The music is blasting, the sweat is flying and the video screens are pulsating with images of bikers racing across a wide open desert.
A typical Saturday night at the gym? Not exactly. Instead of big guys in shorts, the crowd here belongs to the peewee league. And the bikes they're working out on aren't your average stationary cycles. They're "game bikes," linked to Sony PlayStations -- with every turn of the pedal, the desert racers surge farther ahead. The result: Kids just wanna work out.
Bulldog Interactive Fitness, a national chain for youth that got its start in Nova Scotia two years ago, has arrived in Toronto. Although it aims to counteract the rise of obesity in Canadian youth, the F-word that comes up most often at its recently opened Leaside location isn't "fat" -- it's "fun."
"The kids don't even know they're working out," says Lou Martinez, who co-owns the 4,000-square-foot club with wife Mary-Lou. "To them, it's just playing." Designed, in fact, to resemble a video arcade (but one that burns calories instead of quarters), this gym offers strength-building as a guilty pleasure. Hydraulic circuit-training machines share the floor with interactive video technology harnessed to dance pads. Just don't tell the kids it's good for them.
