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MORNING CLASSES

Wednesday and Friday 9.30 am classes in Dreghorn Loan Hall, Colinton*, Edinburgh (click here for map)   These classes are suitable for men and women of all ages and fitness levels.  Classes are exercise to music.  Music can help to motive you and improve your performance - you work harder and for longer with music rather than without.  Music can take your mind off the effort or provide an active beat to work with so the outcome is better performance, more commitment to movement and often, more work achieved through greater levels of effort.  The classes are an hour in length.

Morning Workouts may be:..

• A Metabolic Fat Burning and Strength Workout (does what it says in the title)

• A workout using Resistance Bands, Hand Held Weights or Gliding discs (bring your weights & bands) - more info below

• Fat Loss kettlebell-type / weight workout and Cardio 50:50 class

• Low Impact Aerobic Cardio Workout

• Fitness Bootcamp Workout or

• Fitness Salsa class

Check the Timetable Page for details of class type (*please note possible change of venue during Easter and summer holidays).

These classes are on a drop in, no need to pre-book / Pay-As-You-Go basis £5.

Please bring water with you to the classes to keep yourself hydrated.  Wear comfortable, loose clothing and you’ll need a good, supportive pair of trainers/dance trainers on.  Bring a mat too for floor work.

These are All Level Classes and 'new' people/beginners are always made very welcome.  Please download and fill in 1) a pre-exercise Health Screening Form and 2) a Lifestyle Questionnaire (these can be downloaded from this website).  You can also read/download the Exercise Info Pack and current Newsletter from the website too.

Please click on Contact if you'd like to email Susan with a question/query about these classes.

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More Info about....

     WORKOUTS USING RESISTANCE BANDS / HAND HELD WEIGHTS

Resistance bands have been around since 1980.  However it wasn’t until the last few years that bands began to be used as a functional strength training tool

·                        Resistance bands increase coordination.  Because there's tension throughout the exercises, you have to stabilize your body.  This helps with coordination, balance and it also helps you involve more muscle groups.

·                        Bands add variety - the resistance band allows you to change your positioning in multiple ways. This changes how your body works and how an exercise feels.

·                        Bands are cheap. Bands range anywhere from £5 to £10, and can be bought from sports shops: JJB Sport, John Lewis, Boots, Tesco etc.  They can be bought online too.

·                        They're great for all fitness levels. Depending on how you use them, bands can be great for beginners as well as more advanced exercisers.  We can use them for basic moves or to add intensity to traditional moves.

You can buy a variety of bands.  Most bands are colour-coded according to tension level (e.g., light, medium, heavy, very heavy).  It's best to have at least 2 or 3 - light, medium and heavy since different muscle groups will require different levels of resistance.  We also use resistance tubing bands with handles on the end and again, these come in different colours and levels of resistance. 

Hand held weights can add muscle mass to your body when exercising with them (although don’t worry, you  won’t end up looking Arnie.  Using weights, you’ll increase strength, power, speed, co-ordination as well as core stability.  You could bring 2 or 3 sets of weights to class ie a set of (2) lighter 1k or 1½k weights then a medium set of 1½ or 2 k each and a heavier set of 3 or 4k and alternate between the different sets during the session/class.  Weights can be bought in any large supermarket (Tesco, Matalan, sports outlets/shops) and are reasonably priced.

Resistance training will increase your lean body tissue, improve your posture, enhance self esteem, make significant changes in body composition and increase metabolic rate.

For a Resistance Band/hand held weights workout class, wear comfortable clothing, supportive trainers, bring your band/s and weights, a mat for floor work and water to keep yourself hydrated.  If you’ve got any injuries or niggles in say your shoulders, don’t use the bands/weights until you’ve recovered.

KETTLEBELL-TYPE / WEIGHT TRAINING WORKOUTS

A kettlebell-type weight is a cannonball with a flat bottom and a handle moulded to it.  Through history, it became synonymous with strength and these weights were used for lifting in Russia and the former Eastern Block is an international sport with local, national and world championships.  This is an “old school” fitness tool that holds great promise for current fitness seekers.  The style of training used with kettlebell-type weights returns us to learning how to use our bodies better.  All the moves are ground-based and we learn to use our bodies to produce and control force.  These are useful skills for any athlete or regular exerciser.

Why use a kettlebell (kb)-type of weight?

·        Displaced Center of Gravity – The centre of gravity of the kb weight is six to eight inches below the centre of your hand.  Barbells and dumbbells centre the weight with your hand.  The offset of the kb makes the weight “alive” in your hand and increases the difficulty and benefit of many of the drills.  These weights can do anything a dumbbell can do, even better - but not vice versa.

·        Benefits – clients and class participants looking for that something different in their routines will enjoy the non-traditional nature of kb weight training.  Most of the moves are very integrated and train the body in a coordinated unit. Women who are afraid of “bulking” up from bodybuilding moves, will find these moves a great way to increase strength and conditioning without fear of gaining size because kb-type training emphasizes neuromuscular adaptations in getting stronger . In addition, the ballistic moves will train you to produce and control force at realistic speeds with easy-to-learn movements.  Bracing and spinal stability will go hand in hand with the breathing technique described in the swing.  The Swing is the foundation of this type of training. It teaches the hip snap (hip extension) and sets the basis for all of the other drills/exercises which we’ll learn in class.

How much weight should I use?

Oh, the dilemma between light and heavy weights.  Some celebrity trainers swear by using only very light weights for a ridiculous number of repetitions.  What does research say about this? There are hundreds of studies showing greater strength improvements in men when using heavier loads, but the literature on females is much more scarce.  However, there are several studies examining the difference between using light and heavy weights with women.  The results are clear: heavier weights increase muscular strength and decrease body fat more than light weights, even in women (Tsourlou, 2003).  To explain this: the more work you do, the more calories you will burn.

