Small studio·45 minutes·6 people
Tower & Chair
Six people, springs instead of momentum. The quietest hard thing on the timetable.
Led byRuth Ferreira, also taught by Priya Raghunathan.
This class isn’t
for you if…
Tower & Chair is not for you if it is your first month, because the tower loads differently to a reformer and there is nothing under you if you let go. It is also not for you if you want to sweat — this is the class where you will be still for thirty seconds at a time and it is genuinely harder than it looks. And with six spaces it books up early, so it is the wrong class to rely on if you need to book the same morning.
If that describes you, don’t book Tower & Chair —let the router find the right one, orask us. Nobody here is on commission.
Who it is for
You want something more precise than the flow classes and you do not mind that it is slower. You like being corrected. You have some reformer behind you — six weeks is plenty — and you are curious about the other machines, which is most people once they notice the small studio through the glass.
What fifty minutes of it feels like
Quiet, deliberate, and surprisingly hard. You will hold positions rather than move through them. Almost nobody gets out of breath and almost everybody discovers a muscle they had no working relationship with. The next-day soreness from Tower & Chair is the most specific in the building — people can usually name exactly which exercise did it.
What actually happens
Six people, three towers and two wunda chairs, forty-five minutes. You will work on both. The tower is a wall unit with springs at two heights and a push-through bar; the chair is a small wooden box with a pedal and looks entirely harmless until you try to stand on it.
Ruth teaches most of these. Expect to be stopped and adjusted, and expect the correction to be about something small — the angle of a wrist, whether your ribs have quietly come up off the mat. This is the class where the pilates repertoire is most visible, because there is no carriage sliding around to hide behind.
Why the small studio
Twelve people cannot do spring work well. The load on a tower depends entirely on where your body is relative to the springs, and getting that right needs an instructor who can see all six of you at once. So we run it at six, charge the same as everything else, and accept that it is the least profitable class on the timetable. It is also the one instructors ask to teach.
Coming from reformer
The first thing that catches people out is that the springs pull up rather than along. Your first Tower & Chair will feel like starting again for about ten minutes and then it will click.
If that is not it
Foundations
The first six weeks. You learn the machine before you learn the workout.
Reformer Flow
The everyday class. Continuous, cued rather than demonstrated, and it assumes you know the machine.
Jump Board
Cardio, lying down. A board on the end of the reformer, loud music, forty-five minutes.