Fitness Classes: Better Than At-Home Work-outs?

“Whoooooo!” her voice rings throughout the room as thirty of us are sweating, kicking, punching, and twirling. Our fitness instructor is a twenty-something sandy blonde with a perfect body, chiseled legs, and a tiny waist. She is a never ending source of energy, religiously instructing our fitness class with that same upbeat, seemingly untiring aura several days a week. While the rest of us are gasping for air and counting the minutes to our next water break, she seems unfazed by the rigorous kickboxing, as though a five year old playing hopscotch with her friends.

I was concerned about being able to keep up with the kickboxing class the first time I started. I was jumping into a class mid-summer, long after the classes had initially begun. Besides they were a whole hour—I wasn’t sure if I would have the stamina to keep up with everyone else.

Surprisingly, while the class was challenging, it was far from agonizing. Even though I hadn’t had any cardio exercise in months, the moves were easy. In fact, they were strikingly similar to an at home Tae-Bo tape I had sitting under the VCR.

So why join a gym and bother getting dressed and driving to a fitness class when I could just as easily do the moves at home, in front of my own television? Why had I ignored the VHS kickboxing tape for months, when it was available at my convenience at any time of the day, yet I was making time to squeeze a fitness class into my schedule?

The truth is, fitness classes work a lot better for many people than do at-home workouts. The reasons for this are plenty. Firstly, working out at home can be boring. It’s easy to feel more tired than you actually are simply because you’re bored and concentrating harder on the exercise and wishing it was over. In a fitness class, a live instructor is far more interesting than a video tape that you have watched time and time again and may have memorized by now! There are also many other people to watch, to study form, and to exchange mid-workout smiles with.

Another problem with working out at home is all the distractions. Right when you start getting into things, your dog has to go out or you phone rings. A fitness class will minimize distractions, making exercise the only thing immediately available to you.

Fitness classes make it harder to quit! At home, no one knows and nothing stops you from hitting stop on your VCR or DVD player and doing something else. In a fitness class, where there are so many people doing the same thing, there is some amount of pressure to keep going and finish with everyone else. You don’t want to mess up your form, skip out on an exercise, or simply walk away when everyone else seems to be getting the most out of their workout! This is a good pressure, the pressure that keeps you going the whole hour.

So if you’ve had trouble keeping up with your workouts at home, don’t give up hope. You might just need a different setting to get the most out of your workouts.