Chicago Health and Fitness

Exhale Spa seeks to transform its clientele inside and out. The founding team of fitness professionals and aestheticians sought to create an environment where they could empower visitors with pampering spa treatments, invigorating fitness classes, and lifestyle education, helping clients attain a sense of control and holistic balance. Now with 19 locations across 11 cities, Exhale Spa and its signature services have earned mentions in numerous national publications, including People magazine, the New York Times, and O, The Oprah Magazine.

Exhale's signature Core Fusion classes incorporate dance-inspired stretches, yoga poses, and Pilates exercises into total-body workouts that build long, lean limbs and sturdy abdominal muscles over time. For an even more varied workout, the instructors introduce boot-camp techniques, cardio exercises, or multiplication tables to select sessions. Yoga classes present a similar amount of breadth and variety, drawing inspiration from a number of introspective and physically oriented styles. To help hasten physical transformations, nutrition and wellness coaches teach attendees about the impacts of diet. These sessions build an awareness of healthy eating habits through custom meal plans and by teaching clients how to identify the edible parts of a fruit basket.

Many of the center's traditional spa services seek to inspire confidence. Facials pamper and refine skin using everything from green tea and fruit extracts to microcurrent technology, and mani-pedis revitalize digits before glazing nails with a vibrant new coat of color. Bodywork treatments look beyond physical relaxation and focus on holistic concerns. Massage therapists can use Eastern or Western modalities to soothe overstressed musculature, and acupuncture treatments and reiki sessions jump-start natural healing processes by encouraging the free flow of inner energies.

Since she was a teenager, Sandy Davenport’s determination to stay physically fit has earned her a resumé full of accomplishments, which include authoring her own fitness and lifestyle manual, designing corporate-wellness programs, and winning the Ms. Alabama Bodybuilding Championship twice. After a car accident left her injured, she discovered Zumba's invigorating, low-impact fitness system to keep herself in shape while she recuperated. Her fascination with the fun, energetic workout inspired her to become a dance-fitness instructor, seeking out training from Zumba architect Beto Perez.

Today, Sandy calls upon her extensive training and experience in Latin and ballroom dance to lead exercisers of all abilities through Zumba's fun, easy-to-follow dance moves. In her studio's friendly, judgment-free environment, students feed off the contagious energy of pulsing music with Latin and international dance moves while cutting rugs to reach their fitness goals.

With today’s side deal, $55 gets you three power hour classes and two circuit-training classes at One Mind, Body and Being (a $124 value). It should be made clear upfront that the power hours being offered at OMBB are not the kind you attempted that one night in the basement of Beta House. That said, you'll never know what to expect from a OMBB power hour; the workout changes every class. But whether it’s personal training, Pilates, yoga, or an hour of cardio, be sure to bring plenty of water and a towel or two. To boost your strength and flexibility, OMBB also offers circuit training, a fast-paced group workout that involves the studio’s props and equipment, blending strength training and cardio activity while increasing your flexibility and working all your muscle groups (note: requires a working knowledge of Pilates). If you feel like your muscle groups are just coasting by on their wit and good looks, OMBB will challenge them at their core.

While teaching jazz dance in the 1960s, Judi Sheppard Missett decided to step away from tradition by offering an experimental class that allowed her students to simply dance without the judgment of mirrors or the constraints of rigid technique. In these sessions, she began infusing popular dance moves with specific fitness workouts to forge a distinctive blend of cardio exercise, strength training, and dance instruction. Little did she know that this “just for fun” class was the prototype for what would become the national fitness sensation known as Jazzercise.

Today, Jazzercise takes its aerobic techniques from a variety of sources that include jazz dance, hip-hop, resistance training, Pilates, yoga, and kickboxing. The class formats, which vary according to different toning goals, are just as diverse as the program's move set. Two-time Dancing with the Stars champion Cheryl Burke is a big fan of the improvisational routines, although her advanced skills aren't needed to get the most out of classes. Instructors cultivate a noncompetitive atmosphere where all exercisers—with the exception of those marked as cursed by jazz-hand palm readers—are welcome regardless of age, build, or fitness background.

After years of research and exercise, Dr. John Spencer Ellis felt he'd hit upon a premium fitness formula for producing athletes. Inviting Kelli Calabrese, a master trainer, to help him develop a curriculum, the two pooled their exercise knowledge—which amounted to 45 years of industry experience and 35 fitness, nutrition, and lifestyle certifications. From this wealth of training and education, they created Intense Mixed Performance Accelerated Cross Training, or IMPACT Fitness Boot Camp.

Their formula requires that each workout begin with a sports-conditioning-style dynamic warm-up, before proceeding into speed, agility, and quickness training, which allows patrons to more effectively chase cars down the highway. They then challenge students with full-body-strength conditioning, which focuses on all the muscles versus only the muscle group you want to train, and a high-intensity session of cardio training. Though the formula always remains the same, the exercises vary from session to session. One day, patrons might heave medicine balls and sprints, the next, they might jump rope and stretch TRX bands.

Golfer’s Paradise’s friendly golfing confines foster year-round golfing within the indoor hitting stalls of their AboutGolf simulators. Using real clubs, players pulverize orbs into an immense screen that utilizes 3-D graphics to vividly emulate the immaculate greenery, calculated topography, and yellow-brick cart paths of some of the world’s most famous courses. Golfers can trace powerful drives into the windswept, simulated stratosphere of St. Andrews Old Course or evade the treacherous water hazards at Michigan’s Robert Trent Jones–designed course, The Heather. Along with technology that ensures each shot travels in a realistic manner, the simulators boast advanced swing-tracking sensors that collect data and even offer advice to correct unsound swings.

A staff of PGA-certified instructors oversees Golfer's Paradise's two executive-style lounges, offering expert advice to help transform swing imbalances into trustworthy motions. Pupils benefit from the instructors' hard-won wisdom combined with the computer-generated feedback of the simulators, which reveals detailed results of the position of one's clubface at impact and the effects of sweaty-palm syndrome.