A new gym class is being offered in Riverside Brookfield in the 2017-2018 school year. The class is called Group Fitness and will be run by Marisa Dobbertin, a Physical Education teacher at RB, in the spin cycle room.

Group fitness is all about high energy workouts and having fun.

“I want the students to feel like they have a gym membership, like they’re going to a fitness club… Mostly high energy, high impact type of classes.” said Marisa Dobbertin.

This class will consist of a variety of group activities. The class is very similar to the group workout days in Mind and Body, but in Group Fitness those days in Mind and Body are laid out to be taught in a course of a semester.

“It’s going include Zumba and dance fitness… Orangetheory, current trends in fitness, crossfit workouts, and boot camp workouts,” said Dobbertin.

Group Fitness is not advanced Mind and Body, it is a completely new class that does not have yoga or pilates.

“It’s not going to be the yoga and pilates because that’s a shift towards Mind and Body,” said Dobbertin. “[Group fitness is] more geared towards high energy, loud music, high interval workouts, so a huge wide variety.”

Dobbertin has been trying to get this class in the school schedule for about four years. She went through a lot of steps to finalize her idea and for the school board to accept her proposal and make the class actually run.

“I tried to propose this four years ago and it just never went all the way down the chain to being approved by the board,” said Dobbertin. “I retried again and made some changes to it but since then in my mind and body classes I was playing around with [group fitness day] and dance fitness was a huge interest… so I think the interest is there for that type of class.”

The class will be held in the spin cycle room next to the Wellness Center. All of the bikes will be pushed to the side so they can still be used if needed. Some mirrors will also be added to the room so the students can look at themselves and fix their form if needed.