Reach your fitness goals by working out with our amazing team of group fitness instructors! Whether you are looking for high energy, sweat-soaked workouts or gentle stretch and toning, we have you covered. With all standard classes included in your membership you can try them all. Don’t have a membership? Join a class by paying a drop-in rate ($10 adult, $6 senior / military / youth) with no commitment. No registration necessary for most classes – just drop in on a first-come, first-served basis. Class will remain open until maximum capacity is met, or this class starts. New to class? Come 5 minutes early!
Group Fitness
Group Fitness Schedule - November
Classes are subject to change at anytime. Click on “Class Schedule” for the most current schedule. Classes indicated with * require preregistration to ensure your spot. No classes on Thanksgiving Day.
Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|
5:45-6:30 AM | Pump Up! Julia | Cycling Kirk | Better, Faster, Stronger Mike | Cycling Kirk Pump Up! Julia | Better, Faster, Stronger Mike (11/29 7:00-7:45am) |
8:30-9:15 AM | Barre Melissa | Fit for Life Sue | Total Body Blitz Lindy | Barre Melissa | Total Body Blitz Lindy |
9:30-10:15 AM | Fit for Life Sue |
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10:00-10:50 AM | Deep Peace Yoga Catherine | ||||
11:10 AM-12:00 PM | Chair Yoga & Chi Catherine | ||||
12:00-12:50 PM | Qigong Catherine | ||||
5:30-6:20 PM | Hatha Yoga Melinda | Bootcamp Beth Hlas (no class 11/27) | Hatha Yoga Melinda |
Class Descriptions
Barre
Barre is a high energy, low impact workout fusing the best of Pilates, yoga, aerobics, and elements of the strengthening exercises dancers do. It focuses on small, pulsing movements with emphasis on form, alignment, and core engagement. You will create long lean muscles and improve posture, balance, and flexibility. Your body will be still while doing high repetitions and contracting specific, targeted sets of muscles in isometric exercises. No dance experience is needed and suits all fitness levels.
Better, Faster, Stronger
This class will help you achieve your fitness and conditioning goals by transforming you into an athlete in training. We’ll train with a combination of weightlifting, gymnastic movements, and metabolic conditioning to increase your strength, power, speed, endurance, balance and agility. All are welcome in this class. No matter your current fitness level, we’ll train you to become better, faster and stronger.
Bootcamp
A full-body workout packed with functional movement for those looking to increase cardiovascular endurance, total body strength, flexibility and coordination. Have fun and release stress with energizing intervals and ever-evolving circuits to keep you on-your-toes. All levels are welcome! Modifications are provided.
Chair Yoga & Chi
Stress less and increase strength, flexibility, range of motion, and energy levels – all while experiencing emotional uplift and inner peace. Chair yoga is as enjoyable, beneficial, and challenging as more traditional yoga classes. We utilize a chair during seated and standing sequences for greater support, stretch, balance, joint and spinal health, and to advance into greater levels of challenge. This class integrates Traditional Chinese energy medicine (TCM) to increase your Qi or Chi—that’s life force energy—throughout your being including in energy pathways and organs (By the way, both Chi and Qi are pronounced “chee”, as in Tai Chi and Catherine’s Qi Gong class). With regular practice we rebalance and revitalize body, mind, emotions, and spirit. Lots of insight offered which you can take with you into your daily life.
Cycling
This fun and fast-paced workout takes place on a stationary exercise bike and focuses on cardiovascular training and muscle building while listening to great music! You set your own intensity based on speed and resistance. We do intervals of sprints, hills, jumps, and everything in between! Be ready to sweat! *Register through RecDesk to reserve your bike. Registration opens Friday at noon for the following week.
Deep Peace Yoga
A meditative breath, energy, awareness, and compassion-based yoga experience. Includes elements of Para and Yin Yoga, both TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) and yogic wisdom for life off the mat, and soothing sound healing.
Fit for Life
Combine fun with fitness as you increase muscle strength, stamina, balance, and flexibility. This class includes a variety of low impact exercises using hand-held weights, resistance bands, and a ball for resistance. A chair is available for seated exercises and standing support. All fitness levels are welcome!
Hatha Yoga
This yoga class is heart centered designed to connect mind, body, and heart. Focus is on alignment, opening to grace, and to connect breath with movement in a slow flow practice to improve flexibility, strength, and balance. Appropriate for all levels.
Pump Up!
This is an upbeat and fast-paced class designed to tighten, tone, and build lean muscle. We will be using a series of light to moderate dumbbell weights with high repetition to get a complete total body workout. It is great for all levels with many modifications available. Get ready to sweat!
