FAQ
We’ve read the research and 30 minutes is absolutely enough. Thanks to something called Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption (a.k.a. the ‘Afterburn Effect’), High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) can set you up to continue burning calories for up to 48 hours after your workout, meaning that the length of the workout is less important than the type of workout in terms of calories burned.
If you want to benefit from the afterburn effect, you have to ask just a little bit more from your body than it can handle that day. While that’s almost the definition of ‘tough’ (and it has to be if you want to see results), a session isn’t an exercise in torture. There’s certainly no boot camp-style sergeant major screaming at you to push out another rep. But rest assured, it’ll be manageable and safe, regardless of your fitness level.
We ignore the number of calories burned in a workout because it’s an outdated and broken way of looking at exercise and nutrition for general health. Not only will calories consumed affect everyone differently, but the number of calories burned by people doing identical workouts will also vary for each person, every time, depending on a vast range of factors such as sleep and lifestyle habits, stress, and nutrition.
Regardless of this, the way we see it, the number of calories burned during a session at Ritual is arbitrary: the number doesn’t matter, even if we could know for sure what it is. That’s because when you train the way we teach here, you get an ‘afterburn’ effect whereby your body keeps burning calories for a long time after exercise. Research has shown that after HIIT, the metabolic rate can stay elevated for up to 48 hours compared to pre-exercise levels. When you enable your body to burn calories all day long, the number you burn during a session doesn’t matter.
You don’t have to be fit to train with us — you train with us to get fit! Our program is suitable for complete beginners — we offer modifications and levels of progression that mean that a professional athlete and someone exercising for the first time can both do the same session, and each will get a challenging workout.
The training we do is perfectly safe for most people. Our instructors are trained to scale or substitute exercises and tailor workouts based on your specific issues, imbalances, and abilities.
Never! Among other things, the sessions vary daily regarding the work-to-rest ratios, the order in which exercises are performed, and the overall intensity required, which means your body is always kept guessing and your progress never stagnates. Importantly, we don’t just randomly throw a bunch of exercises on the boards each morning – our proprietary algorithm ensures that over time you get as close to a perfectly balanced training stimulus as possible, regardless of how often you come to the gym.
Unfortunately, we don’t offer child care. We encourage you to take this 30 minutes as your “ME” time to focus on yourself. For the safety of the little ones and out of respect to all of our members, we ask parents not to bring children under 16 to the studio.
No, we are a small group studio; Bell Fitness is not equipped with a shower. However, we have two large restrooms where you can comfortably change.
Our workouts are designed to be scaled to each person’s ability, so people of all ages can enjoy the benefits of training with us. Studies have shown HIIT to be beneficial to people as old as 80, and we have clients who have trained regularly with us into their 70s. However, if you’re over 50 and have any concerns about your ability to train, we’d highly recommend checking with your doctor first.
