ClassPass Confessions (Part 3)
Sweaty snapshots and exercise epiphanies from my years of fitness promiscuity
Part 3- The Iron Age
Noble Iron
At first I wasn’t sure I was in the right place. I had signed up for a kettlebell class at a gym called “Noble Iron” only to arrive at spartan Ralph Gracie Jiu Jitsu studio. The front desk didn't know what to do with me when I told them I wasn't there for martial arts. After some explanation and signing a waiver I got introduced to Patrick.
Patrick was a sweaty, heavily tattooed man that looked like he could break me in half with no hesitation or remorse. What became clear very quickly was that he was not there to coddle me, be my friend, or give me inspirational speeches or nutritional advice. He was there to make me work.
In a section of the room covered in sweaty gymnastics mats he instructed the half dozen attendees to get a big bell and a little bell. I’d never held a kettlebell before, and picking up these cannon balls with handles I was astounded by how dense and heavy even the small ones felt. As he taught our small group how to do kettlebell swings properly I realized this was going to be an entirely different type of class from anything I’d done so far.
If you’ve never performed one before, a kettlebell swing asks you to hinge over and “hike” the bell up towards your groin like a football center snapping the ball. You then squeeze your glutes and snap upright, using your hamstrings to power the bell up to mid-chest height before letting it descend, pulling you back down into the starting position. Rinse and repeat.
Doing just a few of these taught me that there is simply no cheating or slacking when kettlebells are involved. I couldn’t hide from the hard work of the iron arena. Doing just one swing required a good deal of core stability and recruitment of all of my major muscle groups. Every subsequent rep required my utmost focus and strength to keep the bell pendulum-ing up and down. So by the end of my first class I felt deeply sore in nearly every muscle group, was out of breath, and covered in sweat. I’d never used one piece of equipment that felt this mercilessly effective. I felt convinced that if I could only do kettlebell swings for the rest of my life, I could still end up in remarkably good shape.
In the weeks that followed I did hundreds of kettlebell swings alongside fiendishly intense Turkish get ups, clean and presses, hanging leg raises, goblet squats, one-handed swings, and much much more. We’d build shoulder stability by performing “halos,” swirling the bell around our head over and over again. Then we’d hold a kettlebell in a front rack position or overhead to see how firmly we could keep them locked into place while walking around the room. We worked on grip strength by carrying two heavy bells by our sides and doing laps around the room. Patrick called these farmer’s carries, but I referred them as training for the grocery olympics. He also incorporated some interesting full body stretches into the routine, like the “tactical frog” and Cossack squats, which gave us little breathers and helped keep our hips and hamstrings limber throughout class.
Overtime the swings became slightly easier, though I would never describe them as easy. One of the biggest improvements I saw was in my grip strength. I have tiny, bird-like wrists that have never felt very durable but after regularly doing swings, farmer’s carries, and hanging from a bar, I could hold heavy things for much longer before my wrists gave out.
These classes were also some of the few fitness classes on ClassPass that actually involved learning and teaching in addition to all the sweating. It was clear that underneath his stoic exterior, Patrick cared a lot about proper form. He never hesitated to tell me if I was doing a move incorrectly. I appreciated this since there was nothing sexy to me about a low back injury.
Patricks kettlebell classes were a sharp contrast to the other studios I was sleeping around with at the time. Noble Iron was pretty much the diametric opposite of the fancier boutique studios, which was actually very instructive. While the hip gyms had tasteful houseplants perched by friendly receptionists, cleaner bathrooms, and workouts with stylish lighting and bouncy playlists, once class started I was more often than not just a number. In Patricks world, there was no fluff, padding, or adornment to be found. Yet I found this ascetic take on fitness strangely refreshing. Once class started, I was watched, coached, and pushed in ways that many studios didn’t seem interested in or capable of.
In assessing Patricks net impact on my physical fitness I’m reminded of Frodo’s answer to Merry questioning if they can really trust Aragorn: “I think a servant of the enemy would look fairer, and feel fouler.”
HIIT
A former UFC fighter was shouting at me again. My body suspended just inches above the ground, face nearly kissing the floor, I felt like Tom Cruise in the first Mission Impossible, except I also had to do pikes and pushups. I was still getting the hang of these TRX straps with their militaristic BDSM vibe and their Pittsburg Steelers color scheme. In my vulnerable state, it felt like every single muscle in my core had been woken out of a lifelong slumber to help out in project “stabilize Reilly.”
The former UFC fighter was Cole, my go-to instructor at the 7:30 TRX class. He was a burly bald man built like a tank, with veins in his legs that bulged out like offended cobras. The studio where he taught was called Hit Fit, a boxing gym in the Mission. The sign over the door read: “We don’t use machines; we build them.” Hit Fit was right down the street from my job in SoMa, so it was easy to bike over after work. This experience taught me that one green flag of an effective type of exercise is how easy it is to work into your existing routine. Hit Fit fit like a boxing glove.
