Man. Oh man, oh man, oh man.
I’m not a cocky individual, but I like to think I’m in decent physical shape. I’m not the best at anything but I like to think I can survive everything. But you know what? I was knocked off that delusional ledge this weekend at a Yoga Sculpt class!
As many of you know, I went to Bali last month for a close pair of friends’ wedding. Cindy is one of my best friends because she has a wild sense of adventure…and that was demonstrated at her wedding! Immediately after the couple said “I do”, they walked up to the second floor of the villa and jumped off the balcony, straight into the pool! They were still wearing their wedding clothes, and naturally, it led to ALL of us jumping in after them!
The point of my digression? Poor Cindy was so busy holding her dress down while jumping that she forgot the whole tuck and roll mentality while in flight. She ended up hitting the bottom of the pool and fracturing her foot. Never one to baby herself, she promptly ignored the injury for the next three weeks of their honeymoon, backpacking and hiking on the fracture. As a result, she has a bit of a calcification issue going on, so impact sports are off-limits for a few weeks. When we agreed to meet on Saturday morning, she suggested a CorePower Yoga Sculpt class. I keep trying to work yoga into my rotation more frequently, so I readily agreed. What a relaxing way to spend a Saturday morning, no?!
Lies. All lies.
I walked into the class and immediately knew that this was going to be different. A stack of weights hid in the corner and the overhead speakers were jamming out to Justin Timberlake. {Where was the stereotypical yogi-centric music?!} The instructor suggested I grab two sets of weights—a 3 lb. set and a 5 lb set—so I took her advice. I’ll admit it: internally, I was shaking my head at the prospect of working up a sweat with 3 pounders. I had just deadlifted 215 pounds at CrossFit the day before, so 3 lbs seemed absurdly light!
Little did I know…
The room was heated to 90-95 degrees, as it is with many CorePower classes, so I came prepared to sweat. What I wasn’t expecting, however, was to lose my vision five minutes into class. Y’all, sweat was dumping down my face at such an absurd rate that I literally had gigantic drops of sweat rolling into my eyeballs!
In short, the Yoga Sculpt class utilizes standard level 2 yoga moves {i.e. downward dog, warrior 2, extended triangle, etc} but combines them with the hand weights. While in high lunge, the instructor would have you do pulses with the 5 lb weights overhead. While in table top, she had us tuck the weight behind our knee and pulse our foot towards the ceiling. It wasn’t long before my towel was so drenched with sweat that I had to remove it from my mat. Naturally, that left me with a yoga mat/salty lake, so I was slip-sliding everywhere. In a way, I was honestly mesmerized with the quantity of sweat pouring from my body. Where was it all coming from?!
I kept looking at my two friends with a look of mixed horror and amusement. All three of us were absolutely getting our asses handed to us in the best way possible, and we were definitely enjoying the beating. I even found myself watching the clock {which I never do!} because I wasn’t sure how much more of the workout I could physically take. Y’all, that sculpting is hard!
Blessfully, the instructor gave us the last 10 minutes of class to cool down and I gratefully flopped onto my sickeningly-wet mat into our final shavasana. I placed the cool, lilac-scented towel over my face and essentially refused to move for a good 10 minutes. I could feel my muscles aching with exhaustion and knew that the copious amount of sweat was going to take some serious rehydration.
Regardless, I absolutely loved the class! It was totally humbling and reminded me that I have so much room for improvement in a zillion areas. Since I already pay mucho money for CrossFit, I’m not quite ready to dump even more money into a yoga membership, but you’d better believe I’m going to attend Yoga Sculpt again!
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When is the last time you did something that absolutely smoked you? What was it?
9 Comments
RUNNING RUNNING THIS PAST WEEKEND RUNNING!!!
I would have scoffed at the 3 and 5 lb weights too, but no doubt ended up clock watching in pain! I kind of actually thought we were going to mention a bodily function in this post, like passing gas or something. 🙂
Cindy did what?!?! OMG; that’s definitely a memory for the wedding book.
I love yoga sculpt!!! It IS crazy how such a small amount of weight can make such a huge difference during those poses with reps! I know yoga gets a rep for being “easy”, but what lots of people who don’t give it a try fail to realize is even the “mind calming” classes are hard if you’re doing the progressions correctly.
Sadly, anything besides waddling at a tortoise rate “smokes” me these days, but I can’t wait to get back in the swing of things.
I love yoga sculpt but it’s so hard! I dread going but feel great afterward.
I still want to do hot yoga! I can only imagine how much it will kick my butt, but hey, I’m up for the challenge.
That’s such a crazy class! Hot yoga is hard enough without adding weights!!
Haha. Sounds fun!! Love it when classes are deceptively hard. I once took a barre class and had a very difficult time with stairs for the next week!
That poor bride! What a trooper.
That sounds insane but in an awesome way! I did pilates on our cruise this summer and I was all like “whatever, pilates, plus it’s CRUISE pilates, this will be a joke” and then wanted to DIE ten minutes in. Nowadays, every single thing I do kicks my ass that’s remotely exercise related.
i bought myself a 10 class CPY pass and haven’t worked up the courage to hit up sculpt yet for all of the reasons you said. i much prefer the stretchy, sweaty feeling of CP2 to the HOLYCOWSPAGHETTIARMS feeling of sculpt 🙂