Les Mills

[cRaigAl205]

I've recently joined the gym at the local leisure centre, and as part of the membership, I get access to all the classes/sessions. I'm enjoying the gym/cardio but looking to mix it up and keep things interesting.

Mainly joined to work on strength and lean muscle, so a brief look online suggests the Les Mills Grit, for example, maybe good?

Does anyone have any experience/recommendations? How fit do you need to be to actually get started with it?!

Cheers,

Craig

[oddball1313]

Body pump - go twice a week and works great for me. Once you’ve done a few sessions and the muscles have got used to it you can start ramping the weights up. You’re not going to get huge doing it but for a really good toning exercise it’s very good (works for me anyway) and it’s not boring like standard gym work either. I combine with road cycling so I like to think have a good balance between aerobic and anaerobic training.

[popeyewhite]

oddball1313 said:

Body pump - go twice a week and works great for me. Once you’ve done a few sessions and the muscles have got used to it you can start ramping the weights up. You’re not going to get huge doing it but for a really good toning exercise it’s very good (works for me anyway) and it’s not boring like standard gym work either. I combine with road cycling so I like to think have a good balance between aerobic and anaerobic training.

You're not doing any anaerobic training if you got to bodypump and roadcycle.

Les Mills is just another (heavily marketed) aerobics class, same effect as all the others. If you want to improve strength then you need to lift weights, lowish reps, quite heavy.

[oddball1313]

I disagree - if you load the bar up you can easily go into the red

[popeyewhite]

oddball1313 said:

I disagree - if you load the bar up you can easily go into the red

Okay. Red what?

[oddball1313]

Doing 5 minutes of squats with 50kg on it is aerobic exercise then? I suppose chest flys with 10kg on each arm and all the other stuff will have no effect at all on building strength and muscle either.



whatever.

[popeyewhite]

oddball1313 said:

Doing 5 minutes of squats with 50kg on it is aerobic exercise then?

Yes.

oddball1313 said:

I suppose chest flys with 10kg on each arm and all the other stuff will have no effect at all on building strength and muscle either.

It's basically endurance training, you may build a little strength initially, but you won't grow muscle.

oddball1313 said:

whatever.

just trying to be helpful!

[yajeed]

I'm much weaker, and have less muscle mass since stopping Bodypump.

I managed to get to a 70KG weight on the squat track (once they'd upgraded the bars).

It is the most effective way of building muscle? Probably not! It is effective though, having done it and proved it.

[popeyewhite]

yajeed said:

I'm much weaker, and have less muscle mass since stopping Bodypump.

Stop exercise, any exercise, and you begin to lose muscle mass.

yajeed said:

I managed to get to a 70KG weight on the squat track (once they'd upgraded the bars).

It is the most effective way of building muscle? Probably not!

Definitely not. There are prescribed and well documented methods to force effective muscular hypertrophy. Light weight, high reps is not one of them.

yajeed said:

It is effective though, having done it and proved it.

Er... I thought you just said it probably wasn't/? Out of curiosity could you say how much lean mass you think you gained?