Six High Intensity, Change-Your-Entire-Body Workouts

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Welcome to Workout Wednesday: every hump-day, we'll be rounding up some of the city's hottest fitness trends and studios.

Practicing yoga once a week, doing squats while watching Bravo—both of these things are great, but they're probably not going to dramatically transform your body into a lean, mean, muscle machine. Fortunately, New York City has plenty of fitness studios for that, from CrossFit boxes to places where you can unleash your inner linebacker to bootcamps that employ some of the city's hottest instructors (that's #fitspo at its finest).

See the list below for six high-intensity fitness studios that will challenge you to the core—and then some.

↑ Exceed Physical Culture: Upper East Side and Tribeca
Exceed's classes combine strength training and cardio with bursts of high intensity intervals—you'll do jumping lunges with the TRX and then sets of burpees, squats with kettlebells, and then hit the rowers. After all is said and done, you'll be covered in sweat.

↑ Tone House: Union Square
This new studio on East 17th Street is like football practice, times ten—even the relay-style warm up is intensely challenging. Expect to squat with sandbags, crabwalk with resistance harnesses strapped to your back, and mountain-climb with sliders, with group huddles to get everyone pumped up mixed in.

↑ The Fhitting Room: Upper East Side
The Fhitting Room advocates that "strong is the new skinny," and says that the participants of their small group classes will break through fitness plateaus through their powerful workouts. Their formula—FHIX—incorporates high intensity intervals, strength training, and a total-body focus to transform your entire physique.

↑ Brick New York: Chelsea
We can't include every CrossFit box on this list, so we're letting Brick—the buzzy studio on West 17th Street—represent. In addition to CrossFit, Brick also offers a 60-minute bootcamp style class that mixes cardio with high interval weight training, plus a restorative Yin Yoga class to help you wind down.

↑ Barry's Bootcamp: Tribeca and Chelsea
Before or after sprinting faster than you ever have on a treadmill in the dimly-lit studios, you'll be hitting the floor with weights and exercises to target your arms, abs, or legs. The muscly and firm-yet-encouraging instructors constantly remind you that using the heaviest weights you can handle and doing as many reps as possible in the allotted time is the fastest way to see change in your body.

↑ Brooklyn Bodyburn: Williamsburg
Brooklyn Bodyburn's classes revolve around the Largee Fitness Method, which incorporates Pilates principles and cardio with a machine called the MegaFormer. Why is that so intense? Because the MegaFormer "encourages maximum exertion with zero periods of rest." This isn't your mom's Pilates class.
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