It's All About That Convict Body

Locker Area (Jail Cell Door Cameo to the Left)

Post Successful Prison Break Flex

It’s all about that “ConBody”. As the slogan of the gym emphasizes “Do Your Time”, the founder of the group fitness class, Coss Marte  developed a unique and effective exercise program without the need for any equipment while doing his time. With such a strong and almost intimidating name, what makes ConBody different from other workouts? Well to start off, you literally enter into a jail cell-like confinement space as the class door leading towards the main exercise room is made of jail cell bars (as shown in the picture above). Appearance aside, the trainers aim to guide you through a variety of resistance exercises using only your body weight. There’s no other equipment required and no shoes allowed in the exercise room (Tip – we would recommend you to go barefoot to gain tractions when performing the different exercises). The class will help to build personal discipline through a unique blend of cardiovascular training and bodyweight exercises that take advantage of the resistance properties of everyday objects. Additionally, the trainers apply military techniques to space constraints intimately familiar to city-dwellers and individuals who reside in small, constrained spaces.

Even before the workout class, we were very intrigued by this idea of leveraging a person’s harshest and darkest experience to empower others physically and mentally, which is something that we respect the founder, Coss and his fellow trainers (Sultan Malik, Ray Acosta and Shane Ennover) very much so for. Perhaps many of you would agree, working out on a consistent basis and constructing the body that you want day-in and day-out is not merely a physical act, it is about mental toughness and focus. As you may already suspected, all of the trainers did their time in the “big house” and they each bring something different based on their experience to feature into their workout.

Our trainer was Shane Ennover (Instagram – shanes_fitness_world) and our ratings for this class is as the follow:

Motivation (4.3) – The class started aggressively, there was a lot of yelling and pumping up, so it is natural that it caught us little off guard. Shane had great energy throughout the class, it’s hard to believe that our class was his third class in the row! He kept up the motivating chants throughout the workout; one may call it "tough love", but he was very good about correcting your posture if needed and very professional throughout the workout. One of our favorite motivational quotes from Shane was "Why you lying?!", which he repeated many times throughout the last part of our workout or the abs portion when you're experiencing all types of soreness in your whole body body.

Amenities (3.3) – The amenities here are not the best we've seen and the overall facility is relatively small. That said it is suffice for your basic needs - storage, shower and workout towels.  

Intensity (4.2) – Our class reflects a bootcamp-like style of training. Our trainer, Shane was relentless, we did not have many breaks throughout the class; intensity was definitely on point right from the gecko. Additional element of intensity comes from the team/group oriented routines. To elaborate further on that point, we had to perform certain exercises as a group, for instance, together we had to do lunges around the room, relay style, finishing by holding a half-squat position against the wall, so if you let down during the exercise, you're ultimately letting down your teammates and making them suffer (um... does remind us a bit of this workout class called Tone House - a little bid of foreshadowing for ya...). Again, intensity of the class was on point. 

Overall (4.0) – A great workout overall, well choragraph class in a weight-free fashion, which is pretty cool. The class helps you to realize that you really don't need a lot of space or fancy equipments to get in shape, all you need is your determination and let your creativity do the rest. Again, we cannot emphasize enough that we really appreciate what the founder and trainers are trying to accomplish and have accomplished so far.

Class Location:

294 Broome Street (C-Level)

New York, NY 10002

-L&L

Friday Night Date Night with F45

Locker Room Scene

Main Battle Ground

It's that time of the week, Friday night, where you want to be out and about, eating, drinking and doing fun things, so naturally we chose to go to a group workout class - F45 Training ("F45"). F45 was found by our mates from the Down Under (insert our "athletic" Australian accent) in 2012.  The F45 Co-CEOs sought to create a Group-Training facility that featured the most dynamic and effective training styles to date. Not only did they seek to find the best types of workouts, but they wanted to find a way to vary those workouts every day and make them accessible to the masses. They envisioned highly-capable, charismatic instructors to lead the workouts to motivate people to reach their potential. The "F" stands for functional training and the "45" stands for the approximate length of each class.

