Monday Mashups: Maximize Your Spin

Keeping up with your fitness and being healthy is even bigger now than ever before. There are a zillion niche markets since there are so many variations of workouts nowadays. We enjoy boxing and yoga ourselves--both strengthening and relaxing! But we have many friends out there that love, love, love spinning. It is an intense workout but the results are worth it. You may have heard of places like SoulCycle and Flywheel, especially since each have their own celebrity following, that are evolving the spinning world. Well, there's new competition on the horizon by an already well-established company that you would never guess to open a spin studio...Imax.

That's right, Imax is looking to supersize the boutique fitness business as it opens an immersive indoor spin studio in New York City. Never mind the small LCD screen on your local gym's exercise bikes. The IMAXShift studio, launching in a warehouse directly under the Brooklyn Bridge on April 28 to target fitness fanatics, will have tiered rows of stationary bicycles facing a wall-to-wall screen filled with beat-based visuals and pumped-up tunes in a darkened room. Probably a similar experience to Coachella if you were able to party there the last two weekends!

Instructors will lead riders through a dynamic workout with choreographed songs and video running parallel with the frenzied spinning. The imagery could take you anywhere. You could be flying above an ocean, soaring over the coast of Hawaii, you might be in outer space or the far-reaches of the galaxy. This initiative is to help those spinning get out of their heads and solely focus on the screen and not so much their aches and pains! With these Zen-inspired visuals and music, spinners will get to pedaling for performance.

IMAXShift will be priced at $34 a class, with the price coming down as you buy packages of classes. Not bad for something so intense! The visual experience in fitness training is a natural for consumers already used to viewing screens of all sizes so nothing to be nervous about. With this pilot test in Brooklyn, IMAXShift can prove a profitable business where fitness fiends sign up for $34 classes, and return again and again for more pay-per-day spinning sessions. The concept is promising and will likely grow to other areas of the U.S., including California. Once licensed, we expect it will even grow worldwide.

So if you're looking for that push, that new experience that will take your workout to the next level, IMAXShift may be exactly what you need. Devour the details and spin your own journey at your next class!