I’m in a steamy dark room in the basement of a London W1 club moving to the beat of some Swedish House Mafia tune. It’s Sunday lunchtime but feels more like 2am the night before. Several topless men and scantily clad women around me are absolutely drenched, as am I. As the song climaxes, the energy inside goes up a notch and my body pulses adrenaline through my veins at an alarming rate. “Five more minutes, give it everything you got!” yells the instructor at a volume worthy of three exclamation marks.
By London W1 club, I mean the renowned BXR Gym. And by moving, I mean VersaClimbing – outright the best cardio I’ve ever done. It doesn't half kill you, though.
“As the drops of the music come on, the instructor goes up, the lighting goes up, and we work on all these things to bring your levels up, hold you there, then bring you back down, then take you back up,” says Alex Nicholl, BXR’s MD (fitness guru and aforementioned instructor), of his prized VersaClimbing classes. “The thinking is: what do we do in clubs? How do we keep that level high? I had my friends who were DJs helping me with my music and speeding it all up, so we were working on rhythm and how we put it together.”
If VersaClimbing were a town, its sign would read: “Welcome to VersaClimbing – not for the faint of heart”. It is 40 minutes of inescapable torture that comes with what feels like an insurmountable challenge – climbing 5280ft, aka a vertical mile. The relationship between you and this stationary machine you remain upright on and attached to throughout every session will be a love-hate one. But sticking with it will do wonders for your fitness levels.
“Versa climbing is a non-impact form of exercise, which means people can push themselves cardiovascularly whilst limiting the impact on their joints. This stands out from other forms of cardio as less impact results in less risk of injury, which means this type of training is more sustainable,” says Yaz Garcia, a master Versa trainer at BXR. “It's also a full-body exercise that allows people to be upright, which is great for anyone sitting down all day.”
To grasp exactly why I'm calling this the best cardio I've ever tried, how it works and why you should be getting involved, I caught up with Nicholl post my Vertical Mile Challenge (nailed it in 36mins 38 secs, thanks) to get the lowdown on all things VersaClimbing.
For those not au fait with what VersaClimbing is, how do you get started?
On the Versa, the position that you should be in when you start is the same position if you were just about to do a squat with weight on your back. The first time you go in there, you don't know which way it's going. You're trying to do something on it, where actually, relaxing and letting the machine do its work and you working with it is the best way. So it takes time because you've got to allow the body to work with the climber. Height will play into it to a point, but the Versa still moves 20 inches for everyone, and it's guided by the foot, not by the hands. Then it's about being able to do that on the rhythm of the music, which is played at around 136 BPM.
Talk us through the best technique.
If you're putting body weight on the handlebar or on the foot pedal that's going up, you're slowing yourself down. So what you have to think about is as you’re driving down with one foot, you’re pulling up your knee of the other foot, which if you pull your foot up on the other side, you are taking away weight off that pedal, which means it's going to move quicker. And if you do that with the pedals, and you do that with your hands, then everything becomes lighter. And that's where the speed and the rhythm comes. The lighter you can be on the opposite side to the driving force, the quicker the machine moves. So brace your core and soften your knees. That is the position to start VersaClimbing. The bum is not pushed out. The bum is tucked through the core, round and under, and your glutes are engaged. And then you hold that position as you drive through the arms and legs. So your core has to brace and take the movement that is going across.
So is it an arms and legs workout?
It's a phenomenal core exercise because you're keeping yourself constantly on. Unlike on a spin bike where you sit down and collapse the core, when you're standing up, if you don't brace your core, what will happen is, your bum's going to drift back. And then what happens? Gravity's going to do what it does and it's going to start pulling you backwards. And the next thing is, you're hanging off your Versa. So you'll always see those who've got their cores on because they're much stronger, much taller on their machines and they're on the same angle as the machine.
How much impact do you put your joints through?
You're like, ‘Hang on a second. I'm working very hard, but without the impact. My body knows it's drained.’ And the reason you're feeling that is that depletion of calories is higher than any depletion of calories on any other cardio machine. You've got to really know how to work a cardio machine, shy of doing maybe sprint work on a running machine. And even when I've done sprint work, I can't beat what I can do when I do sprint work on my Versa. The body isn't normally used to that amount of depletion, in that amount of time, where it senses normally microtrauma should have kicked in, but it doesn't get that because there’s not that impact like running. The heart rate goes up so high, but as soon as our hands go down, we stop pumping the blood above our heart and it comes back down and it goes again. So it's just working in a way that it doesn't in any other exercise. So you get this phenomenal sweat, you've worked super hard, you've had a big calorie deficit, but the body's not screwed like it should be normally.
Why does VersaClimbing burn so many calories?
First, it's full body. Unlike cycling where you’re actually disengaging a load of muscles, on the VersaClimber, you’re not. So then let's compare it to something where they've converted it, so let's say an assault bike. The assault bike is progressively harder because now we're using arms but again, you're sitting down on an assault bike or a rowing machine. So stage three, you're using arms, legs and you're standing up, so we have to be fully engaged, which beats all the other cardio machines because we're already doing more. Then add a fourth element. You have to pump blood above your heart as your hands are working above your heart. Next time you go for a run, halfway through, stick your hands up in the air for one minute and watch how much tighter you get – it's a whole different ball game. It's very difficult and you have to do that continuously on VersaClimb. Lastly, when you take away impact, you can work longer for harder. So it's a compound effect of all these little things, which is why their calorie burn is always higher.
I really didn’t like it when I first tried it but now I love it, though it’s still a pretty niche workout.
People understand it as a phenomenal way to lose weight effectively and efficiently. But people also become very addicted to the environment that we have created and the class as a concept. Back in 2017, there were 20, 30 people climbing with me a day, now we have over 300 people so that is phenomenal amounts of growth within a very boutiquey industry. As BXR grows, it will always be our signature studio. It is niche and novel, but the gym world is very different now. It's not so much just about a gym space, [at BXR] we want to look at health and wellness as a much bigger element. BXR Labs is our first part moving into this – talking about recovery. So we've got our infrared sauna in there and ice baths. We do our wellness Saturdays where we do IV drips, compression, elements like this. So it's all about recovering as an athlete, like a champion too.
