Madisonville, KY Health and Fitness

Though it functions as an all-purpose gym, Tri-State Athletic Club is actually a community epicenter. When guests aren't running across its sports courts, they might be toasting each other in its halls at a wine tasting or holiday event. Family-friendly programming welcomes kids and adults alike to pool activities and tennis lessons, and personal trainers guide members, whose names they've committed to memory, through custom workouts. Meanwhile, instructors lead group classes such as Pilates, spin, and heated yoga in well-equipped studios. This supportive atmosphere imbues the club with positive vibes, which prompt strangers on neighboring treadmills to amicably concede the right of way.

At regular intervals each day, Swonder Ice Arena’s trusty Zamboni rolls out to keep the NHL-size ice rink smooth between lessons and public-skating sessions. Once the glossy surface is ready, professional instructors begin to lead students through classes in hockey fundamentals, ice skating, and figure skating. Hockey lessons are offered in four levels, beginning with the essentials of hockey skating and stick handling. Ice-skating lessons include nine separate curriculum sets, such as choreography and synchronized skating.

In addition to winter-water fun, Swonder Ice Arena is home to a fitness center with cycles, free weights, exercise machines, and personal trainers.

As they enter the training circle at Curves, female guests come face-to-face with the smiles of other women. And just as points on a circle share a common distance from the circle's center, workout participants share the experiences of those nearby by trading stations throughout the 30-minute training session. One minute is spent on a piece of strength-training equipment built for feminine frames and designed to work two opposing muscle groups with a single movement. Exercisers then move on to a recovery station, where they run, jog, or dance to maintain heart rates and keep platforms in place during momentary losses of gravity.

Ranked second on the Kentucky edition of Golf Digest's Best in State list, the golf course at The Falls Resort & Golf Club makes use of the 2,500-acre resort's size with a verdant layout of varied terrain and historic flavor. Architect Jody Kinney encapsulates the bermuda fairways and bentgrass greens with rough of pure Kentucky bluegrass, yielding a layout that incorporates elements of wooded parkland, open links-style design, and galleries of chirpy avian. The course ranges from 4,200 yards from the front tees up to 6,900 from the back, and players of all skills must negotiate with the land's lakes and rivers. Between shots, idle players can wonder at the simple beauty of flowers populating the landscaped areas between holes or prepare their putters for a jousting duel in case of a tie.

Course at a Glance:

• 18-hole course
• 6,900 yards from back tees
• Five sets of tees per hole
• Designed by Jody Kinney

Each of Yoga 101's certified instructors discovered hot yoga for a host of different reasons—to ease the pain of arthritis, to evolve spiritually during a personal crisis, and to get back in shape after a pregnancy, to name a few. With all the attentive sympathies that their backgrounds afford them, the team helps students of all ages and abilities grow in their personal yoga practice. In heated yoga rooms, they guide students toward proper posture alignment as the heated air loosens up muscles for deeper stretches and spurs on a cleansing sweat that helps bodies expel the toxins and wheat pennies that collect in the body. The sessions, which range from introductory classes for beginners or guests with physical limitations to those for advanced practitioners, blend poses from Bikram yoga and yogi Jimmy Barkan—a master yoga teacher and one of America's yoga pioneers—as they link breath with movement during more than 25 weekly classes.