There is a very easy way to help you understand this: if you perform a set of step-ups on a box holding a 2lb weight in each hand, and then perform another set using 20lb weights in each hand.  The heavier weight will obviously be harder, meaning it requires more work.  More work, more calories burned, equals better results.

Won’t I get bulky?

Absolutely not, unless you train specifically for that.  Girls were not created to get bulky.  Hormones start flowing when puberty begins, and that is the turning point where boys start getting manly and girls become more womanly.  Guys develop their muscular physiques because they produce more testosterone and growth hormone, which plays a large role in increasing muscle mass and strength.  Females get their curvier physiques because they produce oestrogen and limited amounts of testosterone and growth hormone.  In fact, women produce less than 10% of the amount of testosterone that men produce (Haff, 2008).  Oestrogen plays an important, and slightly annoying, role of storing fat.

These hormonal differences are the biggest reason that men are able to hypertrophy (gaining muscle size) to a greater extent then women.  Studies comparing strength gains between men and women on the same resistance training programme have shown that men increase strength more then women, especially in the upper body (Kell, 2011). This is mainly due to their higher levels of fat-free mass.

In summary: no, women are not going to get bulky from lifting.  An increase in muscle size will occur after 6-8 weeks of resistance training, but this will not lead to bulkiness.

Why should I want to get stronger?

Building muscle takes work.  Work takes energy.  And what is energy?  Calories.  In order to build muscle, our bodies must go through a complex process of sending in hormones, regulating satellite cells, assembling amino acids, and finally synthesizing proteins.

And how about sheer confidence gain?  The more you do…. The more you CAN do.

Weight Loss v Fat Loss

Some clients get soooo caught up in weight loss and fail to realize the more important factor is burning fat and building lean body mass.  When people begin an exercise programe, many times they end up gaining weight and don't realize this is ok.  Even when I explain this, they nod their heads and say they understand, but they aren't totally convinced.  Here’s a good way of addressing this topic:

A client who believes weight is everything and body composition is irrelevant, will not be swayed solely by an argument that body composition is all that really matters.  A new client rarely says "I want to get down to X percentage body fat." It's typically, "I want to lose X pounds" or "I want to weigh X."

One way around this is a tip I picked up at a conference years ago.  A typical client who seems obsessed with the scale may listen when we start talking about "losing inches."  Mostly what the weight loss clients really want is not a body that actually weighs less but a body that looks like it weighs less.

In order to show that you’re losing fat and will eventually get a little smaller in addition to getting leaner, we could do both a skinfold measurement and a circumference measurement at the same spots.  The typical 3 sites would be: triceps skinfold/arm circumference, umbilical/waist and thigh skinfold and circumference.  Even as you gain muscle and possibly increases in circumference, the skinfold thickness at the sites will eventually get smaller.  Remember the fact that a pound of muscle burns more calories all day long.  Studies reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and Journal of Applied Physiology showed that adding about 4lb of muscle weight through strength training can increase your metabolic rate by 7%.  That's about 90 calories a day for a woman with a metabolic rate of 1,300 calories/day. But you have to build the muscle first before you can maximize this calorie burning effect!

I hope this helps.  When you come to class, you could bring your 1k (or set of 2 x 1k) weight/s or start with a 2.5k kettlebell-type weight (only the one) and see how you get on. 

BOOTCAMP WORKOUT

Bootcamps appeal to a large range of people because just about anyone can do the exercises.  And they escape the women-only stigma of aerobics and the men-only stigma of weight lifting. 

Influenced by traditional military boot camps, these fitness programes are so popular because they work— when they’re done right—and because of their social element.  Bootcamp participants enjoy the camaraderie of exercising in a group.  And much like peer pressure keeps soldiers moving in military boot camp, peer encouragement – and developing friendships - keep people moving in fitness boot camp. 

Bootcamp programmes are effective and fun.  They consist of a series of exercises carried out in a sequence.  Exercises are rotated so that no one muscle group is excessively fatigued.  The main objective in fitness bootcamps is to increase muscular endurance and cardio-vascular fitness.  Participants work out together in a group.  You’ll perform various exercises working different muscle groups and have a short recovery period in between. You'll be constantly challenging your muscles with new moves so that your body never has a chance to plateau (and you never get bored).  You'll work for an hour doing traditional fat-burning and muscle-building exercises combined with plyometric powerful, explosive moves.

Besides their effectiveness, boot camps appeal to people because of the fun and social factors.  Celebrity or instructor videos are motivating—but video workouts are very impersonal, and the motivation often lasts only for the first week or so. 

With a bootcamp, participants get personal motivation from their instructor that is fresh and new every session.  Bootcamp trainers/instructors can also correct exercise form and postures for clients to keep them safe and get the most from the exercises.  A video can’t do that. 

The bottom line is that bootcamps make your bottom line look better.  They are an efficient way to deliver effective fitness to more people.  Be willing to put in serious time and effort in these training workouts.

Wear comfortable clothing and supportive trainers to a fitness bootcamp session.  Bring water to drink.  Expect to make new friends and work out as hard as you can and achieve results.

FITNESS SALSA CLASSES

In a 6 week block of Fitness Salsa classes, we'll put together a salsa workout routine where we'll learn and incorporate basic salsa, mambo, cha cha cha, shasse steps etc to Latin music.  Fitness Salsa is not partner dancing.  Wear comfortable clothing, dance shoes/supportive trainers and bring water.