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If you have fond memories of swinging along the monkey bars or bunny-hopping in PE without a care in the world, then you’ll probably adore everything about Lactic Jungle - a new class at Gymbox that’s all about mimicking animals movements in the name of burning calories and getting fit. It’s a fun idea – and if you can imagine 15 people crawling around a fitness studio looking like pissed off Harambes, it’s hilarious too.
But like all fitness-y things that sound like a whale of a time, there a catch. The ‘lactic’ bit refers to when you feel the burn in your muscles during a hardcore workout, so this class is brutal. Merciless. Your stubborn flab’s absolute worst nightware. And a couple days later, my quads feel like they’ve been thrown into a Nutribullet. But as the saying goes, no pain, no gain – and Carrie, the enthusiastic instructor who came up with the concept, is nothing short of brilliant when she debuts the session at the Gymbox in Victoria.
She kicks it off with a warm up that involves jumping on the spot, followed by loads of squats. So far, so easy. It’s when we hit the ground and get low that my quads really start to heat up. We get into four queues to do a relentless series of the animal moves all the way to one side of the studio before we run around to the back of the queue and start again.
There are monkey crawls: two hands down, followed by our two legs which we throw up in the air as high as possible, sort of like a clumsy cartwheel. Then there’s the duck walk, which is basically moving with our knees forward in the squat position. We also do the cat crawl, the bear crawl, frog jumps and horse walks, which looks exactly as they sound. It’s not long before I’m sweating buckets, big-time.
The only thing that keeps me going is the fear of doing burpees once we hit the final challenge: a face-off with a partner where we do a sort of walking cat-cum-plank thing, forwards and backwards. Dropping means burpees. No thanks.
We all manage to stay up, and after five reps, we’re done, thank heavens. But after all that animal madness, it’s fair to say this walk on the wild side has left me feeling like the queen of the jungle (just about).
See the Gymbox website for class dates and times at different Gymbox locations.