Emilee Prado
It’s a new year, and for that matter, a new decade. Back-to-back family meals and weight scales reading “you ate too much” compel you to get back in the gym and sweat yourself into shape. While the gym life works for some, it doesn’t do the trick for everyone.
Thankfully, there are more ways to work out than just an endless array of Bowflex and elliptical machines. If you find it difficult to get back into a fitness frenzy and are looking for unique ways to work out, here are a few innovative options to consider.
Rowing
You don’t need a canoe or an oar to row in Southlake. In fact, you don’t even need a lake. Thanks to the new boutique fitness concept Row House that opened last August, rowers can now focus on strength, core and endurance through 45-minute indoor rowing machine sessions that work over 85% of your muscles.
“We start with a warmup, which focuses on your pectoral muscles,” Southlake general manager Kate Thompson says. “Then we do three different intervals of paddle, push and power. Then we get into rowing, which is mostly a leg-focused workout. It’s actually 60% legs. The rest comes from the core and the upper body.”
This workout is low impact, which means it is easy on the joints but still breaks a sweat and gets your heart rate up. Kate explains that rowing is a great workout for older athletes who may have some joint pain or problems.
“We see a lot of older clients where running has had too much impact on their muscles and joints,” Kate says. “When they come in here, you are using all of those same things without straining those muscles or joints. We have people who have had knee reconstructions. We have a guy now that needs to replace a rotator cuff, and even he can still row.”
With over five years of boutique fitness experience, Kate never would have believed rowing would be as intensive as it turned out to be. The key to its fitness routines is its Concept 2 rowing machines, which dampener settings can be switched from one to 10 to control airflow. Kate says setting the damper between three to five mimics the same resistance as if you’re rowing on the lake.
“What you put into it is what you get out of it, which is the same as if you were rowing on the water,” she says.
Hotworx
Infrared Workouts
While sweating and burning up, you might not think that the one thing missing from your workout is even more heat. Yet that’s exactly what members experience at Hotworx in Colleyville and Keller. For 15 to 45 minutes, members enter one of nine infrared saunas, turn up the temperature to 125 degrees and follow the virtual instructor in their own space.
“A lot of Olympians will train in infrared on purpose because it shocks and stresses the body with heat while they work out,” Colleyville franchisee owner Angelique Gates says. “You’re recovering at the same time while you’re working out because the increase in the blood circulation enables the muscle to push out the lactic acid much quicker. It’s going to grow faster, better, stronger and recover quicker because of the infrared energy.”
Angelique explains that Hotworx’s infrared saunas give your body a fever during your exercise, which leads to several unexpected perks.
For one thing, you burn double the calories you would have at room temperature.
“When you’re in the sauna, you’re burning 300 or so calories,” she explains. “But when you get out, your core is trying to cool itself off, so it burns just as much if not more calories outside the sauna as in.”
But it's not just the fitness aspect that’s so appealing to Angelique — it’s also the health benefits. Angelique says the added heat increases your endurance, makes your joints and ligaments more flexible, detoxes the body and even strengthens your immune system. She stresses that there is no added humidity in the saunas, so it’s easy to breathe while exercising.
“It’s not like walking outside in Texas at 100 degrees,” she explains. “This is totally an upgrade that’s going on inside your body at a cellular level.”
Water Aerobics
For a workout just as rigorous but a lot less sweaty, dive into one of the 50-minute aqua classes at Champions Club. Water aerobics offers an aerobic workout that’s intensified through added resistance, because simple movements on land become more difficult in the pool.
“In a general comparison, water is more dense than air, therefore leading to greater resistance per movement pattern than the comparable exercise on land,” fitness performance supervisor Ryan Svoboda says. “Your entire body is working harder against the resistance, leading to an increase in caloric burn.”
Champions Club unveiled its indoor water aerobics classes in November, and special instructors lead these classes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Ryan says each class starts with a group-based warmup, where participants work at their own pace and intensity. Afterward, they alternate between high-intensity strength and cardio intervals in both shallow and deep water, with short periods of rest in between.
Benefits of the exercise include an extended workout, because water weights don’t pull a person down the same way regular ones do. The exercises are also easier on the joints and muscles, making for faster rehabilitation and recovery. Ryan says water aerobic classes are especially helpful to older participants due to its low impact.
“Aqua classes are a great low-impact alternative that can increase overall cardiovascular endurance as well as flexibility and strength,” he says. “Exercise in general is anti-aging, but with the addition of aqua classes, the joints and ligaments in our older population benefit as well since there isn't high impact within any of the movement patterns.”
