13 June 2019
Today we all had the opportunity to do the workout we all felt we needed after the mountains of frites and chocolate Belgium had to offer. We went to the David Lloyd fitness club where we toured the facility and learned about the David Lloyd facilities and what they have to offer. This chain of fitness clubs is a British company with the goal to provide accessible and attainable fitness and activities for both the members and their children. They provide a wide range of services such as daycare in the mornings, classes for kids like Judo and soccer (football) as well as less strenuous activities for senior citizens and even family obstacle course training.
After the tour, the instructors led us in a fitness class of our own. Our workout consisted of a warmup followed by a circuit training activity. The warmup of a few laps of a fake turf area consisting of running, jumping squats, walking lunges, and sumo squats gave us a good glimpse of what we were getting into and prepared us to start our high intensity training workout.
The circuit was broken up into four stations that each group would rotate through. There was the fake turf area we used for the warm up, which would be used for running and endurance exercises. The next station was some floor mats and medicine balls used for core exercises, then moving to the next station of a large strength training area. This area was a cage that had multiple kinds of upper body strength activities from isolated lifting to movement like throwing a medicine ball. The last station used TRX bands for both upper and lower body training.
The trainers partnered us up and had the partners distribute to different areas of the four stations. One partner would do the main exercise at the station while the other partner would do a similar but more of a resting exercise. The clock was set for two minutes at each station where the partners would switch activities after each minute or sooner depending on the activity. After each group completed all four stations, we all had a two minute rest then began the next of four cycles. After each complete cycle the trainers would switch up the activities at each station but keep them working the same area of the body so we were always doing something new but still working our whole bodies.
The full body high intensity interval trainings such as crossfit and circuit training like we experienced today have been becoming more and more popular. I asked our main trainer, Wojtek Przygodzki, what he thought about the new trend of H.I.I.T. and how it compares to traditional workouts such as just cardio with weight lifting. His reply was that H.I.I.T. is more of a full variation of exercises involving your whole body and improves your endurance where as traditional lifting is more stationary and only works on improving one muscle or muscle group at a time. Wojtek said that both are great sources of exercise but it depends on what you need to train more wether it’s building muscle mass or improving whole body training and endurance. I believe crossfit and H.I.I.T. workouts have become more popular because they are more fun, from personal experience today with everybody, as well as it’s a whole body workout in one. I’m glad we all had this experience today for a good workout to have fun and work off those frites!
- Kira Tucker
Public Health Abroad! 