ClassPass Confessions (Part 2)
Sweaty snapshots and exercise epiphanies from my years of fitness promiscuity
Part 2- Lululemonland
Yoga
They’d been chanting for fifteen minutes and showed no signs of stopping. Sitting with my lanky limbs crammed into an uncomfortable cross-legged position, I tried to hide my growing sense of impatience. As the instructor played a miniature piano-like instrument, everyone but me kept reciting a mantra I couldn’t quite make out.
Blistering with self-consciousness and starting to panic, I wondered:
“How the hell did they all know the words?”
I looked in vain for a lyrics sheet but couldn’t find a single one in the armada of yoga mats and Kleen Kanteen water bottles speckled with national park stickers.
When I’d locked my bike outside on Telegraph Ave in Oakland I thought I’d be getting a good stretch and core workout in. Instead I felt like I’d walked into a cult meeting. Right as I was debating a dash for the exit while everyone’s eyes were closed, the songs stopped and we began a sun salutation series. I exhaled a sigh of relief and joined them.
What stood out to me most during my yoga phase on ClassPass is how many different experiences I had during classes with yoga in the title. Some studios I visited were sandalwood scented, meditative enclaves with sanskrit vocab to learn, Oms to chant, chakras to align, and earnest namastes at the close of class. Others were not that different than aerobics, Pilates, or SoulCycle, with playlists, crunches, weights, and merch for sale by the door. The one unifier was Lululemon- that brand is truly inescapable in the yoga world. It’s fair to say this giant brand in the athleisure space literally would not exist without the economic and cultural importance of yoga-as-exercise today.
As I’d later learn, my eclectic experience was a reflection of yogas long and complex history. What’s least debatable about yoga is that it did not start as a type of physical fitness class. Yoga began thousands of years ago as a spiritual practice in India, and only morphed into an exercise system in the 20th century when yoga practitioners combined Western gymnastics movements with Hatha yoga. From this historical perspective, what we know and flow as yoga today is an extremely recent addition to the yoga canon. As an example, sun salutation as we know it was likely not popularized until the roaring 20s. As Michelle Goldberg chronicles in “The Goddess Pose,” Yoga’s prevalence in America is in part due to the efforts of Indra Devi, a Latvian woman who brought yoga-as-exercise to the West and popularized it among elite women in Hollywood. As a hip type of exercise and a nascent form of athletic cultural capital, yoga may have been the SoulCycle of Indra Devi’s time. What is clear to me is that yoga is not and has never been static. Like a cuisine or religion, it’s a malleable thing that evolves and changes as it migrates. Every time yoga has spread to a new part of world, it has changed slightly to respond to its new audiences and their goals for doing it. This is a heavily abridged and possibly apocryphal history, but my main point is that if yoga today feels like it’s made of a grab bag of Eastern spirituality and Western exercise modalities, that’s because in many ways it is. As a result, today there isn’t truly one yoga, but rather many yogas.
On one end of the yoga spectrum is the belief that yoga is inseparable from religion, spirituality, and Hinduism. This is less common (but not unheard of) in fitness studios because it can be polarizing, culty, and exclusive. On the other end is corporate yoga, best epitomized by Core Power, where it’s just another interchangeable form of boutique exercise to commodify via group classes, athleisure, and branded mats and water bottles. In the middle are a litany of yoga studios that pick and choose which parts of yoga are most relevant to their goals, like a college student choosing which movie posters will best summarize their personality to future visitors to their dorm room. I saw some of all of these during my ClassPass era, though the corporate studios were definitely overrepresented on the platform.
In addition to repeatedly feeling uncertain about what yoga actually was, another through line of my yoga experience was feeling out of place. On a superficial level, this was because I was usually one of the only men in the room, but on a more serious level it was because by far the least flexible person in the room. At Asta in the Mission, I felt fatally self conscious as everyone but me spent most of the class casually inverting, the yoga equivalent of doing a wheelie as you peel out of a stoplight. Meanwhile, I struggled to contort myself into a rendition of crow pose that would likely make a real crow fly over to see if I was okay. At the end of class the instructor came over to talk to me. He took one look at my wiry Giraffe legs and hips so tight you could almost hear them cry out for a merciful application of WD-40. Then, like a yoga Liam Neeson, he whispered this remark that’s haunted me ever since:
“Don’t ever stop doing Yoga.”
