BENGALURU: After her friends started to rave about it, Smitha Yadav, a fashion designer, finally tried some high-intensity workouts in a dark room. Yadav recalls the experience as being ‘infectious and exhilarating’. “I regularly workout but had not tried this dark room concept before. But many of my friends vouched for it. So as a part of a group workout with my friends, I went for it and it was so much fun. It was highly energetic,” says Yadav, adding that it resembles working out in a nightclub.
High-intensity interval training workouts in a dark room have been available in foreign countries for a while and are catching up in India too. Sheena Hinduja, founder of The BlackBx Studio, a gym on Kasturba Road, concurs. “We’re trying to create a fun vibe. So if you walk into a nightclub, you will see a very similar setting. The good thing is that people don’t have any inhibitions. No one is judging you for anything. You’re listening to great music and you just go all out by working out. While that is one concept to it, the other is also including a fun element to a high-intensity workout, “ explains Hinduja.
One of the key elements of this setup is music and Nastassja Suri from Chakra Athletica says there is a science behind how the playlist is created. “Every instructor actually makes their own playlist and we switch it every two weeks. So you get a wide variety of music choices. It’s all related to the Beats Per Minute(BPM). It actually takes about six to eight hours to make every single playlist,” explains Suri, adding, “The music and the instructor have a lot to do with the actual energy in the room. The dim lighting definitely adds to it, but it’s not the main aspect of creating a magical energetic experience and making it work.”
One of the other advantages of working out in a dark room is it increases the focus on the body movement, says Nitin Udupa, founder of Meridian Fitness, in JP Nagar, which is currently offering a dark room workout only for spinning. “When you reduce the light, distractions also minimise substantially. This increases focus on what you are doing. You also start judging yourself less,” says Udupa.