Fitness slut

WEEK 12

I’m an exercise monogamist. The familiar workout always wins out. I lace up my running shoes and head out on the same loop … or go for a Monday night walk along the waterfront … or sign up for Thursday spin with Fla … or follow the same floor routine at home. You get the picture.

This week, with the help of a trial ClassPlass membership, I’m breaking out of my fitness monotony/monogamy to play the field. Witness my descent into exercise class promiscuity:

Flywheel. Yes, I’ve taken spin classes for years. Yes, I’ve tried Soul Cycle. Flywheel was a different lover. The display on the bike greeted me by name (so sweet!), as did the perky instructor sporting two pigtails on top of her head. I quickly got into the competitive vibe as my cycle-mates maxed out total power, a combo of torq (their spelling) and speed, our stats visible on the stadium monitors. I left a puddle of sweat under the bike, but the music was average and the instructor talked the entire time, making it impossible to float in my own rhythm. Not sexy. I did appreciate the love-note post class (“You crushed it!”) with congrats for “bringing my A game.”

Form Boxing. This was a surprisingly anxious decision, and I toggled back and forth between class pictures and instructor profiles for a very long time before submitting. The space was awesome industrial-chic S&M — dimly lit all-black interior with blue LED rope light accents and a wall painted with a knock-off Goyard chevron pattern. About 30 tear-drop shaped, water-filled Aqua punching bags hung from a massively high ceiling, attached to chains with giant carabiners. I introduced myself as a boxing virgin, and the next 40 minutes were a chaotic blur. I couldn’t find the right stance or correctly use my hips for power. But I did indeed do the following (with boxing gloves on!): jab / cross / hook / uppercut and all manner of combinations as our petite instructor belted out commands and spun around the room like a Tasmanian Devil. We took “intermissions” from punching by doing squats, planks, squat jumps and crab walks. I left pumped, smiling and sweaty, but in desperate need of some baseline technique.

Cyc45. This class was nuts. First-generation stationary bikes with a single tension knob and no display. I’ve come to expect bad music (at least to me), but this class was a flashback to bad 80’s night club, nearly every beat triggering a light show of multi-colored strobes and neon spots and all of us glowing in black light. The only upside: the instructor was ripped (best fitness class body ever) wearing a camo bra and matching bike shorts. But she pedaled like a maniac, and every few songs she’d hop off her little stage and come dancing down the rows of bikes in front of us. Not my taste.

Orangetheory. Now for the real deal. Simple, repetitive, ruthless. Friends have been raving about high-intensity interval training workouts, with Orangetheory top of the list. I checked in for my first class, and the young staff were adorable in their earnestness. They wanted to know my goals (um, experimentation?), gave me a heart-rate monitor and proceeded to punish me with the Everest Challenge. As the only virgin, once again, I took a deep breath and bounced between treadmill incline intervals, rowing machine sprints and floor exercises. It felt like being in a custom-curated gym with fab equipment and an attentive coach who drove me to find my “orange effect” … basically very heavy breathing and a maxed-out heart rate. Let’s just say with 20 “Splat” points, the workout flattened me, awoke long-dormant body parts and had me seeing double.  

Bodyrok. This was a cool concept: high-intensity Pilates on a custom reformer. The space was crisp, modern and completely mirrored, a fun-house of a dozen twenty-somethings in leggings and me in running shorts (oops). I felt like an uncoordinated ditz, not quite tracking with how to do planks, leg lifts, squats and crunches on this padded, black machine. But we did what felt like 1,000 repetitions of each movement so I was sufficiently spent. My one gripe: the instructor was distant and disengaged, and sure enough, the moment class ended, she grabbed her phone and started scrolling. If Orangetheory was about after-burn, I’ll dub this “after-melt” as it took 48 hours for my gumby legs to feel stable enough for a run.

Verdict? I may have over-extended myself on the new. As hard as my body worked, my brain was mush forming all these neural pathways to parse essentially foreign language, equipment, instructions, positions. At the end of the day, I enjoyed the variety and experimentation, but there’s something to be said for rhythm and technique and a deep relationship with what’s familiar.