As many people discover at the start of each new year, the one universal truism about getting into shape is that only the individual can make it happen. And that is why it was wrong of me oh, so wrong to test-drive a fitness trend in the heat of office party season, where the workouts success hinged upon my ability to be competitive with myself.
As you know, nutrition is 75 per cent of the changes you make in your body, Kalev [pronounced Kuh-love] says and I nod as though I live and breathe by this fact, the memory of the salty McDonalds fries I savoured on the way home from a holiday event the previous night still lingering on my tastebuds.
A buff, earnest young man with 80s-movie good looks, Kalev seems like a guy who would never have to fight with himself to push out one more set, and who doesnt eat McDonalds fries. Hes the heart and soul behind his eponymous , a completely different space than most Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»workout facilities. (It takes up part of two levels inside the historic Sun Tower in Gastown.)
A boutique facility right down to thoughtful touches in the well-appointed ladies locker room (I didnt see the mens), Kalev offers everything from state-of-the-art dumbbells to candlelit yoga sessions. But its his three-dimensional personal training (where you experience a team of personal trainers to get more rounded results) and his Tabata boot camp that are getting tongues wagging.
Tabatas a protocol, he tells me. An interval, exercise protocol thats competition based and structured so that you can score yourself. It can turn your body into a fat-burning super engine.
Each Tabata class starts with a warm up, followed by four high intensity core or plyometric exercises, at eight intervals of 20 seconds each, with 10 second breaks in between. When done correctly, this means youll burn a lot of fat with a minimal time commitment about half an hour.
The formula is quite simple. Pushing through the sixth, seventh and eighth set of each exercise is not.
Josh, an Aussie trainer on Kalevs team who claims he prefers the chilly, damp Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»winters to his motherlands balmy seasons, is leading my boot camp class, and hes in a generous mood.
How many sets, six? he asks me, after our class is done grunting and shuddering its way through our first set: shoulder presses.
Maybe four, I confess.
Well say five, he pronounces, and draws a fat number five in marker on the mirror beside my name, I think to bell-curve the class in order to push the others harder.
I can see that another girl in the class has a legitimate six. She tells me later that it wasnt her first time to Tabata. Shes been coming for a few weeks now, because even though its gruelling shes getting stronger and seeing results. (She obviously started well before holiday office party season.)
Josh wraps the class with eight sets of my own personal torture: burpees. I catch a sight of my lethargic, sleep-deprived self in the mirror as I battle through three pathetic sets, probably totalling about 14 total burpees. Somewhere during the fourth set my legs decide to stop listening to my brain and refuse to go back into a plank position together in the same motion. Awesome, I think four exercises and 20 minutes is all it takes to annihilate me.
Josh consoles me as we wind down our session on the bikes, saying that the depletion Im feeling is the whole point. A Tabata Boot Camp is about pushing yourself through each exercise to the point of failure. Thats why you do only four exercises each session. Thats why its up to you to be accountable to yourself and step it up a little very single time. Thats why you should leave feeling as though you were hit by a truck (my words, not his).
And if you want your body to be a fat burning, super engine, Tabata will get you results as long as you dont stop at McDonalds for fries on the way home.
Tabata Boot Camp | The Sun Tower, 102-128 W. Pender | 604-568-6006 |KalevFitness.com
