3Ness: Got the moves, just not the groove

Your 3Ness weekend consists of hourly slots presenting a choice of 6 activities held in the massive conference rooms, outside, the pool or smaller therapy/lecture spaces. Friday offered three slots with seven on Saturday and four on Sunday. Theoretically, that’s a serious amount of boogeying. On arrival, like the big square I am, I took the final schedule straight to my room to work out exactly what I would be doing on every one of those 15 slots. Because yes, I planned to be at all of them. I like to think big, but if I only I had known…

But on the Friday night Paul hosts a ‘meet the presenters’ session, which threw my careful planning into disarray. Paul is very careful about his choice of presenters, and it shows. A handful had even been flown in from the US just for 3Ness, and as they took it in turns to introduce their classes, I started circling, crossing, re-circling and exasperatedly scrawling all over my schedule until it looked like a really terrible child’s first drawing.

That was after the first three sessions though. I started with Vibe cycle, which seemed a fairly safe option. I wasn’t brave enough to hit the dance floor yet, but cycling was both familiar and educational (I steal teaching ideas at all opportunities) and having got lost by the cycle room on my initial reconnaissance, I knew it was in a very small room which would heat up faster than a ring with Wolverine vs David Haye. In their underwear. When I arrived, I could have had any bike I wanted. I chose badly – about ten minutes into the class the left peddle started to feel a bit dodgy, and about 50 seconds after that, although it was still attached to my foot, it had given up its grip on the bike. That could have been a broken leg at speed or an expletive-inducing landing from a climb.

Vibe cycle [Visualisation mind Body Euphoria] is a relatively new cycling style. Developed in the UK by international presenter Delvin Clark, it’s kind of based around having a party on a bike and involves occasional rousing declarations of ‘Don’t just ride! Feel the Vibe!’ from the class. They have an excellent philosophy about energy flowing from the teacher to the class and back again in an endless cycle – an aspect of teaching inherent in Les Mills training but I think missing in Spinning. My Spinning background rebelled against the many upper body movements performed on the bike though – lifting up and down for the sake of rhythm rather than work, drops to the right and left sides (my knees doth protest), pulling forwards and back with the body. It’s fun, but I know RPM and Spinning both ban any movements of the body that don’t relate to workload (resistance) and tempo changes. My understanding for this was a matter of safety – moving the body quickly while the legs are in motion seems to put the stability and alignment of the knees in particular at risk – but I know both those systems follow the mandate of performing no movement on the spinning bike that would not be performed on a real bike. The body moves on a real bike, but only to negotiate and compensate for terrain. There was also almost no time in the saddle, which was interesting and I suspect puts more of the work onto the aerobic system than strength training and endurance. Research beckons. I’m interested.

But hey, the party really started with Richard Callender’s Urban Funk. I had an image of Richard in my head as a tall slender blonde man – I’m sure I’d seen him in a magazine somewhere. Well, no. I couldn’t have been more wrong. He’s a tall black man with watermelons for muscles. He has the cheekiest smile I’ve ever seen on a grown man. The man can move and boy can he groove. I am a little in love with Richard Callender.

Urban Funk indisputably requires one to dance, or attempt something in near approximation. I am all for pushing my hips into kicks for Combat, or bending at the hip for squats in Pump, or opening my hips in Balance, and even riding the hips high or low as required by my spin terrain. But you ask me to gyrate, pop or grind my hips and there ain’t no action to be seen baby. Richard built combinations of moves and then jammed them together in explosive style. Every time I relaxed slightly, thinking we’d got to the end of the sequence and I almost had a handle on it, he’d throw a little extra razzle onto the end, and then break that down for the retards on the dance floor (ie me).

Now let’s be quite frank about something: there were a lot of people of African and Caribbean descent at 3Ness, and I don’t know whether it’s genetic or cultural, but these guys know how to swing and sway their bodies with style. While a lot of the Anglo chicks like me wore expressions ranging from terror to extreme constipation, I found myself wishing my common African ancestry featured a whole lot more recently in my DNA. Eventually, painstakingly, I mastered to moves, but was yet to find my groove.

The last session for Friday put me right back on solid ground with Greg Francis’ Fit2Fite (Fitness, Intensity, Technique, Excellence). Greg – Paul’s brother, it was rather a family event with his sister Janice dancing up a Soca storm – is assistant coach to the National Karate Team and first developed the program as a more interesting way of drilling the team. He’s now just achieved REPs accreditation (whoop!), so is poised to roll it out as another martial arts based training system to compete with the likes of Body Combat, Fight Club and kick boxing courses around the nation.

Fite is based around technique drills set to hot dance music and packed out all three of its sessions at 3Ness. On the Friday I wasn’t completely sold: the music didn’t grab me (but that’s a personal preference, and I’m well fussy about some of the Body Combat tunes too) and next to the ultra-dynamic, choreo-heavy format of Combat, I found the drills a little samey. But I went back in on Sunday, where I really started to get caught up in it. Fite is fluid, the music started to grow on me, and the advantage of the drills is that you could start to really throw yourself into the quality of your moves. Soon I became the Karate Kid, then Raphael and eventually I WAS Buffy, slaying the dust out of those vampires, yo.

Finally though the main event arrived: the buffet dinner. For me, being on my own, this first involved Making Friends, ie walking up to a table with a spare seat, plonking myself in it, and then brightly asking whether anyone else was actually sitting there. I lucked out with a group of girls who were quite happy to keep pace with my returns to the buffet, or at least too polite to comment. After a fortnight of good eating on the Thrive Diet though I had forgotten why big dinners are a bad idea: this one put me to sleep. So much so that when the World Cup dragged relentlessly on, delaying the official opening of the event, I retired back to my enormous room to work on a TV series pitch I needed to submit by Sunday, and which a group of friends were kindly workshopping for me. A writer’s work is never done – I have a few frankly mortifying deadlines this year and should be working 70 hour weeks to hit them.

The opening was well worth the wait though. As I mentioned earlier, the presenters came up one at a time, introduced themselves and promoted their classes. Sunny Singh, probably Britain’s best known male belly dancer, had me spellbound. That man can isolate every individual muscle of his body, I swear, and jiggle them in sequence or all at once. As someone who struggles to relax jaw, shoulders or butt, I was utterly astounded, and still regret that I was unable to get to either of his classes. I had his Bollywood circled on the Schedule of Doom, but a later incident with my alarm clock rather rooted that plan.

The US step contingent then blew away all of my preconceptions about step. I mean it’s step, right? How many things can you do over a static piece of plastic? I mean I’ve done Body Step. It was cool. Enough. But it has nothing on Izett Barnett’s Xtreme Step Performance. Izett bought his step girls on stage, and they rocked 3Ness so hard we demanded an encore. I take all my sniffy attitude back. Step can do Cool.

The night began/finished off with a parteh, but by the time the football and intros had finished, I was both too tired and sober to try to find my elusive groove. Besides, I had a double bed and no neighbours playing video games punctuated with uproarious laughter until the wee hours. And I had a bold ambition: if all the presenters were being forced to partake in a 6:30am jog, why shouldn’t I?

Best of intentions, and all that…

Tags: 3Ness, Fitness