Theodora: Uplifting Strength and Cardio

Hi friends! We’re back in Tucson after an amazing vacation 🙂 I’ll be back in the am! Tonight’s post is courtesy of Theodora- a lovely lady, and I’ve enjoyed her blog for quite a while. I love reading about her fitness adventures (especially since I’m convinced I was destined to live in NYC) and her awesome sense of humor. Take it away, Theodora!

xo

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Hi Fitnessista readers!

I’m Theodora from Losing Weight in the City, and I blog about maintaining my 50-pound weight loss in NYC. While delicious restaurants and fun bars on every corner make this challenging, fun fitness classes make it easier.

Especially when you can have wine at the studio after a fitness class! (Which I actually haven’t tried yet. I don’t know why.)

But as cheesy as it sounds, taking class at Uplift is incredibly uplifting, and this is coming from a slightly-cynical New Yorker who’s never been able to regularly get into taking boutique fitness classes.

For starters, the space is gorgeous. With tall floor-to-ceiling windows, the studio gets an incredible amount of sunshine and the decor is bright. Plus, everyone who works there is so damn happy. And not in the annoying way.

They’ve recently changed up their program so that they specialize in two classes – Uplifting Cardio and Uplifting Strength. I’ve tried both, and I think I actually have to say I like Strength better (since I am so bad at strength training on my own.)

Uplifting Strength focuses on your major muscle groups and mixes it up with four minutes of Tabata intervals in between each set. The thing I love most about this class is that you never repeat an exercise in the strength portions. If you do a set of bicep curls, once you finish that set of bicep curls, you will not do another bicep curl in the entire class. As someone who hates doing a circuit and going back and repeating it multiple times, I love this. Also, as intense as the Tabata intervals are, they’re over relatively quickly.

Uplifting Cardio has strength moves, but the class’  focus is getting your heart rate up, and so every strength move is followed by a 30-second cardio burst. I actually am not a huge sweat-er (hyphen because otherwise I’d be a wooly garment), but I walk out of this class DRENCHED. The cardio bursts consist mostly of jumping jacks, high jumps, burpees and squat jumps, and the sets in between are short enough to keep your heart rate high.

I know most of you probably don’t live in NYC, but I also know that lots of you like to try classes when you travel, so if you do make it to NYC between now and May 5, and sign up for an 8:30am, 10:30am or 5:30pm class with the code losingweightinthecity, you can get 10% off!