.

But now Conrad is taking his workouts outside the gym, with a new program that aims not only to strengthen the participants, but affect our little corner of society as well. He's calls it the Midtown Shape-Up, and I signed up for it. I'm glad I did.

Since last Tuesday morning — we meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7 a.m. — I've joined Conrad and about two dozen other people of widely varying degrees of fitness in Grant Park on C Street between 21st and 22nd. What we're doing is something very old — group calisthenics — something so old that I figured it couldn't give me what I wanted. I was wrong.

With the grass still damp, Conrad leads us through a variety of exercises that I hated when I was a kid, and am not crazy about now: jumping jacks, push-ups and sprints among them. The difference is, I know I need them now, and I'm happy to be doing them.

But man, I hurt.

My motivation was to get into a different kind of shape — not about looking good, but about feeling good, and getting stronger. Getting a strength that fits the myriad things we are called upon to do in an average day: lifting awkwardly shaped things, like furniture and boxes — and kids. Moving with grace and strength, so that one false move doesn't cripple me for a week.

"Building strength in a gym is useless if you can't do something with it," Conrad said. "Since my definition of strength is ability, what we're trying to build is the kind of strength that gives us ability. The ability to do what we need to do."

Despite the moans and groans, this crowd is clearly ready for Conrad's instructions, and his leavening them with wit, and keeping every exercise short, works. Though the crowd has shrunk since the first morning a week ago, at this third meeting the group has stabilized and no one holds back or balks at his instructions. They see the value. What he says makes sense.

"How often are you lying on your back pushing a weight straight up in real life?" he questioned when I asked him later about the classic bench press. "Everything we do in most gyms is very specfic, linear — very safe, really. Sometimes we need to learn how to lift in precarious situations. If we don't learn to move in those situations, we'll hurt ourselves in real life."

Thus, in our calisthenic routine, all we lift is ourselves, and it soon becomes clear that this is a lot of work. After one workout with Conrad's beloved (by him) "burpies" (drop to a squat, kick legs out into a "plank" position, do a push-up, jump back to a squat and spring straight up), even just a dozen, I am feeling pain in my lats and shoulders that I haven't felt from much harder workouts in the gym.

More than that, Conrad has us doing silly things like "gorilla runs" (hands and feet on the ground, moving sideways) and windmilling our arms wildly. Movement. Moving in space and managing that ever-shifting weight. Very challenging. And, well, awkward.

"I think awkward weight-lifting is essential," he said. "Pick up something weird, work with it. That's what you're going to be doing in real life. There are so many factors that throw off what a gym would consider a normal lifting pattern. That's life."

One gym staple that Conrad disdains is the crunch. Horray for that, but, what? No crunches? Aren't they the way to perfect abs-of-steel, the holy grail of gym workouts?

No, Conrad said. They don't guarantee that. Visible abs are partly the result of genetics and of low body-fat content, and they can do worse.

"Why perpetuate bad posture?" he asked rhetorically. "When you do crunches, you're flexing your spine, rounding your shoulders — we do that all day long, in the car, at the computer screen. Why do it more? For some pretense of vanity, to make our abs stick out? No thanks."

But there's a whole other dimension to Conrad's Midtown Shape-Up. It's the communal aspect. Other than bike rides, I can count on one hand the number of times I've worked out with a group of people. Usually, it was dancing. And that's different.

But Conrad — and this is where he gets evangelistic — believes that doing workouts together is something that any healthy society should be doing. And he argues that the fact that our society doesn't do that bespeaks our lack of fitness.

“In my travels, wherever I go in other countries, I see groups of people working out together, outside,” he told us our first morning. “You see people doing tai chi, or calisthenics, or even tumbling. Anything that's body weight-related, just moving together. I want to do that here.”

This is where he gets really passionate, and it becomes clear why he's offering the Midtown Shape-Up, a total of 12 meetings over six weeks, for a mere $20.

"I want this to be the beginning of a virus that will infect the neighborhood and get people to incorporate movement into their lives a bit," he said. "If people see people doing that in the park, maybe they will think they can do it, and then 20 will turn into 50 and then into 100. And fitness, real fitness, will grow in our society.

"Why there's not something like this in every park in Midtown is baffling," he said. "Hopefully it will be, soon. A boy can dream, right?"

Conrad's Midtown Shape-Up continues into July, and he plans to start another group next month. To find out more about this approach to fitness, visit physicalsubculture.com.