Was that meant to be encouragement or a threat?
A surprising amount of these classes were heated, either by the sheer number of limber Lululemon-’d limbs in one room, or more often a twist of the thermostat knob so liberal it would make dads across the planet cry out in terror. The heated classes reliably felt harder, sweatier, and more intense. While some instructors claimed this made the experience detoxifying, I kept my doubts to myself. I enjoyed the sweaty serenity of a hot yoga class as much as the next attendee, but also maintained a healthy skepticism. What they called detoxifying I believed to be nothing more than dehydrating.
I began to develop a pet theory that the main reason yoga classes are Hansel levels of “so hot right now” is simply because this makes you sweat more. On one level, I understood this appeal and even sought it out. Sweat is one of the most basic markers of exertion after all. For skeptic yogis like me, sweating felt like one of the most clear physical signals that I was getting a “good workout” in class. Even if I didn’t get the chants or the chakras, a sweatier class made me feel certain that I’d worked hard. So, for those of us seeking yoga-as-exercise, hot classes felt implicitly felt more worth the money and time we’d spent on them. What was fascinating to me was the idea that you can make students like me feel that they’d gotten their moneys worth just by bumping up the heat along with the playlist.
After a dozen or so classes, most of them hotter than a Nelly music video, I eventually developed an innate understanding of the basics of sun salutation, the DNA helix undergirding most (but not all) yoga classes. This gave me a conversational fluency in yoga asanas that made subsequent classes more fun and less intimidating. I could finally get out of my head and stop comparing my poses to other peoples.
This new-found confidence culminated in one of my favorite yoga memories to date that (perhaps tellingly) occurred entirely off of ClassPass. My older sister Ashley had recently finished getting yoga teacher certified at her home studio of Interstellar. Before that term meant heady Christopher Nolan visuals and Hans Zimmer chasing a K-hole on the church organ, it was an inspired oasis of healthy movement on Adeline Street. The capstone of her teaching experience was a showcase class for friends and family to attend and witness a display of her newfound yoga power.
I dropped in to see it for myself. Thanks to my familiarity with the basic movements, I got to experience a much slower, more thoughtful version of yoga than anything I’d seen on ClassPass. It was called Forrest yoga. Even though it was an unheated class taught by five different recently minted yoga instructors, the experience of it was seamless, grounding, and deeply meditative. My sister even came around at the end of class and offered me some helpful adjustments. This made me realize how much my inflexible, asymmetrical body desperately needed this kind of attention in ClassPass classes. Even in what I thought to be a peaceful “non-pose” like savasana, it turned out that my right shoulder blade was violently chicken-winging out, as if it had ambitions to one day leave my upper back and move to Austin along with the rest of the Bay Area.
This newfound yoga knowledge felt better than I’d expected but it also gave me an awareness of some movement limitations I clearly had. What felt elusive was the knowledge, time, or attention necessary to address them. My listless ping-ponging between different studios and genres of exercise likely wasn’t helping matters. My stubborn hips and calves seemed to stay tight no matter how many vinyasas I threw at them, roaring in defiance like King Kong stoically absorbing all of those biplane bullets.
My bourgeoning yoga knowledge now made it much easier to size up a new studio that I was trying on the platform. I could more quickly assess the style, pace, and instruction of a class and decide if it was a good, bad, or odd fit for me. There were some odd fits, to be sure. Of the double digit studios I tried, none were more or a caricture of the surreal predicament of modern yoga than Ritual.
