Experiencing Air Fit: Simulated High Altitude Training {Pleasanton, CA Studio Review}

Hi friends!

Before I moved last weekend, I had the opportunity to try a new type of workout trend that has hit the Bay Area: indoor high altitude training. Some supposed benefits of altitude training include:

• More efficient workouts: Training 50 minutes at altitude is comparable to 90 minutes at sea-level
• Increased red blood cell count
• Decreased recovery time
• Reduced overall stress and fatigue
• Enhanced oxygen transportation to the tissues, muscles and brain
• Stimulation of fat metabolism

All of this had me very curious when the folks at Air Fit, a new high altitude training facility in Pleasanton, CA – which happens to be the largest high altitude training facility in North America – invited me to come try out some classes. Unfortunately I was only in town for a few more days so I only had the chance to go one evening. I had planned on taking a strength and cardio class + a summit yoga class, but traffic from an accident left me late for the first class. Luckily I still got a great experience of simulated high altitude training from just doing the yoga class!

Air Fit is part of The Quad, a 20,000-square foot gym. When I walked in the gym, I was immediately impressed. Not only does The Quad have the high altitude training room and a gorgeous regular gym, it also has a barre studio, a CrossFit gym and a boxing room. How amazing is that?!

Air Fit mimics high altitude exercise – also called hypoxic training – at up to 22,000 feet by using generators that pump oxygen-reduced air into the room. When I walked into the room, I immediately felt a little lightheaded, but it felt like it subsided after a moment and I felt pretty normal. The yoga class was held in a simulated environment of around 12,000 feet.

The instructor led a vinyasa-style yoga session in a pretty crowded class. I loved the instructor, Malia, and thought she gave off a great, very yogic vibe. The class was a nice combination of faster-paced moves and the holding of poses.

What I found to be really interesting was the amount of sweating I was doing during the class. Unless the room is really warm, I tend to not sweat all that much during yoga sessions. In contrast, at Air Fit I was glistening quite a bit. According to my heart rate monitor, I also burned a lot more calories than I typically do during vinyasa yoga:

I burned 100 calories prior to the class warming up on the stair machine, but that still means that I burned 400+ calories in yoga, which is awesome! Although I love yoga, I tend to go for faster paced, more calorie-burning workouts a lot of the time, so I was a big fan of summit yoga. It felt like a “real” workout to me, thanks to the simulated high altitude environment making my body work harder to get into those poses.

All in all, I absolutely loved working out at Air Fit! The only downside to Air Fit and The Quad is that membership prices are pretty steep, but it’s all relative because most specialty studios are pricey. I think you get what you pay for when it comes to this type of thing. If I lived in the area, I would be very tempted to become what they call a mixx unlimited member so that I could have access to the gym, barre studio, boxing gym, and Air Fit classes for $220 a month.  I think I’d have a blast taking a different class each day of the week, and would probably even get around to trying CrossFit! 😉

At the end of the yoga class, the instructor recited this beautiful verse, which she later told me was from a book called When Things Fall Apart by a Buddhist teacher named Pema Chödrön. I felt like the words really spoke to me. That night I was set to close on a house in the San Diego area near rampant wildfires, with the recent loss of my grandma still very raw, and was in the midst of packing up my life to move, yet somehow the class and those words left me feeling incredibly relaxed and peaceful. I found a few verses of it online and wanted to share it with you all, as I thought that it might bring you some peace of mind to whatever’s going on in your life too:

“We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that’s death. Seeking security or protection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn’t have any fresh air. There’s no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. Doing this is setting ourselves up for failure, because sooner or later, we’re going to have an experience we can’t control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we’re going to find out we have cancer, or somebody’s going to spill tomato juice all over our white suit…

The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache and sometimes you feel 100 percent healthy. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience. There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the awakened point of view, that’s life…

We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

Aren’t those just beautiful words that can resonate with every single person in this world?

*For more information about Air Fit, check out the gym’s website here.*

Questions: Have you ever tried simulated high altitude training? If not, is it something you’re interested in trying?