OrangeTheory or tips on how to get the most out of your work out

When OrangeTheory came out, it was wild. I had colleagues raving about the experience and telling me how amazing it was so having a bit of fitness budget from my company, I decided to sign up for classes right away.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with OrangeTheory, it’s based on this science of EPOC — Excess Post-Oxygen Consumption — if you fatigue yourself during exercise, you get an ‘afterburn’ effect that helps burn more calories up to 24 hours after the work out. At OrangeTheory, the exercises are generally based around high-intensity interval training and everyone has a heart monitor that tracks whether a person is in the blue zone (rest), green zone (light activity), orange zone (push zone) or red zone (all out). As you exercise, you watch your heart rate and try to get into the orange and red zone for at least 12 minutes. If you can do this, you will then have EPOC and therefore burn extra calories up to 24 hours after the activity.

The studios that I have been to, and I’ve been to a few in my city, are quite small but is packed with treadmills, a floor space and rowers — at maximum capacity, you could have 36 people (12 on the treadmill, 12 on the floor, 12 on the rowers) and then rotate every 3rd of an hour but in most cases, there are usually enough for two rotations (10–20 people).