Dog Day Afternoon

Behind the Scene - Locker Room

General Workout Facility

We're back at it again! Similar to the classic film featuring Al Pacino, before heading to The Dogpound, we had a plan and intended to follow the plan and execute the plan at all cost, needless to say, we were looking forward to this for awhile. That said, most time plans often deviate from reality and Ron paid a steep price for his action last night as he had few too many tequilas - lesson well learned.

Founded by its head trainers Kirk Myers and the Pena brothers (Dawin and Brey), The Dogpound aim to help participants to not only achieve their goal, but to "smash it". Since its first celebrity client Hugh Jackman, Mr. Wolverine himself, The Dogpound has gain a wide variety of loyal clientele in its brief history, ranging from Victoria's Secret Models and Olympians to everyday New Yorkers. When you first walk into the gym, you'll notice the sleek and modern design of the place with a very strong color preference of black, which you would expect with a name such as The Dogpound. One thing that was not expected was the boxing ring in the back corner of the gym to mix things up. The gym offers exclusive one-on-one training session, semi-training session for group of 2 - 4 people and group classes.

Onward with our ratings for the gym:

Motivation (4.5) - Our trainer for the day was KC, he's been with the gym since day one and he was great. He strike the right balance of motivating and entertaining. Throughout the whole workout, he was pumping us up and making sure we were performing each of the exercise correctly. The tune in the gym is mainly hip-hop, not the hardcore kind, but more like the ones you hear on the radio (yes, Ja Rule was featured once or twice during the workout...)

Amenities (4) - With addition of the boxing ring, we would say the gym has everything you'll need for a ass kicking class (i.e. free weights, battle ropes, cardio machines and more). The biggest amenity of them all, though paid for, is the expertise and knowledge of the trainers. However, in terms of the post-workout and pre-workout amenities such as the locker room or shower, it's pretty bare bone - the gym offers you a locker to put your stuff away, but that's about it.

Intensity (4) - Since the bread and butter of the gym is personal training session, you can customize your workout (i.e. cardio, strength, flexibility and overall). We did a semi-private training session for two and we did not have a specific objective, so we let KC design our class. Our workout consisted of mainly calisthenics and light weight training in high intensity interval training (HIIT) fashion. The workout was more so about body control and hitting the precise muscle groups that we were not aware of.

Overall (4) - We had a great training session and learned a lot about different new moves that we can incorporate into our own workouts / trainings. Factoring into the price of our training session ($100 per person per hour, so $200 total for both of us), we would categorize this as one of the  "treat ya self" situations. We would like to go back again to explore different types of training session in the near future.

Class Location:
1 Renwick St.
New York, NY10013

- L&L