They incorporated TRX straps into their workouts in a diabolical variety of row, push up, pike, lunge, and even single leg burpee variations. Rounding out the ensemble cast of equipment were jump ropes, battle ropes, medicine balls, and the odd kettlebell. Classes were reliably challenging and after the initial soreness of acclimating to weight training and TRX at the same time, I felt at home surprisingly quickly. They even had a taco truck that parked outside sometimes for quick, if greasy, fuel for my nascent gains.
I had a great run at Hit Fit, though by the end of it I could see how ClassPass was actively changing the studio for the worse. Multiple evening classes were so flooded in participants that there was barely room or equipment for everyone. Buoyed by their popularity with the fitness-obsessed tech set, Hit Fit opened up another studio, which called Cole away from his normal class times. The frazzled instructor that replaced him could barely keep up with how to manage the increasingly large groups. I took this as a sign that it was time to find greener, fitter pastures.
Thankfully ClassPass had a ton of HIIT options. It was probably the most well-represented fitness genre on the platform behind yoga. Under the loose umbrella of circuit or HIIT (high intensity interval training), classes like these usually centered around going through various stations around the gym and completing weighted or bodyweight movements for reps or for time. For the studios, classes like these were easy to run because all you had to do was show everyone the sequence, start a timer, and then let them loose. For students like me, they were a predictably good way to get a workout, since you could usually scale the moments up or down in difficulty by lifting different weights or changing how fast you did the sequence.
My HIIT quest took me all over the Bay Area, starting with another culty boxing studio in the Mission called the Park Gym that had cardio circuit classes I liked. Back in the East Bay I enjoyed working out at Proaction Athletics by Lake Merritt, Sweat Health and Fitness in Rockridge, and Oakland Fitness Company on San Pablo, a gym I’d end up joining for three years after leaving ClassPass. My lone bad HIIT experience was a gym I tried in Flatbush while visiting my brother in Brooklyn. Since the class had not included any kind of warm up, I promptly and painfully pulled a quad muscle during the opening set of weighted lunges. Later, during a set of calf raises the beefy guido instructor asked me if I played basketball. When I responded that I played ultimate frisbee he replied dismissively: “Oh you don’t need your calves to throw a frisbee.” Thank you, next.
Overall, classes like these were a good multi-vitamin for weight training that gave me a conversational fluency with the moves and equipment to be found at many gyms. This meant that if I was traveling, for the first time in my life, I could put together my own circuit workouts fairly easily with whatever the hotel gym had on hand. I just copy pasted my favorite moves from class. They also let me use cool equipment that made me feel like I was in a badass training montage, which was a big plus for my mid 20s male ego. I savored movements like working the battle ropes, doing sledgehammer swings, or my personal favorite: flipping a huge oversized tire. HIIT classes also gave me ample opportunity to practice the kettlebell movements like swings, goblet squats, and farmers carries I’d learned from Patrick at Noble Iron. I noticed that the hardest classes and the ones made me feel the best afterwards tended to be the ones that involved full body, compound movements like the thruster, wall ball, and kettlebell swing.
Most revealingly for me, it was these HIIT classes more than Yoga, Pilates or Spin that finally started change how my body looked, felt, and performed.
Spin classes had made me feel euphoric, winded and sore in my quads. Yet given how much I was already biking to get to work, my quads didn’t look or feel much stronger. While regularly going to Soul had made me able to go harder in class, I noticed that biking in place didn’t really make my body feel any better about all of the running, jumping, stopping, and starting of ultimate frisbee. In retrospect, the biggest thing Soul Cycle gave me was motivation to exercise regularly, which was a psychological benefit I’ll always appreciate.
Yoga classes reliably made me feel calm and sometimes a bit more limber in my hips and hamstrings, which were perpetually wound up from biking and playing frisbee. The post-class serenity of yoga was so appealing to me I’d often deliberately schedule an intro class after a frisbee tournament. Nothing felt nicer in that sore state than some gentle, non-threatening sun salutations. I was also thrilled to discover that even chaotic Ritual Hot Yoga offered a restorative class with a slower playlist, mercifully slotted on Friday evenings to heal from the slings and arrows of the week prior.
Pilates classes always made me feel the burn in the moment, but their burn also felt mysterious and elusive. Going regularly didn’t seem to make them hurt any less. I also couldn’t figure out why muscles that felt strong in other types of classes were so easily wrecked by Pilates.
HIIT classes delivered a combo of the breathless euphoria of spin class with a rotating grab bag of challenges for my major muscle groups that kept me humble and on my toes. In the first few months of regularly going to HIIT classes I found myself playing a guessing game called “What’s sore today?” Yet the challenges and soreness didn’t feel insurmountable. The classes felt compelling enough to keep my enthusiasm burning bright each week. In part, I think this was because the movements felt closest to realistic training for the breathless running and jumping of playing ultimate frisbee. With the benefit of hindsight, I now believe that it was the intensity of the stimulus, relevance of the types of movements, and consistency with which I went that ultimately produced real positive changes for me. New strength and coordination came first, followed by some physical changes I hadn’t expected.