Ritual was a hot yoga studio I frequented in SoMa due to its proximity to work. It felt like the SoulCycle of yoga in the very best and worst senses of that remark. Poses were held for milliseconds as we rapidly transitioned between the greatest hits of the sun salutation series to the throbbing beats of Top 40 remixes. The instructor, was a wiry man whose real name and/or Burning Man name (unclear) was “John Blaze” and who pronounced chaturanga like it was a city in Tennessee as we vinyasa’d at a blistering pace. Like SoulCycle, the music was a central part of class, however it was frantic bordering on incoherent. At one point they played a mashup that combined “Save that Money” by Lil Dicky, the remix of “Roses” by the Chainsmokers, and DJ Snakes inescapable remix of “You Know You Like It” by Aluna George. Hearing a mashup of two remixes and a parody rap song felt like the musical equivalent of the grinding dissonance of “Will it Blend?" on Youtube. Sweat dripped off of my forehead and created small lakes on my Jade yoga mat as we rapidly flowed between different warriors and dogs and I began to feel like I was losing my mind. After collapsing into a quivering puddle at the end, they brought around tea-tree scented face towels and placed them gingerly over our eyes as we panted in Savasana. This cute closer made me even less certain what yoga really was but did convince me to come back the next week and try it again.
Pilates
When I walked into the studio the instructor audibly gasped.
“A man!” she said, as if I’d just set foot on Themyscira.
I felt like a clueless guest of honor as she continued.
“Welcome. Have you ever done Pilates before?”
“A few times. I’ve been trying it through ClassPass.”
“Got it. Well I should start by saying that we’re not like other Pilates studios…”
The first constant of my Pilates journey through ClassPass was that every Pilates studio seemed to want to quickly explain that they weren’t like other studios, which was odd when I began to realize how similar most of these classes really were.
It’s worth clarifying what I think they meant. Pilates, like yoga, is not a monolith. This likely comes from its origin, which is stranger than fiction. It has the dubious honor of being the only boutique fitness practice that was created in an interment camp. Yes, German founder Joseph Pilates decided to create his own system of physical fitness while imprisoned in a British internment camp during World War One. To do so, he mashed up a loose medley of stretching, gymnastics, bodyweight, and resistance strengthening exercises into a new athletic paradigm, in the same way that MMA later combined the greatest hits of boxing, Jiu Jitsu, Muy Thai, and wrestling into a holistic system of combat. Since then, his original system has been riffed on, modified, and expanded upon almost beyond recognition. Today it has as many different disparate sects as Christianity, including Classical, Contemporary, Stott, Winsor, and Lagree, to name a few. So at this point it may or may not resemble what Joseph Pilates was practicing in that fateful exercise yard on the Isle of Man. Were he to see it today he might scowl at the loose morals of the modern spinoffs like Stefanie Meyer watching 50 Shades of Grey.
One World War later, the big divide is no longer between Allies and Central Powers but between mat-based Pilates, and reformer Pilates. Mat Pilates is usually a series of crunch, plank, and lunge variations, often supplemented with equipment to make things burn more. At (since-shuttered) Rogue and Saint in the Mission, we spiced up our mat based movements with a Pilates board, a wooden plank that looked like a comically oversized ruler with a series of springy cords bolted to it to offer different forms of resistance. The class that followed involved a lot of clipping and unclipping these springy dog leashes and then yanking on them in several silly but challenging variations. It felt like a combination of being an old-school phone operator frantically toggling a switchboard and repeatedly trying in vain to get the wall to accompany us on a walk. Other moves resembled futility attempting to free our extremities from a giant mouse trap. While the movements felt odd to my novice limbs, the burn was real. Another mat-based class in Piedmont incorporated a talk about our chakras with some moves that felt like breakdancing while “Lose Yourself” by Eminem soothingly played on the stereo. It was a surreal fusion bordering on confusion but the moms in my class seemed to really dig it, so maybe it was me that was missing something.
