My first love
The exercise that made me love exercise (and why I don't do it anymore)
Let’s cut to the chase: it’s spin. I love spin classes. I love them so much. I love the music, the intensity, the darkness, the air conditioning, the heart-racing adrenaline rush, the amount I sweat and feeling of the shower hitting my bod afterwards. But I haven’t been to a spin class in, what I’m now realising, is years.
I first got into spin in 2016 which was right in the middle of the spin class boom era. I hadn’t exercised for a long time, or really… ever (because school did not teach me to enjoy exercise!), but I was sick of feeling unfit. I’d tried Going To The Gym but had no idea what I was doing and had no sense of purpose or whether what I was doing was useful or good. So, I wanted something that was going to properly rip the bandage off and pack a lot of intensity into a short period of time. I decided that was spin classes, and booked my first class at Psycle in Oxford Circus. It was on my way to work, so I would leave my home earlyyyy in the morning and stop off at Psycle before hopping back on the Victoria Line to my job in Highbury. I still remember my first class, which was with a French woman called Marion, who had nothing in particular to distinguish her from any other instructor but because she wasn’t actively mean, I imprinted on her like a duckling with its mother and for weeks would only go to Marion’s class. I would also only book the back row of the class, because that felt safe.
If you’ve never done a spin class, let me tell you: that shit is hard. It’s intense and exhausting, but crucially, it’s also quite private. So even though I was literally always the biggest person in the room, and even though I was brand new and not able to keep up a lot of the time, I felt pretty safe on my bike in the back of the room, in the dark. And the thing with spin is that if you keep doing it regularly (and I was doing it regularly), you can get very fit very quickly.
As I said before, this was the peak of the spin class boom. You had to be online at 12 o’clock on a Monday with credits in your account if you wanted to stand a chance of booking the most popular classes of the week with the most popular instructors, let alone get the bike you wanted. It was feral! It was wild! We were mad for spin! I was going spinning maybe three times a week, which was as much as £££ would allow. Because even then, spinning was expensive. Now, a single class at Psycle will set you back £27 (obviously this number can be reduced if you buy a pack of multiple classes or you can do a new customer offer), and even though it wasn’t quite that expensive then, I just couldn’t afford to do that on top of all the shopping and socialising I was wont to do at that time in my life. It helped me get really fit really quickly, and gradually my confidence in the classes increased to the point where I didn’t just stick to my ‘safe’ bikes and my ‘safe’ instructors. But I still never really felt fully good there.
Over time, my routines and habits changed, and I fell out of the habit of spinning as regularly. I would still go to classes once in a while, but I might also try other forms of exercise too.
And then, the pandemic happened, and I basically didn’t exercise at all, ever, for a few years. This led to me, at some point in 2022, feeling absolutely desperate to get back some level of fitness, because I really had none. I’m naturally a real stomper but the pandemic had really curbed my walking habit, and I would get out of breath having to walk up the (many) hills in my area. So I did the only thing I knew to do, and went to a spin class. The first spin class I went to after deciding it was time to start exercising again was memorable, because as soon as I left it I discovered the Queen had died and there was a rainbow over Tower Bridge as I was walking across London Bridge from Boom Cycle in Bank. Poetic!
I’d taken out a ClassPass trial and decided to go to a few different spin studios rather than just going back to Psycle because it was familiar. At that point, Ash of AshRidesLondon was still teaching at Boom, so I figured her classes were the best place to start. Her classes were and remain absolutely brilliant and she is a total gem and a force for good in the exercise space. If you’re reading this and you’re feeling slightly sold on doing a spin class but still worry about feeling out of place, please go to one of Ash’s classes. You will be able to completely take it at your own pace and you will not feel harassed or stressed by the vibe, I all but promise you. Anyway, I was right and Ash was a good place to start. I tried a few other studios as my schedule and location allowed, and eventually found that the place I liked the most was a place called Digme.
Towards the end of 2022, I got paid an instalment of a book advance, and took a deep breath and spent part of it on a year’s membership of Digme. No other spin studio in London did a deal like this, where if you paid upfront for the year, you could literally go to as many classes as you wanted. And my schedule was so flexible at that time that I properly rinsed it. I think by the end of the year, I had gone to about 150 classes, which is genuinely a bit mad of me, but that also included yoga, barre, strength, although I’d say at least 2/3 of the classes were spin. I loved it. It completely changed my life in tangible ways, including meeting an instructor called Fiona who was the direct link to me doing my PT qualification. Digme felt safe to me in a way that Psycle never did. 95% of instructors literally never made diet culture-y remarks in class, and the 5% who did already had a reputation of being Bad Vibes among my spinny comrades. I felt so competent and confident in classes and, unlike at Psycle, would happily, regularly ride in the front row. I even rode on the podium during one class, a special celebration class with the aforementioned Fiona. I don’t think I will ever find an exercise space that I found as pleasurable and transformative as Digme.
But nothing lasts forever: they made a series of strange decisions that led to a lot of the best instructors leaving, before the studio closed each location before shutting up shop completely. By that point, I wasn’t really going anymore anyway. When my year of pre-paid limitless spin ended, I was in the worst financial position of my life (so far!) and just couldn’t justify dropping big dollar on exercise memberships. So, now I run (free), work out at home (free) and go to the gym occasionally (for which I pay £20 a month and will never give up my founder membership even though I hardly ever use it).
I would sometimes do Peloton classes on the spin bikes at the gym, and I even loved those! I think I am a true Girlie of Spin. Alas, the kind person whose Peloton household account I was sharing has ended her Peloton membership (on that note, if you would like me to be a member of your household, I promise I am a quiet and unobtrusive guest), so I don’t even have that anymore. I can’t tell you the last time I spun, but I can tell you that I miss it.
I’m not going to get into the ins and outs of the changing landscape of boutique fitness classes, but I would love someone to write a deep dive on what’s gone ‘wrong’ with spin. Has it just fallen out of fashion? Has it been usurped by reformer pilates? Is it incredibly expensive to run studios? Did the pandemic kill it? Because since I started spinning again in 2022, Boom Cycle closed its central London branches, Digme closed down completely, and even the SoulCycle have just closed their Notting Hill Studio.
But the truth is, if I had a well-paying job and worked in Central London? I would be right back on that bike.
I save all my best podcasts for when I run, and the one I find myself looking forward to the most which you might not already listen to is 5-4, which is a podcast about the US Supreme Court. It sounds boring but it’s hosted by what I like to refer to as ‘three rude leftists’, which is basically the nicest thing you can say about a person. It’s very funny, very interesting and not at all politically wet. One of the hosts is Peter Shamshiri, who you might know from the podcast If Books Could Kill, co-hosted by Michael Hobbes, who you might know from the podcast Maintenance Phase. Basically, if you like one of these podcasts you will probably like all of them, but I suspect 5-4 is the one that people are the least enthusiastic to listen to because of the subject matter. I heartily recommend and find myself learning a lot from it!
