SLT: Stretching, Lettuce and Tomato?

While most of being unemployed kinda sucked, the one thing that was awesome was being able to arrange my own schedule. 9:30am workout? Sure!

Months ago, Amanda Freeman, co-founder of Vital Juice emailed me and invited me to her new baby: SLT. I told her I’d love to try it, and forgot about it fairly quickly. One of the phrases that was used to describe it was “muscle-quivering,” and the only muscles I wanted quivering during marathon training were my quads.

With the marathon behind me, I finally got back to Amanda last week.

Fine, you can make my muscles quiver.

So you’re wondering what SLT stands for? Is it like a BLT but with stretching? Like, stretching/lettuce/tomato? No, but that would be good, too.

It stands for Strengthen, Lengthen, Tone, and is based on Amanda’s favorite class in L.A., Pilates Plus. In an interview with Well and Good, she says that SLT is like pilates plus a cardio workout, so you don’t feel like you need another workout.

If a regular Pilates class is done on a reformer, this is a megaformer. (Clearly, no messing around here.) The front and the back pad are stationary, but the “carriage,” (the middle thing) moves back and forth on springs. The springs are also used to control the level of resistance–it was yellow for light resistance, blue for heavy resistance.

When you do something like a lunge, the carriage goes back.

And my stomach also dropped. I thought I was going to fall and get stuck in between those springs and possibly chop off a leg and never be able to run again. But I actually made it through an entire class without the middle carriage slipping and me falling, so I consider that a major achievement.

I feel like I get workout amnesia during a difficult workout like this, so I’m not sure I accurately remember what we did, but the breakup of the 50-minute class was roughly 2/3 lunges and squats and roughly 1/3 planks and arms. It was difficult but was definitely a fun workout. The moving carriage (or moving pad of death, as I thought of it) required a ton of core strength (which I don’t really have) in the exercises where we needed to keep it stable. We used handles and pulleys for the arm part of the workout.

I consider myself a fairly normal-sized girl, but this class was full of TINY women wearing Soul Cycle shirts. I definitely felt like the biggest (and weakest) person in class. I wore that kinda-cute outfit, but I found myself wishing I’d worn a marathon shirt instead to show that I was tougher than I looked.

The class is $20 for the first time and $40 after that, so it’s probably not something I’d do on the regular, but I would definitely try it again. I’ve never tried a Pilates Reformer, and this makes me want to try one of those now, too.

I’ve heard I won’t be able to move Sunday. I’m looking forward to it.

What’s the most unusual workout you’ve ever done? (This so far qualifies as the most unusual for me.)