- School electronic gates complete with Stephen Hawkins intercom
- Tyrone the instructor being the only man in the world to work the 3/4 length trouser over leggings look
- The it-must-be-worth-it muscle ache of not being able to get out of the bed normally for a week
Having sacked off
my expensive gym membership, caught up in the heady delights of Dodgeball and
with the seductively subtle marketing talk of Go Mammoth’s Fitness Manager
James, Jolly Dodgerettes Abbie and I had enrolled on the Tuesday night Circuits
class in Stockwell (this). Yes, you heard. 100% a good idea. Not one horror story of
senior-school circuit training where you couldn’t even do one pull up and you
got hit in the face by a medicine ball came to mind. Hello ripped abs and
Amazonian strength; we look forward to meeting you.
With a full belly
of carb-y pasta, last week (our first class) we hadn’t quite left ourselves
enough time to get to the venue. It took us about five minutes to work out
local parking, and then ten minutes to work out how to break into the school
where the class was held. We eventually found a gate and were patched through
an intercom system (with a Stephen Hawkins ‘You. Are. Now. Being. Transferred’
message) to the 24h receptionist (mental! Even my office isn’t manned beyond
5.30pm). After going through the electronic gates, we walked to the main block
and signed in. If I’m honest, I was slightly disappointed that this wasn’t one
of those schools that had metal detectors on entry. Bloody sensational media!
Letting me think that all South London yoofs carried knives and wanted to stab
me up so that they could join a gang called All Bout Money*, and schools were
now just prisons and teachers over-qualified riot police. Ridiculous. If it’s
not true in Stockwell, I don’t think it’s true anywhere.
So that week we
arrived with mere tenths of a second before the class started, un-stretched and
Abbie with a full bladder. Lesson learnt, Stockwell.
This week we
arrived twenty minutes early, and raced over to the fitness studio block to
prepare for the class. With the fishy smell of another 24h receptionist’s
dinner lurking in the air, we stood lunging/stretching/chatting on the stairs until
the Go Mammoth Boxfit class finished. An Australian teacher and classmate
turned up and after a brief chat about Caitlin Moran, we watched in disbelief
as in Mary Poppins bag/Tardis style, person after person left the studio in
what seemed to number bodies well and truly beyond the room's capacity. Perhaps
Boxfit was actually some sort of survival of the fittest fist fight for access
to the limited amount of air in the studio?
Instructor Tyrone must have quickly swept the oxygen-deprived Go-Mammothers
into the cupboard, because the floor was clear when we entered and the only
evidence of the hunger games battle was a few open windows with survivors standing
by, victoriously breathing in the fresh air.
This was only mine and Abbie’s second week of Circuits, as we’d signed up
slightly late to the classes and had nervously joined on week 3 fearing that
we’d enter a room full of committed triathletes and sports fanatics who would
scoff at our pitiful attempts at a press-up and would have furthered the
already gaping fitness gap with those two extra sessions under their
maxi-muscle belts. But after an amazing workout, with an enthusiastic and
carefree instructor (Ty) and friendly group of Go-Mammothers of varying fitness
levels, we were well up for our second week, and the fourth official week.
There were a few
less attendees than week 3 but given that our aches from that class had only
just subsided (if this were an arrested development episode, it would flick to
footage of me repeatedly attempting to lift myself into a sitting position in
bed two mornings later, before having to roll onto my front and fall sideways onto
the floor, and of Abbie having to be dressed by her boyfriend because she
couldn’t get her arms to work) we presumed the muscles of others had put up
better protests than our own and were imprisoning their eager-to-work-out
bodies to comfy sofas and forcing them to watch bad TV. Tyrone gave us a
high-five when Abbie announced her surprise that we’d made two classes in a row
before we got down to business and started warming up.
The warm up was
different from the previous week (when we’d used skipping ropes) and as the
class progressed, we subtly noticed that the instructor had taken everything up
a notch, forcing us to all push ourselves a little harder. He went through
various circuits, each focussing on something different (be it power,
biometrics, resistance or cardio) and being long enough to cause you a little
pain, but short enough that you don’t start praying to God to KILL YOU NOW. As
a small, insider tip, I found the easiest way to stay focussed was to count the
number of repetitions you were doing, rather than spending the 1m work-out
wondering how on earth life would ever be the same again and wondering if
Tyrone needed the battery in his watch replaced because you’ve clearly been
doing lunges from a bench for FIVE HOURS NOW ALREADY.
I won’t reveal the
structure of the class, as one of the best parts of the first week was not
knowing when the circuits were going to end, and the euphoric relief when
Tyrone changed the pop music (which I say with absolute delight is not the sort
of dance shi*e that you get at a spinning class) to some calmer numbers for a
quick abdominal workout and the warm down.
We're by no means
uber fit. Aside from Go Mammoth Dodgeball, Abbie cycles to Uni and I run home
from work once a month. And so whilst effective and tough, we found the class
in no way intimidating or suited only to the mega fit. The instructor is
encouraging, without having to resort to aggressive TOUGH LOVE and doesn't
bring group attention on you when you're struggling. In fact, it's such a
personal work out and about individual effort that you can't focus on anything
but trying to coordinate a press-up hand clap without falling on your face or fighting
not to accidentally star-jump backwards into the wall. If you ever are
struggling, Tyrone will just come and quietly do the moves next to you to keep
you on pace, and when explaining the moves in each circuit, generously lets you
ogle his strong, sculpted arm muscles and toned body do the moves for a few
minutes without making you feel like a trench-coated man at a children’s
playground.
*Note, ABM is
actually a real gang, and gang culture amongst children is not something to
joke about. I think Dappy and that Bloods and Crips documentary have taught us
that.
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