On top of the world! Still buzzing from the Windsor Women’s 10k on Saturday and for more reasons than one.
Firstly, just to say I was given a press place for this race – but my mum entered off her own back, but I am, as usual, 100% honest in my review. Pre-race info was thorough – and we left home at about quarter to 8, taking heed of the advice of avoiding Windsor town centre so coming through Datchet instead…and we arrived at 8.25, no traffic and were about the 10th car there #keen
We’re on a bit of a yoga roll right now. Off the back of our recent trip to Yoga Hive, Everyone Active invited us to try out the latest addition to their Leisure Centre offering – Hot Yoga!
Katie
Tucked away in a little side road just off Carnaby Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Oxford Circus, aka my least favourite place, Marshall Street Leisure Centre offers a welcome calmness in a stunning art deco building. I am still fairly bad at being blasé when it comes to taking “blogger photos”, so there are fewer pictures than usual. Plus, I was a bit busy actually doing stuff like sweating my butt off in yoga to take too many photos of it and I thought it would have been a bit rude to everyone else there. But that’s for another day…
So, enough about the building and the beautiful swimming pool, and back to the reason why we were there – to get our sweat on with some hot yoga, the perfect way to ease into a Wednesday morning. Continue reading
As you will probably have seen on Instagram, we recently attended a Vinyasa Flow session with Robyn from yogahive , which took place at the Curious Duke gallery near Old Street/Barbican. As “people who don’t do much yoga but understand it is really important”, we jumped at the opportunity!
Kate
I know that I should stretch more. I should stretch more before I work out. I should stretch more after I work out. I should stretch first thing in the morning and I should stretch to aid recovery. And yet, I don’t. I always manage to convince myself that somehow it’s a waste of time, and that attitude only changes when I tweak something and berate myself for not having warmed up properly. So, when Katie and I were asked by the lovely (and pretty inspiring!) Robyn at Yoga Hive to pop along to check out a class in their amazing gallery space, I was delighted to have the excuse to give yoga a try again. Continue reading
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.
A few months back, Kate & I received an opportunity to test out “Skinny Rebel“, a class offered by the guys at Train Dirty…which is described as “a personal training workout with a difference”…
A myriad of things (think building leaks, illness and general work/life balance being the wrong way round) set out to try and prevent it happening, but a few weeks ago I was able to try my hand at the sort of thing that typically happens when you live in say, Colombia or the Rift Valley – hypoxic training…or for those of you who don’t recall this from your sports science degree – reducing the oxygen available to the body. In this case, it’s all down to a clever little mask. Which makes you look either like Bane or Hannibal. And sound a bit like Darth Vader.
*Disclaimer – the session was provided free of charge, however all opinions are my own*
A nice and leisurely 8am session was a great idea, meaning I didn’t have to leave my flat until 7.20 to get to the gym, WIN.The Conrad St James is super easy to find – bang opposite St James’ tube (although I walked from Victoria, which took about 10 minutes) and very close to Met Police HQ. It is, as you’d expect, a gorgeous location, with the kind of reception staff you would expect from a high standard hotel. (also meaning there are gym towels, lockers, a fridge full of still and sparkling water and the ever-present hotel gym green apple offering!)
The gym is tucked away downstairs and upon entering, my initial worry was confirmed – it was a typical hotel gym aka about 4 square foot, with a weird “this can do everything” weights bench and your usual limited cardio and weights equipment.Ugh.
However, don’t judge a book by its cover Katie.
I was welcomed in by James and we had a chat about the class, the team, the locations (think luxury hotels in St Tropez and Lisbon….much more appealing destinations than London on a dreary Wednesday morning!) and what was coming. I went along with the naive feeling that, being a fair few months into a marathon training programme, I was in pretty decent shape, but was promised that this would really help to test where I wasn’t in shape. And where I needed to focus.
Circuit 1 went something like this:
Bear crawls, ropes, more ropes, duck walks, boxing, burpees. BURPEES. I hate burpees. However I have a real respect for anyone who puts them in a circuit though as I know they do their job.
