If you love working out but don’t want to pay for a gym membership, Stone Ridge’s new fitness room is the place for you. Over the summer, a new and improved “Gator Athletics Performance Center” was built in Gym 2. It includes multiple treadmills, weights, and cardio equipment. The performance center is accessible from 3:15-6 p.m. after school, and you do not have to be involved in a Stone Ridge sports team to use this space. However, one team that has especially benefited from this new space is the cross country team, which uses it almost every day to do core exercises. According to Gillian Tobias, ’17, “it’s more spacious, so now it is easier to fit the whole team in there.” She also mentions how much it benefits players who are injured and need a day off from running. This fitness center is not only beneficial to our sports teams, but also to girls who are looking to get sports credits in a different way.
For Stone Ridge girls who want to exercise but are unsure of how exactly to do this, SR offers a variety of exercise classes you can attend free of charge. Tabata classes, which involve high intensity interval fitness training, are offered on Tuesdays from 3:30-4:30 p.m. in Gym 1 (the old fitness center and weight room). Yoga classes are given on Mondays from 3:30-4:30 p.m. Finally, a new program, “Gator Strong” is now offered in Gym 2 on Tuesdays from 3:30-5:30 p.m. This program allows access to a fitness, strength, and conditioning professionals who can instruct you on essentially anything, from how to use the new equipment to how to create a workout plan that achieves a certain goal. Explosive Performance, the fitness experts that lead Gator Strong, helped train Katie Ledecky as well as some professional women’s soccer players. If you are struggling to find sports credits, these programs can earn you ¼ of a credit if you register and attend classes throughout the semester. Now you have no excuse to be lacking these sports credits!
Although Stone Ridge’s new facilities should be taken advantage of, an increasingly popular way to work out is at SoulCycle, which has a nearby location in Bethesda. SoulCycle is a new or “reinvented” way of cycling. Class lengths vary, but most are 45 minutes long and exercise your body holistically, with cardio that burns fat, choreography that works your core, and weights that tone your arms and back. Classes offer different instructors and different music that propels you to pedel harder, spin faster. Classes are roughly 30 dollars each and are available throughout the week at various times of day. New methods to maintain fitness are more readily accessible and are already creating a healthier culture at Stone Ridge!
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