What I learned from going to every exercise class once

I’m just back from the workout called Insanity, which was the last class in my personal mission to try every type of exercise class offered at Aber Uni at least once (except yoga – you’ve got to draw the line somewhere). I saved Insanity for last, you can probably guess why.

Being a proper nerd of course I kept a spreadsheet, with comments and some estimates (percentage of class completed, approximate proportion of guys, that kind of thing). So here are some stats:

• Highest max heartrate reached: Insanity. Today. 140bpm
• Lowest max HR: Pilates, where most sessions I got up to 70bpm max
• Lowest heartrate reached: also Pilates, 53bpm. Those classes can be relaxing
• Maximum steps per class: an hour’s Zumba class with 4725 steps
• Maximum steps per minute of class: a 45 minute Dumbbell workout
• Hardest class: a tie for work-it-circuits, Bootcamp, and insanity. I’m sure that the nice man who teaches ordinary circuits will be disappointed to learn this.
• Highest proportion of blokes: Circuits, with an estimated 75% bloke proportion
• Lowest proportion of blokes: 6 classes had no guys at all (2 of the Aerobics classes, one of the Pilates, one of the Zumbas, a Piyo and a Bootcamp)

The project has taken me 2 months, and has involved going to 2 or 3 classes a week, 23 classes in total. To my surprise, there aren’t any which I’ve actively disliked. The only one I don’t think I’ll return to is PiYo, and that’s because it’s a bit too much like yoga. I think my favourites are dumbbell workout, bodyfit, and (surprisingly for me) bootcamp. But I’ll go back to pretty much all of the others too.

For any aber people wondering… here’s the timetable.