AntiGravity Flying Fitness: Flipping and Flying in a Hammock

I swung over to a small fitness studio for my first AntiGravity Flying Fitness class tonight. Sounds cool, right? But you never heard of it, have you? Up until last month, neither did I. While browsing around for a fun, fit activity, this crazy form of working out caught my attention and I had to give it a whirl. I’ve seen pictures and watched videos before stepping into the studio, so I went in knowing what to expect, but what I didn’t know was how challenging I’d find it to be.

I went it, filled out an emergency contact form, grabbed a squishy rubber mat and set it up beneath one of the unrolled orange hammocks hanging from the ceiling. Once everyone was ready, my instructor introduced herself and then proceeded to, in a soothing yoga-sounding voice, walk us through hopping into the hammocks and then got us going with some warm-ups.

We rode the hammock like a horse and swung back and forth, then we swung on it like a swing, and twisted our arms, legs, and bodies around in all sorts of shapes to get used to the feeling of the hammock holding our weight. Then we stood up in the hammocks, did some stepping exercises, sat back down in them, stretched a bit, then we dove right into flipping backwards and landing on our bare feet. The first time I needed a push from the instructor with this, since I realized the upper body strength I thought I had did not exist anymore, because I barely use those muscles like I used to (this will change!). Anyway, to start the back flip, we were hanging by our feet with our pony tails sweeping the floor. Our “tootsies,” as my instructor kept calling them, were hooked to the tightly rolled up sides of the hammock, and we had to pull ourselves up, bring our knees to our chins, and flip backwards.

After flipping out, we played around with different poses: lotus, archer, table, tree, monkey, Superman. Hanging upside down turned into a handstand, and to bring the class to a close, we pulled ourselves up and calmly swayed in our hammocks to reflect on our journey and to “reconnect” with our bodies.

This was a fantastic experience, and luckily I have five more FlyFit classes lined up. I definitely recommend this fit way of hanging out to anyone who’s looking for a fun, unique workout.

They also have pole dancing classes.