Emilee Prado
Climbing And Bouldering
Your fitness can reach new heights at the Summit Climbing Gym in Grapevine. Built in 2001, Summit is one of the oldest climbing gyms in the area and features over 2,000 square feet of bouldering that reaches up to 32 feet tall.
As one of the gym’s coaches, Trevor Jason says there are two ways to scale walls — climbing and bouldering. Climbing mostly involves securing yourself with a rope and scaling a vertical wall. While most new climbers think climbing works the arms most, Trevor says the legs play a lot more into it than people expect.
“What climbing comes down to is a lot of finger strength, legs and shoulders,” Trevor explains. “It doesn’t take much to be able to hold yourself up on a wall when you have your feet on, but then it becomes a game of getting higher and pushing on your feet.”
Bouldering, meanwhile, involves more inverted surfaces, with some boulderers even finding themselves horizontal under a surface. Trevor says bouldering requires intensified arm and leg strength to complete.
“It’s way more aggressive, larger, stronger moves while rope climbing can be more meticulous and slower,” Trevor explains. “You’ll use your toes to push down on a hold, and then pull up and get your weight up. That’s when it becomes a little more like bouldering and you have to tense up a lot more to make these more strenuous moves.”
Trevor says climbing and bouldering is just as psychological as it is physical, as athletes need to pick their next grip strategically while suspended 6 to 15 feet in the air.
“It isn’t about one more rep,” he says. “Instead of just doing curls until you can’t do them anymore, you see exactly how close you are and push yourself harder. It’s way more about your head game and mental space when it comes to climbing harder routes. You motivate yourself.”
Tapout Fitness
Mixed Martial Arts
Instead of dumbbells and free weights, go 12 rounds with an old-fashioned punching bag and see who comes out on top. Tapout Fitness opened its first Southlake location in April last year, and with kickboxing and martial arts classes and boot camps, members won’t run out of ways to hit the bag anytime soon.
“All of our classes give people a glimpse into what fighters actually do to get ready for fights,” Tapout Fitness Southlake owner Barry Foval says. “This is stuff the everyday public doesn’t always get to see, and it is based on a very high-caliber fighter’s routine. It just opens it up to everyday people to get the opportunity to see that side of it.”
Barry says Tapout teaches a variety of different fighting styles: boxing, kickboxing, muay thai, jiu-jitsu, martial arts and even self-defense.
All of the classes start with high-intensity training regiments then they end with one long bout of hitting the bag over and over again.
“It is a total body workout,” Barry says. “You are hitting a heavy 100-pound bag, and it’s those tiny little micro-tears that give you a lot of that muscle. We really isolate that and hit that core down as hard as you can in a short period of time.”
To get a fully optimized workout, Barry says knowing your form is incredibly important: simple stuff like how to set your feet or how to move your body when you throw a punch. But once you have the proper form down, Barry says kickboxing can create really defined muscle, not just on your arms and chest, but also your back, waist and legs as well.
“Your core is getting worked out the entire time you’re hitting, kicking, moving around and doing stuff,” Barry explains. “It builds muscle, but it’s a nice, lean muscle. You won’t look bad when you take your shirt off.”
Dance With Me
Dancing
You don’t need a treadmill or a running track to experience high-intensity cardio. If you want a more fun and fast-paced method to work out the same muscles, ballroom dancing with a partner is the perfect alternative to get your heart rate up. Dance With Me coordinator Brandon Wisner says he has been teaching dance for 14 years, and fast-moving dances like the cha-cha, salsa and East Coast swing have the most athletic value to them.
“There’s a lot of footwork and articulation that goes into it,” Brandon explains. “You’re activating your core so you can move two people as one. Your trunk is twisting in different directions. It activates your back muscles, your lats, your quads — everything all the way down your whole body.”
Brandon says even the more formal dances, like the waltz and the foxtrot, can be relatively rigorous on their own. Brandon says try holding any pose for two minutes straight, and anything can be strenuous.
“A lot of people look at the waltz and say, ‘Oh, that’s very pretty, very soft,’ but there’s a lot going on within the body that you really don’t think about — how you hold your frame up and use muscles that you’re not normally [using],” Brandon says. “Just learning the full-on technique and how to make it look effortless is the toughest part of it all.”
Whether it's Latin, American rhythm or interpretive dance, Brandon says he considers dancing to be one of the most beneficial forms of exercise there is because of how many muscles you’re working all at once. Brandon says many professional athletes even take dance classes just to help themselves be quicker, lighter and nimbler on their feet.
“They all are pretty much the same dances,” Brandon says. “It’s just the way you perform them that is slightly different. It’s pretty involved when you break into the ballroom world.”