Photo by Jay Paul
Seo Kelleher (left) leads a Pound class at Midlothian Athletic Club
If you’ve ever wanted to get in shape to the beat of your own drum, Richmond now has a fitness option that lets you do exactly that. Pound is a 45-minute class combining drumming actions with cardio, strength training and Pilates for a fun, full-body workout.
It’s offered by Seo Kelleher of Richmond-based CO2Fit, who first heard about Pound at a conference in New York back in March. “I felt like, ‘Wow, this could be huge,’ ” she says of the workout, which is designed to burn between 500 and 900 calories per class, engaging smaller muscle groups in the core, legs and butt. She likens it to Zumba in that “anybody can do it — people just have fun, and at the end of the class you get the workout.”
It’s also probably the most rock ’n’ roll group fitness class out there. Participants use “RipStix” — bright green, lightly weighted exercise “drumsticks” — to beat to the rhythm of the music while performing various movements standing, sitting or lying down. The soundtrack is pretty rocking, too: “There’s a lot of Rage Against the Machine and Linkin Park,” Kelleher says, as well as hip-hop, Miley Cyrus and Iggy Azalea, “so it’s a good mix — it’s a lot of fun.”
Kelleher’s other main offering is Fighting Fit, a much more high-intensity mix of kickboxing, TRX suspension training and interval training; she introduced Pound into her repertoire as a way to attract an entry-level crowd looking for a more approachable, fun way to get fit. She asserts that participants “don’t even have to be good dancers,” though it does help to be able to follow a beat.
Her CO2Fit is styled as a “fitness resource,” in that it doesn’t have its own brick-and-mortar site, but instead partners with several local businesses to either provide a location for its own classes or recommend another organization’s class, depending on each client’s individual needs. Pound classes led by CO2Fit can be found at Midlothian Athletic Club and Body by T Fitness, both in Midlothian, and East-West WingChun in Carytown; visit co2fit.com for more information and class schedules.
