Getting fit with Oxygen Freejumping – Review

I was invited to try out the Oxygen Freejumping trampoline park in Southampton on Friday night. I was able to bring a guest so I decided to bring my sister as I hadn’t caught up with her in a bit and I knew it might be something she’d enjoy.

My sister, Rachel, is a little bit mental and crazy. She’s completely the opposite to me – she has stacks of confidence and can make conversation with anyone. She’s amazing. Entirely different to me, she has two beautiful daughters and hates anything to do with exercise. Despite this, she’s actually really slim despite her addiction to full fat Coke and penchant for unhealthy food (when we were growing up she literally lived on cereal and pizza and never gained weight). Slim but not necessarily healthy.

The Friday night at the trampoline centre had a fitness class so this sounded perfect for me to try out as I have already been to the general trampolining before (read about that HERE). I decided not to tell Rach that we were going to a fitness class and just that we were going trampolining for fear she might back out. I told her it would be best to wear something like leggings and a non-fancy top so she’d fit in to the class

Oxygen Freejumping has 150 connected trampolines on the floors AND walls. It has an area to play trampoline dodge ball, it has long ‘roads’ of trampolines so you can make several jumps in a row, it has a giant airbag that you can leap into safely and, my favourite part, the obstacle course (this includes monkey bars, balancing rods and ropes).

There’s loads of stuff you can do at Oxygen Freejumping. You can host parties, take little kids or actually train properly in trampolining. Or you can just go for an hour with your mates and bounce around. I’ve done this twice and it is really good fun. You don’t have to be a proficient trampoliner I assure you! Just bouncing around randomly is a good laugh. And jumping into the foamy pit is the best.

But we were doing the fitness class. No larking about for us, nope *evil laugh*.

Airborne Fitness is a high intensity but low impact exercise class. We started off with some stretching which I was a little narked about as stretching cold muscles isn’t great. But seen as how this seems to be fairly mainstream I won’t moan about it too much. We then began some normal bouncing, then jumping jacks, high knees and things like that to get our heart rate going for about 5-10 mins. We then did three different exercises, each for a minute, before having a two minute break and then repeating those exercises for a minute but working backwards through them.

The exercises including things like throwing a ball between two people while bouncing, sit-ups, press-ups, jumping jacks, bounding from side to side. It was a good mix of focused body weight exercises and then movements to get the heart going. Apparently jumping on a trampoline burns three times more than running (in an hour you can burn up to 1,000 calories) [Yahoo].

The fitness class lasts an hour but there are regular two minute breaks so it’s not hugely intense. I think it was really good that my sister came because it gave me a good insight in to how someone who doesn’t exercise at all would find the class compared to someone like me who does exercise quite a lot.

Without sounding my own trumpet here…I did find it very easy. Yes it got my heart rate going and doing press-ups and sit-ups is always a good workout but generally I wasn’t out of breath and didn’t need the two minute breaks. To be honest, I enjoyed the breaks as it meant I could natter on with my sister. But then I don’t think I’m the target audience for this class (it also required a bit of coordination which is never my strongest skill).

My sister however found it very tough. She was sweating, gasping and pretty much dying the entire time. I remember her saying at one point, “my shins are sweating. Is that even possible??”. She really enjoyed it though, saying it was nice to know you were only doing one exercise for one minute before you got to change. She had good fun. It doesn’t feel like a regular exercise class, like spin as there’s an element of fun to it and you can have a laugh. The instructor was really encouraging and gave good demonstrations of the exercises and reasons why we were doing them and what muscles needed to be focused on.

So big thumbs up from me for Oxygen Freejumping. Good way to burn some energy and have some fun with friends.

Have you ever done trampolining?

What kind of exercise classes do you prefer?

Do you have any brothers and sisters? How similar are you?

**Full Disclaimer: I was given a free session at Oxygen Freejumping with a guest in return for a review. All opinions are mine and my sister’s honest ones.**

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