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This Saturday and Sunday, Physique 57 hosted a barre crawl: three back-to-back classes at its three New York City locations. Having participated myself, I can say that it was, in fact, the exact opposite of this. I take barre classes regularly, but I've never been to Physique 57, so the thought process was—why not try out all three studios in one day?
To make it extra challenging, I showed up hungover. After the jump, a photo play-by-play of what's going down in history as the most exhausting Saturday and the healthiest St. Patrick's Day weekend ever.
12:30pm The first class begins at the 73rd Street studio. It's a Mat Class with Neil, who's a hoot. I accidentally grabbed four-pound weights (don't do this. Even Neil doesn't grab four-pound weights.)
1:30pm: Class is over. It was challenging but not impossible. Neil kept everyone in good spirits. When we worked on our "seats"—in a position that involved laying on our sides—he told us to pretend we were in the Little Mermaid. He then recommended that we all see that movie if we haven't yet. It's good family fun.
2:30pm: Refueling with a Kind bar before the next class. We were given one at 73rd Street and another here at 57th Street, so I'm currently two-bars deep. The second was chocolate, and I'm not sure if we were supposed to inhale them right before class began. Nobody stopped me.
3:30pm: The second class (a Mixed class) was insane. I made sure to avoid the heavy weights this time, though. Our instructor Sarah played a lot of Irish music, including a Sinead O'Connor remix and I think two U2 songs. Everyone in this class was a total pro. I spent most of the time copying what the girl next to me was doing because my brain had officially shut off (cute tank, by the way!)
4:20pm I've arrived at my final class at the Spring street studio: stretch. I'm promised it won't be hard.
5pm: The stretch class is over! Everyone kept saying it would be a treat in comparison to the other classes, but it was still pretty tough considering you know, we just did two other classes. (And it definitely wasn't a half-hour long shavasana like I was hoping.) The real treat was the free Juice Press.
6pm: Here's what my Nike FuelBand read after I walked to the subway (and made a pitstop at the Canvas store in Chelsea). I'm not sure if this is really indicative of all the work I did, because I still have yet to fully understand what fuel measures out to in real life terms. (And by "have yet to fully understand," I mean I lost the instructions that it came with it and have been too lazy to Google.) Nevertheless, I beat my daily goal!
6:30pm: After all that, I spent a good portion of my evening laying around in bed. It looked something like this.
· Plié Through St. Paddy's With Physique 57's Barre Crawl [Racked NY]
· Everything You've Ever Wanted to Ask a Barre Instructor [Racked NY]
· Physique 57 [Official Site]