Disclaimer: Not going to lie – this has been sat in my drafts for no reason other than I have a memory like a sieve… but it is still as relevant as ever as Body Conditioning is a still a staple of the Castle Centre’s group exercise timetable.

Everyone Active have recently taken over the running of several leisure centres in Westminster and Southwark. They’ve also invested a fair bit of cash in refurbishing and creating brand new timetables, and they are clearly pretty pleased with the way things are going so far. So pleased that they have staked their reputation on it by inviting a bunch of fitness bloggers, such as ourselves, to check them out and review them. In this review, I’m sharing my experience of the Body Conditioning class at The Castle Centre. For more info on the leisure centre itself, check out the my thoughts on it here.

Delighted at the prospect of trying out a few new classes on the house, I trotted off to Elephant & Castle one Monday evening after work to have a go at the Body Conditioning class. Described on the Everyone Active website as “A challenging workout designed to improve your cardiovascular fitness, muscular strength and physical endurance, delivering all round benefits to every part of the body. Suitable and adaptable to all levels of fitness from” I thought, that doesn’t really tell me very much, but it certainly sounds suitably challenging.

The biggest clue I got on the content before it started was that it was populated solely by women with the exception of one guy, who admittedly left after 15mins. Our instructor, Galena, cranked the poppy music up high and enthusiastically hollered at us to get started – the first combination of moves we did included a ‘grapevine’. Lightbulb moment: this is an old school aerobics class.

The participants were certainly representative of all different levels of fitness and form, which was great to see, but I was a little disappointed when it became clear that there wasn’t going to be variations on the moves to make them harder (or easier). Despite this, I certainly got out of breath and swe-e-aty! Which is as good an indicator of a decent cardio as any in my book, but I wouldn’t say it truly delivered a ‘challenging’ workout, as promised.

If you are looking for a fun way to get a bit of cardio into your weekly routine and mix it up a bit by doing something a bit silly I would thoroughly recommend this class – it is high-camp and freaking fabulous. I’m not usually a fan of dance-based classes, because frankly I’m terrible at them, but this class gave me a workout for my brain as well as my body, and I really enjoyed the old-school aerobics moves – after all if they ain’t broke, don’t fix ’em!

For more class reviews in the London area, check out the Reviews section under ‘What we write about’ in the header above.