Tag: fitness

We followed two Fitbit wearers—an Atlanta housewife and a Real Housewife of Atlanta—to see what kind of stats they’d put up.

Do you still have nightmares about doing pull-ups in gym class? You may have forgotten the name of the Presidential Youth Fitness Program or the certificates you earned, but we bet you haven’t forgotten the moves. Did you know there’s an adult version?

Last year, Georgia was the first state in the nation to fully adopt the updated Presidential Youth Fitness Program. The program, started by President Eisenhower in 1956, uses body composition, aerobic fitness, muscular strength and endurance, and flexibility to evaluate overall fitness.

Check Instagram and you’ll see photos of celebs stretching out on silks—from Khloé and Kourtney to January Jones. Fitness classes have sprung up to capitalize on the art’s growing popularity, with Reebok creating Jukari Fit to Fly, a session that combines suspension training and cardio. Even Hugh Jackman has reportedly said he does trapeze as an alternative to weight training.But there are no celebrities in this class at Sky Gym, and nobody’s getting coddled like a Kardashian.

“I don’t mean to sound grim, but people die doing this,” the bald man says, his goateed face looking grave and his legs folded into lotus position.

Most of us have someone in our lives with a particularly pronounced chatter problem, to whom we may have prescribed yoga. That's certainly true of my mother, the hardest working and least mellow person I know. She needs yoga. It's obvious. And so do I.

“And one and two and three and four,” the instructor drilled, her straight leg flying in rapid fire. “Close front, close front, close back, close back.” Or something like that. We’d just started a beginner ballet class, and already I was lost.

Wrapped around my torso using a strap that presses directly against the skin, the monitor was slightly uncomfortable. But it made me feel like the subject of an experiment. That was kind of cool. And kind of true: the experiment was my own, though.

It looked a bit like a Rube Goldberg machine at first: straps and chains and Velcro wound together complicatedly. But soon I grasped the basics of it: you wrapped a few straps around your head then attached a dumbbell weight to a chain dangling unattractively from your forehead strap. At that point, you look like you're on your way to (or from) a medieval torture chamber. But, rest assured, you're ready to give genetics some push-back.

I tossed a five-foot resistance band into the Civic, knowing I'd hit some traffic later that afternoon, while heading across town. Sure enough, I was at a standstill on Georgia 400 around 4pm. But unlike most people standing still in late September, I was sweating.