As a lifelong lanky boy, I’d assumed I’d be stuck with the physique of Gollum from Lord of the Rings for my entire life. So I was thrilled to one day notice visible back and shoulder muscles taking up residence. For the first time in my boozy and hedonistic 20s, the idea of acquiring an abdominal six pack felt more appealing than an alcoholic one. Lizzie’s girlfriend Amanda pointed out that I had something-resembling-biceps all of a sudden. In moments of post-class vanity I would sometimes wonder if tighter t-shirts might just might make me look like Chris Evens curling that Helicopter in Captain America, Civil War.
More than stroking my ego with the marginal physique changes, these classes awakened a new sense of power and resiliency in me. Even in the ones that were harder or far outside of my comfort zone, I could hold my own, which felt good. It was calming to know that I was finally in good enough shape to attend almost any class and not drown in the difficulty. It felt validating to realize that I could tackle most physical challenges with the strength, stability, and power innate to my body. Moreover, each experience of this high gave me newfound strength and motivation to keep building on it. Climbing the HIIT strength ladder was an addictive positive feedback loop. I stopped drinking on weeknights so I’d have more energy to workout and these workouts only made me want to workout more. I felt like a video game character leveling up his skill tree with each HIIT class I scheduled.
Oakland Fitness Company
Ironically the biggest and most long lasting change in how I worked out from this era was that ClassPass introduced me to the gym I would one day leave it for. Oakland Fitness Company was located in an unassuming concrete and glass space in the ground floor of a condominium complex at the intersection of San Pablo and 65th Street in North Oakland. I’d walked and biked by it dozens of times and even tried emailing the owner but got no response. I was intrigued when I finally saw it show up as an option on ClassPass. On paper the location alone was basically perfect. It was a ten minute bike ride from my apartment and a five minute bike ride from my new job at Imperfect Produce.
The main instructor was a heavily tattooed, muscular man named Mike Beatrice. In my first class, he took one look at me doing body weight lunges and told me that I needed to put on some muscle or I was going to hurt myself playing frisbee.
“You have no lateral stability. Look at any good athlete doing a dynamic move, whether it’s a basketball player crossing someone over, Serena Williams acing a serve, or an NFL receiver catching a pass in traffic, they’re always moving dynamically across their bodies. We need to build that strength and stability in you.”
So he put me to work, programming movements I’d done before like squats and lunges, but also movements I’d never done before like the landmine press, Paloff Press, and pushing a weighted sled across the astroturf. While Mike was a bit disorganized as a gym owner, at one point forgetting to bill me for my membership for well over a year, he had gathering an excellent array of thoughtful trainers and useful equipment in his North Oakland oasis.
After seeing how much pushing the sled and doing goblet squats in Mike’s classes were making me a faster, more confident ultimate frisbee player, I decided to do something I’d never done before: evangelize fitness to other people. After running the idea by Mike, I posted in my frisbee teams Slack group that we should start training at my gym together. I reasoned at worst it would be a fun bonding activity and at best it might make us all stronger, tougher players.
Above: The initial class of 5 AC Bandits players that tried Oakland Fitness Company- Me, Alexis, Saadia, Danielle, and Seamus
My now-girlfriend Alexis was one of four people to take me up on the initial offer. Long before we ever dated we were gym buddies. Thrillingly, even more people came to join us over time. For a magical era of my 20s we had a large group of AC Bandits players that would eventually make up the bulk of Mike’s classes. At one point we even had enough teammates in class to put 7 on the line for a frisbee game: Moose, Chowder, Cody, Fiona, Saadia, Duke, and Princess, all united by a common goal to get stronger. My housemate Matt even joined in on the fun. For a glorious year or so, a large chunk of my world revolved around OFC. I’d never imagined a gym would be the nucleus of my social life, but here I was flipping tires alongside teammates, housemates, and my future partner.
Above: Fiona, Alexis, and me resting in a tire after a grueling workout on New Years Day, 2017
Above: Alexis and I knew how to nail corny poses (if not yet heavy lifts) from an the earliest stages of our relationship
Above: Alexis, Fiona, Seamus, Matt, and me after class at OFC
When Mike opened a healthy cafe called Home Grown a few doors down, we developed a ritual of swinging by for a group brunch after Saturday morning class. His egg bowls and smoothies hit just right after a sweaty session at OFC, especially since the group was sometimes nursing a hangover from hanging out together the night before.
After realizing how much I liked the classes and the social aspect of my growing gym community, suddenly ClassPass’s limit of only 3 classes per studio per month felt constricting. I needed to go to OFC more often than that to get what I wanted out of it, both on a physical and emotional level. By this point I was only using ClassPass for the occasional yoga class to limber up or Pilates class to bond with my new Imperfect co-workers, so canceling and joining OFC full time didn’t feel like a very big deal.
After I cancelled my ClassPass membership, some burning questions about my era as an exercise slut never fully went away. In fact, like delayed onset muscle soreness, they seemed to intensify with time. The biggest one felt like semantics but actually cut much deeper than that.
Why is there so little actual learning and teaching in most fitness “classes” when so many of them could be more accurately described as “pay-to-sweat experiences?”
Which classes and movements were actually making me stronger and fitter and which ones were just making me feel sweaty and tired?
More importantly, why? Is there a unified theory of physical fitness somewhere out there past the Grey Havens of Gains?