Qigong
Qigong means cultivating energy. Based on Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), Qigong is used for longevity, preventing and treating illnesses, greater skillfulness with difficult emotions, living life with greater effortlessness and ease, sending healing intention to others, and for spiritually harmonizing with the rest of universe in this the One Reality of which we are part. With such intent, this class uses flowing meditative movement (simpler than that of Qigong’s daughter, Tai Chi). To that we add revitalizing energy-based breath work, the opening of energy pathways and centers of the body, visualization, a relaxed non-striving attitude, brief seated meditation, and the power of intention. Class ends with sending healing compassionate intention to others and the planet, and brief Himalayan Singing Bowl vibrational sound medicine. ALL SKILL LEVELS.
Total Body Blitz
This class has a both high and low impact options that raises your heart rate, gets you sweating, but saves your joints. The class is open to all levels of exercisers-especially those who want movement without high levels impact. This class includes several circuits with each circuit including upper body, lower body, core, and cardio work. Circuits are timed, which makes this class a great option for anyone! Weights, bands, and loops will be the most frequently used equipment.
Meet Our Instructors
Melissa Carnes
Barre
Melissa is a certified Cardio Kickboxing and Barre instructor. She started taking group kickboxing classes and training privately with kickboxers over 20 years ago in Southern California. For the last two years she has been teaching Cardio-Kick/Circuit locally in Mount Vernon where she resides with her husband and two kids. Loving how great she feels after each workout, physically and mentally, Melissa’s hope for everyone is that they too can experience that feeling. Encouraging people of all ages and body types, to feel successful throughout their fitness journey while improving their quality of life is her goal.
Julia Karkow
Pump Up!
My name is Julia, I am 33 and living in Mount Vernon with my young boys Ezra (4), Rhett (2) and my husband Doug. I love to stay active by biking and running long distances. I’m currently training for my second ultramarathon and can’t wait to ride RAGBRAI this summer for the 8th time! I am looking forward to teaching some fun fitness classes at the LBC and being part of the great community!
Mike Bray
Better, Faster, Stronger
Mike Bray spent 5 years as a CrossFit athlete, training and competing in CrossFit Competitions in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest. In 2016 he became a certified trainer and coached CrossFit athletes in Marion, Iowa for 2 years. Mike loves living in the Mount Vernon community with his wife, 2 children, and 1 very loud beagle. When Mike isn’t at the LBC, work, or with his family, you can find him playing standup bass and singing with his band, “Flash In A Pan,” based in Iowa City.
Lindy Hopp
Total Body Blitz
Hi! My name is Lindy Hopp, and I am a Personal Trainer here at the LBC. My husband and I live just down the road in Solon with our three children. We have always been an active family, playing sports, hiking, kayaking or even flipping tires in the front yard. I have worked in the Fitness industry casually, but I decided that it was time to take my hobby and turn it into a career. In 2022 I earned my Personal Training Certification from the National Academy of Sports Medicine. Helping others gain strength, confidence and making the activities of daily living easier is so rewarding. Your fitness should be a celebration of what your body can do. Let me help you create a fitness routine that your body craves and keeps you coming back for more!
Catherine Quehl-Engel
Deep Peace Yoga, Chair Yoga & Chi, Qigong: Mindful Energy Medicine Movement for Vitality & Inner Peace
Catherine Quehl-Engel’s doctorate in spiritualty centered on heart focused breath, energy, and compassion-based meditation for personal and inter-personal healing wholeness. She holds several teaching certifications in mindfulness, meditation, yoga (YRT-500), and energy medicine. These include TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) informed yin yoga and qigong, yogic sleep (Amrit authentic yoga nidra), and as a Spring Forest Qigong Practice Group Leader, singing bowls sound medicine practitioner (Atma Buti), and Reiki Master Teacher. An Episcopal priest and retired chaplain of Cornell College, Catherine leads stress-reducing mind-body-spirit classes at Cornell, spirituality retreats throughout the region, and provides soul care/spiritual companioning through calmwithcatherine.com.
Melinda Snyder
Hatha Yoga
Melinda Snyder has been practicing yoga for 20 years and completed her yoga teacher training in 2020. Melinda loves spending time outdoor running, hiking, biking with family and friends. Melinda and her husband David live in Solon. She spends her days with her young grandchildren.
Beth Hlas
Bootcamp
Beth Hlas has been teaching fitness classes from spinning to HIIT to Bootcamp for over 15 years. She has a passion for people and assisting them in learning to enjoy working out, no matter their fitness level. As a recent empty nester she is enjoying lots of Pickleball with her husband, learning piano, reading and spending extra time with her dogs.