Main studio·50 minutes·12 people
Foundations
The first six weeks. You learn the machine before you learn the workout.
Led byNadia Kellner, also taught by Ruth Ferreira.
This class isn’t
for you if…
Foundations is not for you if you already train on a reformer every week — you will spend fifty minutes being told things you know, and Reformer Flow is the class you actually want. It is also not the right room if you are pregnant, postnatal, or working around a current injury. Not because it is too hard, but because those need somebody watching only you for an hour first, and in a class of twelve nobody can do that.
If that describes you, don’t book Foundations —let the router find the right one, orask us. Nobody here is on commission.
Who it is for
You have never used a reformer, or you tried one once on holiday and could not tell you what it was called. You want somebody to explain the springs rather than assume you know. Roughly two thirds of the room booked their first Foundations feeling faintly ridiculous about it.
What fifty minutes of it feels like
Slow, and more conversational than you expect. Nadia stops the class to explain things. You will spend the first ten minutes lying still learning what your ribs do when you breathe, which feels like nothing and is the reason everything else works. You will feel your inner thighs and the backs of your arms the next day, usually to your surprise.
What actually happens
You arrive ten minutes early because we ask you to. Nadia takes you to a reformer, shows you the carriage, the footbar, the springs and the straps, and tells you which of the four springs you are on and why. Then the class starts.
Fifty minutes, always the same shape: breathing, footwork, a bridge series, arms in the straps, some side-lying work, and a stretch. The shape does not change week to week, on purpose. Repetition is how the machine stops being a machine and starts being something you can think through.
Nobody is watching you. This is the single most common thing people say after their first one — that they had braced for a room full of people who knew what they were doing, and found a room full of people counting springs.
The six weeks
Foundations is designed to be taken about six times. After that, most people move into Reformer Flow, and some go sideways into Tower & Chair. There is no graduation and nobody tells you to leave. But if you have been coming to Foundations for four months and you are bored, that is the class doing its job and you being ready — say so and we will move you.
What you need
Grip socks, which we sell for £12 and lend for free if you forget. Something you can move in that will not fall over your head when you are upside down. That is all. No mat, no towel, no app.
If that is not it
Reformer Flow
The everyday class. Continuous, cued rather than demonstrated, and it assumes you know the machine.
Tower & Chair
Six people, springs instead of momentum. The quietest hard thing on the timetable.
Jump Board
Cardio, lying down. A board on the end of the reformer, loud music, forty-five minutes.