The Unique Release of an Emotionally Cathartic Workout

Martha Gold is many things—a respected magazine editor, a two-time New York marathon finisher, a fearless world traveller who’s explored many an uninhabited island—but a crybaby is not one of them. Yet there she was on New Year’s Day, bawling her eyes out on an indoor cycling bike.

“It was a first for me, I assure you,” says the Manhattanite, a tough-as-nails media type who doesn’t mince words and who usually heeds seventies songstress Melissa Manchester’s advice: “Don’t cry out loud/just keep it inside.” But not on this particular day.

“It was January 1, and I wanted to stay in and be depressed over a failed relationship, but I dragged myself out of bed for a SoulCycle class,” Gold recalls. Once there, “I was just going through the motions. Then I heard the first notes of the Eagles’ ‘Take It to the Limit.’ There’s something so wistful about the lyrics; thematically, it’s about wanting more for yourself. When Sue [Molnar, SoulCycle master instructor] told the class that it was the last song but just the beginning of the journey, and that she hoped we would all find our way in 2015, hot tears started streaming down my face. I couldn’t control it.”

While she was thankful for the cover of darkness in the dimly-lit Upper West Side studio—not to mention the glistening sweat, which masked the liquid pouring out of her eyes—Gold was also surprisingly grateful for the public breakdown. “It felt so good to cry in that moment and feel like I wasn’t alone,” she says.

All across the country, at places like SoulCycle, PureBarre, and Barry’s Bootcamp, more and more of us are seeking cathartic group workouts where we can ease our minds while engaging our muscles. With most of our waking hours given over to stressful jobs and/or the incessant demands of parenthood—both of which require us to almost always be “on” exercise studios are among the few places we can go to decompress and disconnect from the world and our multiple gadgets, if only for an hour. Recognizing this, many group-fitness instructors are responding with regimens that encourage a stronger mind-body connection, allowing us to sweat out the small stuff like road rage and clashes with co-workers, or work through major life setbacks such as divorce as job elimination.

“Many of these classes encourage women to ‘let it go’—release their preconceptions about what they can do [physically], their hangups about their bodies, even their inner emotions,” says Susan C. Vaughan, M.D., a leading New York City psychiatrist and author of Half Empty, Half Full: Understanding the Psychological Roots of Optimism. “That let-‘em-rip attitude has everyone crying, as they release lots of pent-up psychological things they can’t get out anywhere else, except maybe at the shrink.” Vaughan adds that these classes “feel so good because it’s a chance to stretch your boundaries while exhausting yourself entirely—and it’s hard to be anxious when you’re exhausted!”