Work up a sweat

From a new Crossfit community to hands-on self-defence classes, these new programmes will shake up your fitness routine

high-intensity interval workout is definitely not child’s play.

In this circuit-based class, the star player is the room itself. The lights on the floor and walls are controlled by Prama software and there’s a giant screen that counts down your 45-second intervals. Most of the time you’re actually training against the computer, as the software changes the tempo and sensors and tracks your effort. What seems like an easy children’s game of “follow the moving light” becomes an all-out sweat session. Push ups become an interactive game where we have to stomp on a light sensor intermittently, the length of our shuttle runs are chosen by the computer, and we’re forced into actually executing a mountain climber properly because the lights won’t change unless we stomp on them properly.

We rotate around about a dozen fairly straightforward exercises, with three rounds of each, before collapsing on the floor.

The verdict

While the session time is 45 minutes, we estimate we probably worked out for well under half of that – yet we feel the same as if we’d been on an hour-long run. Hey, if we can get all our exercising done in 20 minutes, we’re more than happy having a computer tell us what to do.

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