I missed out on gymnastics as a kid. Well, to be honest I never felt like I missed anything. The sport never really appealed to me—or so I thought. But when I walked into the giant gymnastics facility at Chelsea Piers to do the Gymtensity class and saw an adult gymnastics class in full swing, I may as well have been 10 years old again. 

I was really excited about flipping and swinging and bouncing around on the springy platforms and cushy mats.

My class started out with a jog warm-up around a springy platform (nice on the knees) followed by a pretty intense set of squats and burpees, which helped get the heart going and, so they said, allowed the instructors to get a sense of what each participant’s limits were. We then worked our way through a circuit of exercises that included leg swings on the parallel bars, variants of pull-ups and push-ups using gymnastic equipment, and (my personal favorite) whatever you could manage to do on the pommel horse, which for me meant barely holding my body up, but for others meant side-to-side leg swings on par with what you see in the Olympics. (OK, only the instructors were that good, but some people were pretty close.) We did more leg swings on the rings (see picture above) which was fun, of course, but nothing topped the crawl through the pit. Remember how exhausted you would get after playing in those plastic-ball pits as a kid? Well now imagine giant foam cubes filling the pit and trying to crawl the length of it as fast as you can. It’s hard. Really hard. My arms and my abs hurt so good for a week. Sadly, I was unable to climb the rope at the end of class, but everyone else managed just fine.

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.