All about the Orange

Part 2 of my time off – The Staycation – started on Tuesday. I decided to do a class at my trainer friend, Master SFG Phil Scarito’s, studio in King of Prussia.

Phil is my kettlebell guy, and I’ve trained with him on and off since 2008. He prepped me for my RKC in 2010 and my re-certification in 2012.

I like Phil’s classes because he keeps it “simple” – he focuses on doing the basics (swings, squats, presses, sometimes cleans) with heavy bells. It’s always a good workout. I’m definitely going to borrow the squat ladder/bear crawl complex that we did last Tuesday night for my Thursday night kettlebell class. Watch out, Swingers!

On Thursday The Husband, The Tot and I headed down to Florida for our annual trip to see The Husband’s parents. I’ll spare you the details of the plane trip and just say why do we keep taking this kid places? 🙂

I had planned to do the outdoor boot camp classes at the Midtown Athletic Club in Weston, but after checking out the weather forecast (85 degrees at 7am – no thank you!) I decided to try to some new INDOOR options.

Friday was Orangetheory Fitness in Weston.

Orangetheory has locations nationwide. The workout is based in interval training and EPOC (Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption), and according to their website they use: “the science of Heart Rate Based Treadmill Interval Training, the efficiency of Indoor Rowing for increased power and the proven concept of Weight Training Blocks”.

I was skeptical at first because of the treadmilling. Not that the treadmill doesn’t have its place but the idea of treadmilling for any part of an hour left me uninspired to say the least. Plus there was the heart rate monitoring. I threw out my heart rate monitor 4 years ago when mine kept telling me I was going to die (i.e. – I was exceeding my max heart rate) during interval workouts when I felt JUST FINE. Plus, HR monitor watches and kettlebell cleans aren’t a good pairing.

The Orange 60 class uses the aforementioned three modalities: the treadmill, the indoor rower, and weight training. We used dumbbells, the Bosu, a step bench, and suspension trainer during Friday’s class. The Weston location also had a small collection of kettlebells and some core boards. Each Orangetheory participate receives a heart rate monitor and POD to track 5 zone – gray, blue, green, orange, and red. The goal is to keep your heart rate in the orange zone for 12-20 minutes to get what their web video calls the “orange effect” or “after burn” (aka – EPOC).

With dimmed lights and bass a-pumping, Orangetheory had a bit of a club effect, but it looked like the participants definitely came to workout. The session started with your choice of warm-up – treadmill or rower, then the treadmill group went into interval training and the rowers went to weight training which consisted of 3 circuits. We did Bosu squats with dumbbells, single leg deadlifts with shoulder presses, Bosu plank jacks, body rows, and a variety of lunges to name a few movements. After 20-plus minutes we switched groups and my group went on to intervals in which we alternated between the treadmill and indoor rower. I’m still not a fan of the treadmill but I could see that the running I had done this year had paid off and I was able to challenge myself in terms of speed and incline.

We finished the hour with a cool down and stretch. All and all it was a great workout. I worked and got my sweat on and I’ll definitely go back to Orangetheory next time I’m in Weston.

Bonus/small world event – I saw one of my former neighbors at Orangetheory. We lived three blocks away from each other for two years but never connected. Our only interaction as neighbors happened one day as I was walking my dog. In a “sistahs in the suburbs” gesture I slowed down to say hi to her. Her response was “He’s [referring to her dog] very protective of his boys [referring to her sons].” In other words: “keep moving sistah”. Too bad we didn’t connect when we lived blocks from each other, but we had a fun few minutes on Friday talking about H’town. We’re Facebook friends now and maybe we’ll hook up next time I’m in Weston.

In my next post I’ll tell you all about the return to the Globo Gym.