#26: Creative Core Williamsburg
In an effort to ward off seasonal depression, and be faithful to my commitment to you all, dear reader, I decided to try a new workout class with an absurd title: “Spring and Suspend: Barre Amp’d Up!” at Creative Core in Williamsburg. Billed as “Possibly the most challenging barre class you have ever taken!” the class utilizes “..a custom SpringBoard, Suspension trainer (TRX), and many props” and promises “Hands on and lots of adjustments”. The ClassPass description ends with an all-caps “GRIP SOCKS ARE MANDATORY,” insisting that you have to buy them for $16 (via Venmo, Zelle, or cash) should you dare show up unprepared.
I don’t normally read Google reviews for a workout class, but when I was mapping out my route to the class I happened to check in on what the people are saying about Creative Core. The 4.4-star rating consists primarily of women saying that it’s their favorite workout class of all time and the instructors are incredible, with a few notable 1-star reviews where people have the same complaint: they showed up on time (or a minute or two late) only to realize that class starts ON TIME and has a strict lockout policy, no exceptions. Or they didn’t get the memo on the grip socks—or they were both late and not wearing the grip socks. I pity these fools.
The funny thing about these one-star reviews was that the owner took the time to not only address the reviewers directly (and antagonistically), starting responses with sentences like “This is absolutely not what happened…”, but she would then continue to libel these poor women, in the third person, in ensuing (very long) paragraphs. Shoutout someone named Allison, who was allegedly “being dishonest and not taking responsibility for her lack of preparedness, her attitude, and how she was affecting other user’s experiences.”
I was both terrified and titillated by the prospect of meeting this epic barre/pilates instructor slash Miranda Priestly-esque villain character, and as such endeavored to show up 15 minutes early to her class, donning Amazon’s cheapest grip socks. Fighting through the frigid New York winter temps on my short walk to North 10th Street from the Bedford L, the air had a strong acrid smell to it, almost as if someone had burned down a pilates studio in retaliation for a $28 late fee. But when I got to the old brick office building on the corner of N 10th and Driggs, I was relieved to see it was still intact.
After softly knocking on and opening the door, I was greeted by a Chihuahua mix glaring at me from his nest on top of one of four reformer machines in the small room. A pink neon sign on the wall read “Be a Badass With a Good Ass.”
“Hello?” I called, to no answer.
After standing frozen for a couple of minutes, afraid to approach the tiny dog glaring at me (I love small dogs but it felt like a bad idea), the woman/myth/legend finally walked in, said hello, and darted back into a little makeshift kitchen to begin eating cottage cheese straight from the container. For anyone who’s seen Gilmore Girls, she looked exactly like the actress who plays Christopher’s wife, Sherry, but with abs and a touch of lip filler.
We chatted about our mutual love of the high protein dairy product, and our preferred consumption methods (me savory on toast with balsamic and olive oil, her sweet with Trader Joe’s sugar-free raspberry preserves), and then she realized with surprise that I was new to the class, saying that she felt like she knew me for a lifetime. By this point, I had won over her dog, Tontito, who was alternating licking my face and turning around for butt scratches.
Next, she flitted over to one of the mirrors and began taking pictures of herself flexing, saying she was starting a new lifting program and needed to get progress pics. The dog began barking incessantly at her, to which she said “Tontito! Don’t bark at me while I’m taking my selfies!”
A minute before class was to start, I was still the only one there, and she wondered aloud where everyone was. I sensed a Google reviews screed brewing, but before we knew it, the other three class members rushed in one by one, and we were off to the races.
We were each to stand in front of one of the four wall-mounted springboards, as pictured in the dog photo above. At first, she instructed us to unhook some hooks from some of the springs, hang them on another hook, and attach a bar to the springs. Already the one other newbie and I were floundering. I finally figured out what she was trying to tell us by looking at the more experienced attendee next to me, but the poor other newcomer still couldn’t figure it out, and the instructor was all but making fun of her for being slow.
The class involved a lot of inventive plie variations, and always elicited the exact right amount of muscular burn before moving on to the next sequence. The class was certainly difficult, but never so hard that it wasn’t doable, and between all the different contraptions—pilates balls, and springs, and TRX, oh my!—it absolutely flew by, unlike the barre class I tried months ago that felt like it was designed to cater to a perverse fantasy of ballet as punishment, and seemed like it went on forever. And the instructor wasn’t shy about calling out form issues, or marching over and making rather assertive hands-on adjustments.
After class I was buzzing; even though I barely broke a sweat, each move was so well-constructed as to light up the muscles it was targeting that I knew I was going to be sore the next day. And I loved how intimate the small class setting was, and how it allowed for the rather aggressive physical and verbal adjustments (“Point your toe” “No, point your toe” “No, I said POINT your toe” “Do you really think you’re pointing your toe right now?”).
I milled about to talk to the instructor after class, and told her that I did a lot of [solidcore] and SLT, but that her class was so much better. She asked if she could get personal, and then said she could tell I did so much [solidcore] because of how my shoulders tended to slope forward—consider me roasted! Those hard faux-pilates studios with large class sizes foster competitive atmospheres, she said, and are simply too hard without enough individual instruction, leaving people who take the classes to adopt bad form to muscle their way through them. This isn’t dangerous per se but strengthens the wrong muscles and leads to worse posture. Just think, she said, I wouldn’t want to have a body like most of the [solidcore] instructors. I nodded in agreement, and then felt guilty all day for condoning body shaming.
The verdict? I will definitely be back for more hard pilates-and-barre-inspired workouts, and am regrettably so here for the owner’s b*tchiness (complimentary).