Sorry, Ennui Is No Excuse Not to Sweat

Sprained your brain lately thinking up excuses to break a date with that 7 a.m. step aerobics class? After all, you know the routine so well, you could almost do the whole thing in your sleep (a righteous idea just about now, eh?).

“Boredom is one of the top reasons people drop out of their exercise programs,” says Kathie Davis, executive director of Idea, the Health and Fitness Source, an association of fitness professionals.

With that in mind, we scoured this so-called fitness capital of the world for an alternative sweat, hunting for the exercise class that could do no less than skewer our attention spans like kebab. Here are three that met the criteria:

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A Class You Won’t Want to Bag: It’s 8:45 p.m., and I’m standing between a heavy bag and 215 pounds of Silas Myers. He’s a 29-year-old investment analyst, mostly muscle, and we’re at the Krav Maga National Training Center in West L.A. waiting for K.O. Bag class to begin. Although many of the young urbanites--equal mix of men and women--are here to shape up for the gritty martial art of Krav Maga, the official fighting system of the Israeli armed forces, a good portion have come to combat a much more personal and domestic enemy: flab.

After a rousing warm-up, the class splits into two groups. The A group grabs surgical tubing and follows the center’s fitness manager, Linda Shelton, in a series of squats, flies and special power-packing moves using the tubes for resistance. The Bs pop on boxing gloves for punching and kicking drills on the heavy bags with Michael Margolin, one of the owners and a third-degree black belt in Krav Maga. Every three minutes we switch groups.

“It’s not about staring in the mirror to see if you have a six-pack, it’s about using your workout to pack a punch,” Shelton says. “Our motto is: Show up and participate. Your body will change.”

It’s true. There is no time for looky-looing or watching the clock. In fact, as I ricochet between tubing and bag banging, instructors flying in my face egging me on, I feel the princess in me rise up--not Jewish, but Xena! I stop worrying and become warrior, and swing with all my might. “There’s something about hitting that bag that makes the tension go straight out of your body,” points out Myers. “I’ve done other sports. This is an exceptional stress reliever.”

* Krav Maga National Training Center, 11500 Olympic Blvd., West Los Angeles; (310) 966-1300. Cost: about $80 a month for unlimited classes (first class free). If you’re running short on time, try K.O. Bag Lunch, a new noon class at which you can order lunch before class and pick up your grub on the way out.

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Where the Wild Things Are: Am I in the wrong place? The high-ceilinged space in the 18th Street Arts Complex of Santa Monica looks more like a photographer’s studio than one you would exercise in. And strange objects hang in the air, the most striking of which is a black rubber net called the Web.

A sense of adventure is a good companion to have if you’re heading for Jungle Gym, which, on a rainy Thursday morning, is just beginning. Emilie Conrad-Da’oud tells her 16 students, who range from professional dancers to a quadriplegic, “Move between the dots, find the nuances.”

Jungle Gym is the antithesis to almost any class you’d find in a regular gym. Conrad-Da’oud, a movement pioneer and educator, believes the mechanical repetition of most exercise--”the Industrial Revolution,” she calls it--makes the body rigid. Not only that, it bonsais the mind.

“Patterned movement puts the brain to sleep,” she says. “It’s through creating a complexity of movement and texture that you allow the nervous system to expand beyond ‘straight forward, up, down, carry water, fetch wood.’ When you do, it has a tremendous effect on the brain.”

Student Kristy Schaefle agrees.

“Along with my bodily reflexes, my mental reflexes are a lot quicker, so I can better deal with whatever is coming around the next corner,” says the 40-year-old who, until recently, worked as a 911 operator. Maureen DeLandreville, 52, uses the classes as therapy after breaking her neck in a fall six years ago. “Through Emilie’s work, I am creating new neural connections, new ways to get messages through,” she says.

Naturally, no two Jungle Gym classes are alike, and today’s is about improvising. At first I experiment with a folding metal chair, then on one of the slanted ExploreBoards specifically designed to drape your body on, over and around. The idea is to let our bodies unravel, elaborate and reinvent themselves, breaking the boundaries of habit, challenging the rules of gravity. When I finally climb up onto the Web, Conrad-Da’oud’s latest creation, which is still in the prototype phase, I finally relax. Playing on the bouncy grid, I feel deliciously distorted, stretched in all directions like a newsprint photo on Silly Putty. I notice I’m sweating, but it doesn’t concern me.

Two hours just fly by when you’re “moving between the dots.” It seems you enter a timeless zone, a sort of mind-body casino where there are no clocks and gambling is the rule. Emerging from this place, I am definitely enriched with something very unfamiliar. I guess you could call it vitality. And I’m sure it could become addictive. “This is 21st century exercise,” Schaefle says. “Jungle Gym tones your muscles from the inside out.”

* Jungle Gym at the Continuum Studio, 1629 18th St., No. 7, Santa Monica; (310) 453-4402. Single two-hour class, $18; series available.

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Out of the Ordinary: Over the past 10 years, indoor cycling classes have taken the doldrums out of the most boring machine in exercise history. Can Boathouse do the same for the rowing machine?

I decide to check it out at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, where a small patch of gym turf overlooking the pool has been devoted to group rowing classes for the last year. Be forewarned: These machines bear little resemblance to those rowers of the ‘70s that hurt your back if you ever figured out how to use them. Second, don’t start singing, “Row, row, row your boat.” “Gently” has nothing to do with this sport.

To begin class, we each take one of the eight machines, strapping our feet onto pedals in front of us and grabbing the handle attached to a cable coming from a weighted flywheel (it feels as if you’re drawing out a metal tape measure, which I just might need to record my shrinking midriff if I keep at this). Instructor Lori Guerrero, who rowed competitively at USC and is now assistant rowing coach there, shows us how to push off the pedals, sliding the seat back, then pull. “Most people don’t realize it,” she says, “but 75% of the work is done with the legs.” Another 75%, I soon realize, is done with the rest of the body. (That’s right--you give 150%.)

I find it a pleasantly fluid motion defined by the constant push-pull of most relationships. But the burn creeps up on me when Guerrero suggests I try to keep the number on my screen under 3:00. That’s the number of minutes it would take me to do 500 meters in the water. Robin Campbell, a 46-year-old attorney on my left, is clocking 1:55.

The fact that Campbell and I can row in sync but at different intensities is the beauty of the machine--and the class--according to the folks at Concept II in Morrisville, Vt., who developed both. The Athletic Club’s president, Steven Hathaway, agrees: “People of all levels can be in one class together because you can pull as hard or as lightly as you want and still maintain the same strokes per minute.”

Hathaway, a nationally competitive rower himself, admits it takes a little while to get your technique down so you can get all the fitness benefits. But, he says, no other machine gives you a better workout.

“The calorie burn is amazing,” assures an enthusiastic (and thin) Megan MacMeekin, 27, who’s also hooked on trying to “beat her meter.” I notice, peeking at her screen during class, that she hovers in the low twos. Speaking of minutes, Boathouse takes only 30. It’s over before you can get bored.

* The Boathouse at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, 431 W. 7th St., Los Angeles; (213) 625-2211. Membership is $250 to $500 for initiation plus $80 to $130 a month. The class is held in about 25 clubs around the U.S.