Circuit 2 was similar, a few changes in exercise, but of note was that BURPEES were in there again! At this point I was pretty glad I didn’t have the mask on yet, purely because the feeling of burpees couldn’t possibly be made any worse…
However, after this, out came the mask. And yes, I looked like Hannibal. If Hannibal had blonde hair. I found the biggest challenge was learning not to panic when you couldn’t breathe. It’s like swimming, or anything where you need to focus on your breathing – the more you panic, the harder it is. I have a feeling if you do yoga and are good at controlling your breathing, you will do this a heck of a lot better than me…
The choice is yours whether to wear the mask or not – and I’m not going to lie, it was a pretty tough session even without the mask on! I wonder whether I would have pushed myself more not wearing it – I was struggling so much with getting used to it and worrying that I couldn’t breathe that I probably put less intensity into the exercises themselves (i.e. burpees) I think thought that after a couple of sessions you would easily crack it and begin to reap the benefits. There’s a whole host of studies about the impact of continued oxygen deficiency on the body (it boils down basically to being able to do a better job of transporting and using the oxygen you have available when you limit it) – and this is a legit way to do it rather than a) becoming a pro cyclist and going the short way round or b) spending months living up and training down mountains.
Fail #1 is misplacing my HR monitor. I have no idea where it is (probably under my bed) – and I wish I had had it for this session to see the impact that putting on the mask actually had. Claims are big – up to 1000kcal in a 45 minute session.
Fail #2 is thinking ‘I’m sure I will be fine wearing a mask’. Nope, it’s less fine than you think it will be – it took me a good circuit and a half to feel comfortable wearing it and less like I was going to have a full scale panic attack. But once it’s on and you’ve got used to it – you begin to forget it’s there. Until you realise how much harder it is making things feel!
Fail #3 is doing an arms session the day before. NO! This made my press up ability very limited – and meant my planks suffered as well. I get to the point now where I just think I am in a permanent state of DOMS.
In summary:
I then popped to work with a spring in my step – I showered at the office so didn’t get a chance to see if you were able to use any changing facilities – and was buzzing to tell people what it had felt like!
Skinny Rebel workouts run at Conrad London St. James for guests and your regular selves. The workout is priced at £40 for one 45 minute session, with block booking offers available. For more information and to make a reservation, email: info@traindirtylondon.com – or they’re also on Classpass. The team also offer a range of PT options – visit the website for more information.
I love tyre flipping. I also love how ‘flipping tyres’ can be used in exasperation if you are easily amused by rubbish puns (it’s the same as ‘rucking shields’ which is a long-running joke in my family…..) I also love sledge dragging, lifting heavy stuff and chucking battle ropes around. Oh and obviously being told I’m alright at it. Which means that, after coming across City Strongman on Twitter and remembering how much I used to love ‘Torture Club’ (aka circuits at the rugby club) I was clamouring to give it a go.
City Strongman was set up by PTs Dave Thomas and Ben Gotting and started out at Rosslyn Park on Saturday mornings. They’ve just started expanding due to a being a MASSIVE success and now hold a mid-week session at the Iron Club, tucked away under the arches by Vauxhall station. Continue reading
Last Wednesday Katie and I went rebounding. No, I don’t mean we hit the dating scene of SW11 hard… rather, we were invited by Missie Frank (dancer, choreographer and founder of Rebounce London) to try a new quirky, sweaty, bouncy exercise class. Being the intrepid explorers that we are, we duly signed up and ventured to Fitness First at Clapham Junction (I say ventured, one of us lives in Battersea and one in Balham so it wasn’t like we had far to go).
Both of us had trampolined before, and there is still a trampoline in the back garden at our respective childhood homes (though, admittedly they are mostly now only used by visiting younger cousins or for sunbathing), but Rebounce is something quite different – it’s fast, choreographed and done to the beat of a pumping playlist!
These Girls Do 