The other main camp of Pilates is Reformer Pilates. Unlike the name suggests, it isn’t some Protestant spinoff of regular Pilates, but rather refers to the equipment used. A Pilates reformer is essentially a large, expensive spring-loaded torture device for white women’s hip flexors and abdominal muscles. In more detail, it’s basically a big platform with a sliding carriage that you’ll usually place part, but not all of your body on. The few times I tried putting my whole body on the carriage and zooming back and forth I got some weird looks. The goal is to use the mechanics of the carriage to execute a move like a lunge or a plank in way that burns more. Adding difficulty is the fact that the carriage has a bevy of those trademark clippy springs, which, like their Microsoft word namesake, are always intrusively offering to add some more resistance for the platform for you. The upshot of a remarkably complicated way to to slowly pulse your body back and forth and up and down is that you can make basic moves like a lunge, side lunge, or abdominal pike remarkably challenging. What on solid ground would feel like a mild jalapeño burn in your core or hip flexors, on the reformer makes your muscles feel like they’ve been slathered in habaneros in just a few seconds of pulsing.
I enjoyed my Pilates classes and even found one close to my apartment that I’d go to with co-workers as a social activity. However, the habit and the movements never stuck for me. It was one of the first types of exercise that just didn’t click. This was because it sat in this uncanny valley: neither fun enough to do despite it not giving me noticeable results, nor impactful enough to do despite it not being fun. The vibes also just never felt right, and boutique fitness is often defined by its vibes. There’s this wonderful Spanish expression for feeling out of place: “Como un pulpo en el garaje” or “like an octopus in the garage,” and that captured how I felt at basically every Pilates studio I visited.
This was odd and I honestly couldn’t tell if it was just my own insecurities and baggage, or something real and palpable in the culture of Pilates. Pilates studios were, on the surface, just as welcoming as yoga studios. However, I felt noticeably more self-conscious showing up since in Pilates classes I was usually the only man there. It wasn’t just a gender dynamic, however. Pilates also gave off this sense that it was a very specific type of exercise for a very specific type of person. Pilates felt much more like SoulCycle than yoga did. More than a way to exercise, it seemed like a form of cultural capital. Classes and the elusive “Pilates body” seemed to be a status symbol. Attending therefore wasn’t just about how your hip flexors felt afterwards, but rather being the type of person who attends Pilates, a persona I can only loosely sketch as a thin white woman with disposable income whose primary goal for exercise is to become “toned but not too bulky.” I’ll be the first to admit that this armchair theory may or may not hold water. It may have just been my inner sociology major running wild and trying in vain to distract me as the inescapable Pilates burn threatened to overtake my sanity after too many hip-flexor pulses.
They say one of the best things you can learn from a job is actually what you don’t want to do. ClassPass was showing me that this was a useful lens for exercise, too. In between the super fun classes was a slow but important process of elimination I was engaged in. This helped focus and reframe what I wanted out of the service, and, on a larger level, exercise as a whole. In tandem, what yoga and Pilates made me realize was that I actually did have some nascent goals for exercising besides just sweating after work.
SoulCycle had taught me that exercise could be fun and communal. Pilates and yoga showed me the truly dizzying number of permutations that now existed for exercise in the modern world. Being in shape was clearly a kaleidoscope of possible outcomes. Now, beneath the burn and the sweat, I hungered for more. I realized I needed to find the types of classes that actually fit me, what I wanted, and what I really longed for, which was to get stronger.
I finally had this rough draft of a goal because I’d started playing sports again. The hit of self-confidence from SoulCycle had encouraged me to try playing ultimate frisbee after 3 years away from the sport. Early pickup games and league matches were intense, overwhelming, but at times exhilarating. I mostly felt fragile, easily gassed, and spindly, however. As a newly minted aspiring athlete, I felt like a fraud who would surely be found out on the next breathless point. Realizing that my chaotic diet of the scraps of other peoples fitness routines wasn’t translating to the frisbee field, a refocusing and paring down seemed necessary. Could this skinny limb-fest of a man who’d once been nicknamed “Gumby” on his crew team possibly become bigger, faster, and stronger? By the summer of 2015, this question felt like a taller order than 6’ 3’’ me.