Lounge
On a holiday? Head to the park for a group exercise
Summary
High on energy and camaraderie, group exercise helps push your limits and allows you to experience a foreign city like a localA little after 6.30am on a recent Wednesday, I found myself doing an extended plank at Independence Square in Colombo among a group of exercisers and under the watchful eye of two fitness trainers, Tusari Ekanayake and Nathan Nikko. Not far away was a phalanx of military cadets doing crunches. The postcard perfect setting was framed by a rapidly more belligerent sun.
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On my previous trip to Sri Lanka, I had discovered TASS, a sports science, training and sports injury rehab centre that hosts group exercise classes every day. Many are outdoors—leading me to discover the joy of working out outdoors while on vacation. To many, exercising while on holiday would seem to miss the point of a break from our daily disciplines, but group exercise gives one instant access to excellent trainers and a band of fellow fitness devotees. For an hour or so, one feels like a local, part of the regular rhythms of a city.
Many gyms around the world allow visitors to join for a week or less. In Hong Kong, the plush Pure Fitness chain offers a month-long pass that enables a visitor to attend group classes that include a tai chi-yoga hybrid called Body Balance and a weight training routine called Body Pump. More than a decade ago, I had become addicted to the frenetic energy and camaraderie of large group exercise classes while living in Hong Kong. Pure Fitness uses formats created by Les Mills in Auckland, whose group classes set to fabulous music are franchised to 18,000 gyms in more than 100 countries.
TASS, founded ten years ago, has developed its own classes that incorporate weights, body weight training, and occasionally, a CrossFit routine. The sessions run 45 minutes. I did four in a week in early April and found very little repetition. A recent class started with a one-mile run past a pristine cricket field, so numerous in central Colombo that it often seems a city that permanently inhabits an era when sport was played in whites.
The kettle bell was deployed that morning to make lunges more challenging and build strength. When one of the class struggled to hold the two-minute plank, others in the group spontaneously gathered to cheer her on. Even though I was headed for the beachside town of Bentota on the weekend, I squeezed in a class at 7am dubbed Saturday Sizzle. Imran Khan, the gym’s business development manager and a fitness trainer, explained the aim is to “push your limits non-stop for 45-50 minutes and keep the heart rate high."
Serendipitously, the exercises chosen that morning seemed tailor-made for a club tennis player like me, focusing on squats and lunges that help build strength for staying low at the point of contact with the tennis ball. There were also routines to build oblique strength, an underappreciated necessity to generate topspin.
My favourite was the slam ball routines, repeatedly thrown against a wall as tennis stars often do as warm-up. Another involves a 15kg weighted ball, slammed on the matted floor repeatedly. This has something strangely cathartic about it—violence without inflicting pain or suffering consequences. When the time was up, I was still walloping a large tyre outside with a heavy elongated hammer with such abandon that I had to be told to stop.
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A management role model of leading from the front, Thanura Abeywardena, TASS’ managing director, is usually in the gym training clients before heading to the office. He founded TASS a decade ago, fulfilling a dream as a schoolboy to set up a sports science and injury rehab centre.
On a recent Monday, about 10 people had signed up for the morning class. Abeywardena, 40, seems to have the ability to do everything at once. I had just started a 500m race on the rowing machine, when I noticed the pedal strap on my right foot needed to be a little tighter. Before I could adjust it, Abeywardena had raced across from his personal training client to do it. He has a combustible, charismatic energy, shouting across the gym to one of the group trainers to load weights onto the thighs of someone doing a wall squat, while also keeping a watchful eye on the couple he is training.
Group exercise anywhere lends itself to high spirits. This was especially true of this class: It was languid one moment, ferocious the next, a boot camp with banter. During ‘Monday madness’ a month ago, after slamming ropes, rowing, yanking cables and flipping tyres, my 20 reps box jumps looked ragged, and Nathan said I should lower the level. Still high on adrenaline, I ignored the advice and tripped a few seconds later. (As Khan jokes, if one can’t keep up, there is a conveniently located cemetery right next door.) TASS could consider boot camp weeks for tourists, the way hotels promote spa retreats. I paid as little as ₹600 per session and plan to do their strength and injury prehab midweek sessions on my next visit.
High-intensity interval training takes you out of your comfort zone—just as travel should, on occasion. Cooling down on a Saturday, I found myself in the multi-religious Borella Cemetery, so well-tended and with such beautiful statuary and tranquil Christian and Buddhist chapels that it should double as a movie set. The first gravestone I encountered had as its inscription the words from the Bible used on my father’s tombstone. Until months before his death at 76, he continued with his daily, early morning commitment to tennis and to 5BX, a Canadian Air Force exercise drill favoured also by actor Helen Mirren, 78. That morning, the inscription on the gravestone – “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith" – seemed also a broader encouragement to keep going even when exercise takes you almost beyond your limits.
Rahul Jacob was travel, food and drink editor of the FT Weekend between 2003 and 2010.
