After enduring countless years of winter lasting at least until April, this year New York has surprised us all by giving us an early spring! Flowers have been blooming, the sun is shining and people are emerging from their winter hibernation. There could not be a happier time in the city. However with this nice weather comes the looming threat of shorts, tank tops.....and BIKINIS! In the never ending battle of having to face wearing a two piece this summer, as well as prep for my upcoming half marathon, I decided to try mixing up my workouts for some fun. To do this I thought I would give kickboxing a try. My friend J and I signed up through the Urban Girl Squad last Saturday to take one of these classes at an Equinox gym here in the city. Urban Girl Squad works to organize events in the city for women as a chance to meet and get to know each other. Seemed like a Saturday afternoon kickboxing class would be fun. It was brutal. To add to the hour of endless punching and kicking a punching bag while holding weighted gloves I had the added bonus of fighting off the previous night's hangover (my own fault I guess). Luckily after an hour of some serious sweating we were rewarded with a lovely goody bag from the gym including a pass for a free 3 day trial membership. While we were tired, the workout felt great so we decided to go this weekend for 3 days straight and check out all the gym has to offer.
Our first day at the gym began at 6:30AM Thursday morning. Since kickboxing was so fun the first time we figured we'd give another class a try. The class was led by a different instructor this time and titled "cardio kickboxing" rather thank only kickboxing, but that can't make much of a difference right?....Wrong. Maybe because it was 6:30AM everything seemed harder, but this class required a lot more coordination than I had remembered. Instructions were being yelled at us of different combinations such as "jab, jab, duck, punch, jab, uppercut, kick, kick, kick etc" which were all to be done at a pretty fast tempo and for a good 5 minute interval. My heart rate was definitely up but half the time my limbs were flailing around trying to get my body to move as fast as he was saying. Needless to say it was certainly good at waking someone up. Thanks to our instructors demand for non girly push-ups though I can say I was feeling it the next day, and felt I totally deserved my egg and cheese bagel that morning.
For the second day we tried out the gym's facilities. Me on the treadmill and J on the elliptical we powered through another solid workout. As a reward for two days in a row of working out we chose a nice dinner of sushi and some very strong beers (by strong I'm talking 9% which post workout it pretty much doubled). In addition, as with any good dinner there must be desert, so we decided for the always delicious choice of brownies. After a tough workout though we couldn't just make any brownie....Thanks to Chef J these "reward brownies" included a layer of graham cracker crust, a layer of brownie, and a peanut butter swirl and crushed oreo topping. If you choose to make them at home really what it involves is looking in your cupboard and asking how much of this can I put into a brownie?
Finally the last day of our three-day trial had arrived. I chose to attend a different class led by our first kickboxing instructor. This time the class was titled "The Titan Method." Having "Titan" in the title should have been my first warning this was not going to be a nice early Saturday morning class. Instead it turned out to be probably one of the hardest classes I've ever taken, and I didn't even do all of the exercises the whole time. The class works in 5 minute intervals with 30 sec rest in between. Each 5 minutes is then broken into 5 different exercises you do for 1 minute each. Sounds ok......that is until you are doing burpies, crunches, push ups and many other forms or torture for a full minute each. I guess it works a lot like P90X with muscle confusion but to me it just brought back flashbacks of pre-season for high school swimming...not a good time.
While its been a painful three days its also been oddly invigorating, and while it was sad to leave Equinox (my gym heaven) it was fun while it lasted. Looks like its back to the Y and Central Park for now!
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