If you've read our second post - Time For a Switch ("Switch Playground" or "Switch"), you may have drawn some parellels between the two classes. Both classes (in our opinion) does a good job of keeping your body guessing by performing various movements at a high intensity level and firing off your different muscle groups. That said, F45 feels more like your cross fit gym with a openness feel to it and Switch injects certain gadgets (i.e. smoke machine and live DJ) to create a certain club-esque feel to the workout (though F45 does have a DJ on Saturdays).

F45 offers few many different style of classes, so you should definitely check'em out on its website, under "Workouts". We did the Flamingo: Athletica ( a 45-minute cardio focused session featuring varieties of HIIT). We took 3 Athletica classes (based on the generous two week special) and were pleased that they felt completely different each time, will definitely keep you from getting bored.

Time to drop our ratings on this class:

Motivation (3.5) - Our session consisted of 3 trainers, one of them was the owner of this location. The session started with the trainers providing demonstrations of the different workouts, which we thought were helpful. Further, there were TV monitors on the wall that provided additional guidance of the different exercises if you happen to be lost. That said, we wished the trainers were to do more during the workouts; while they did a good job of trying to pump people up with the "you can do it!" type of chants, we thought they could've guided people more with their forms and approaches.

Amenities (3.8) - Believe it or not, we do take this rating category pretty seriously and we did debate a fair amount regarding the rating we should give for F45. The controversial aspect of this rating rooted from the lockers without a lock, which we had a different view on. Ultimately, we decided that the overall amenities package provided by F45 gym does sufficiently offset that no lock on the locker aspect. The locker rooms do have LARGE fluffly towels and 3 showers if you are looking to run to work after. The restrooms and core training facilities were well kept and equipped with everything you need to get a good workout experience.

Intensity (4.0) - Not to over belabor the point regarding the correct forms when performing different exercise, but given how short of intervals each exercises are (20 seconds with 10 seconds break in between sets or 45 seconds with 15 seconds rest), we thought having the correct form when performing these exercises are critical to optimize your workout and maximize the intensity level. Overall, the exercises themselves will definitely give you a good run for your money, but if the trainers were more keened on people's forms and movements, we thought the session could've been even more engaging, providing more tangible results.

Overall (3.7) - We both thought the class had a lot of potential, however there were some hiccups in midst of the workout. For instance, the malfunction of the TV monitors which led to the trainers miscounting the number of sets and cutting off (several times) the cycles prematurely. All in all, we did enjoy all the different workouts featured in our session and we did appreciate the breadth of exercises offered in our session. Giving how new this location of F45 is, we hope the gym can smooth out these wrinkles quickly and realize its true potential.

Class Location:

F45 Training Flatiron
123 W. 20th St. (1E)
New York, NY 10011

- L&L

Let's Get Cyc'ed!

Li & Loo Tackle Cyc

Safely Store Away Your Belongs

Ladies and gents, today we're going to take a closer look at  Cyc Fitness ("Cyc"). As you can probably extrapolate or infer from that name, it is a group fitness class for cycling. Ever since the emergence of Soul Cycle in 2006, cycling has been the foundation block of New York group fitness scene, partly driven by its accessibility and prevalence for people with different fitness background. Additionally, these cycling classes aim not only to provide you with a good sweat and workout, but good vibes.

In this competitive cycling group fitness landscape, Cyc aims to creates its own unique brand identity. In our opinion it is closer to a Soul Cycle class than a Flywheel class. Cyc offers a series of fast-pace, beat-bumping rides that activates the whole body, the whole time. Each unique class combines calorie burning endurance intervals and weighted sectors with high-energy playlists and motivating instructors. The Cyc experience consists of  3 different types of classes: Cyc45 (most popular and common workout - for 45 minutes, let your instructor take over and just ride), CycLift (like Cyc45, but with additional elements of weight training incorporated into your ride) and CycLean (opposite of CycLift, this class focus on your stamina building and it's weight free). We took the classic Cyc45 class.

Most people are fairly familiar with cycling group fitness class due to the popularity of Soul Cycle, Flywheel and Peloton, so for us the deciding factor comes down to the instructor for your class and we got a great one today.

Now let's rate this thing:

Motivation (5) - As we mentioned above, the deciding motivational factor of the class is mainly determined and heavily influenced by the instructor. For this weekend's class, our instructors was Aaron Albert and tell you what, he was hands down one of the best cycling instructors we had, all time. The style of the class was very upbeat and motivating right from the beginning. Similar to most instructors, Aaron too, incorporated his own choreography and style of riding, however, his energy was phenomenal, especially when he would sporadically just free-style and improvise during middle of a song - his energy was contiguous.

Amenities (3.5) - The gym offers you the soup to nuts amenities similar to the rest of the group cycling classes, so if you don't have your own cycling shoes, the gym does provide you with rentals. There is a locker area downstairs from the studio, along with separate restrooms.

Intensity (4.5) - The class was fast-paced and mixed with variety of different workouts, including the weight component. While the intensity of the class was largely dictated by the our instructor, he did provide the class with the opportunities for feedbacks throughout the session. The class rode with great intensity and chose the "harder" options every chance we got. Needless to say our shirts were completely drenched by the end of the class, it was a great cardio day.

Overall (4.5) - The class definitely pleasantly exceeded our expectation and it was probably one of the best cycling classes we've taken thus far. Granted this is the only Cyc class we've taken, so it's hard to tell whether if all Cyc classes are like this, but if most of the Cyc classes provide similar quality, we're confident that you'll hear more and more about this brand of cycling. Also, Cyc is available through Class Pass.

Class Locations: 

Cyc Chelsea
555 Sixth Ave.
New York, NY 10011

Cyc Hell's Kitchen
700 Eighth Ave.
New York, NY10036

Cyc UES
1231 3rd Ave.
New York, NY 10021

-L&L

Bikini Body Guide to Sucess

Kayla in Action

Ron in Action

In today's blog we're going to chat about something a little bit different than what we normally sample, which is group boutique fitness, we're going to talk about a cult-following, body sculpting and girls' best kept secret for that beach body, that's right, we're talking about Bikini Body Guide or all the cool kids referred to as "BBG".

BBG is found by aspiring young (25 years old) personal trainer, author and entrepreneur - Kayla Itsines. So, what is BBG? This awesome workout routine was initially created by Kayla and her partner Tobi, back in 2014 and was initially encapsulated by their eBook that contains 12 weeks worth of 28 minute resistance workouts plus educational content. Since November 2015, the BBG has been transformed and is now available as a part Kayla's Sweat with Kayla app. BBG's secret sauce to its success has been its mass appeal, it is meant for girls of ALL shapes and sizes, all ages and backgrounds with varying fitness levels. That said, please not think this is ONLY an workout for the ladies, guys can try it too and we're confident that the workout routine will rock the guys equally (Ron certainly agrees as you can see in the pic above - definitely not a easy workout).

You know the drill, onward with our ratings:

Motivation (3.5) - We performed the BBG workout simply utilize a printout that Madisen has prepared. Yep, it's that simple - get your guided workout routines ready and you're off to the race. For us, the biggest motivating component is doing the workout together as a couple. We highly recommend you try this workout with someone and have FUN with it; naturally, you'll start to feed off of each other's energy and challenge yourself every step of the way.

Amenities (2 - 5) - Oh snap, "no you didn't" - this is the first time that we're introducing a sliding scale. The reason being the BBG workout is so flexible that you can practically performing the guided exercises anywhere and therefore the amenities of your workout can range wildly.

Intensity (4) - While the workout is suitable for virtually everybody, the level of intensity could vary greatly. In a typically 30-minute session, consisting of 3 different 7-minute cycle of different exercises, you're recommended to do as many sets of the different exercises as possible. This means you could have completed in a range of only one set or 3, perhaps even 4 sets of all the different exercises. Again, the beauty of this workout is to customize it based on your level of fitness and desire to achieve your goal, so let's make it count.

Overall (3.5) - In addition to the convenience of the workout, as the name implies it is a great compilation of different exercises that will help to tone your body. Gents, this does not have to be a workout that's performed only by the ladies, we promise you that if you would try BBG, you'll pick up a move or two that you can incorporate into your own daily routines, changing things up. Overall, we thought that BBG centers around the philosophy of self-motivation and self-disapline, so you're really your own trainer and motivator, therefore some people might like having a trainer that directs their movements better. Nonetheless, it is something fun that we think everyone should try at least once.

Class Location:
Your go-to gym, bedroom, living room, local park - exercise your creative mind and this workout routine can be done practically anywhere

- L&L