About Urbankick®

What Is Urbankick®

UrbanKick® is an innovative and athletic format that is taking group X schedules by storm! By expertly blending cardio kickboxing, (punch and kick combinations), with sports conditioning athletic drills, UrbanKick delivers a serious knock-out workout! Every class incorporates steady-state cardiovascular training, metabolic boosting H.I.I.T. training, and body-weight strength training for a unique and total body workout. Our format challenges your body in all planes of motion so you constantly develop strength, agility, flexibility and balance and torch calories. Get ready to kick a$$!

Every UrbanKick® class expertly balances the need for familiar moves and format (to ensure the class is welcome to all levels of ability), along with the need to keep the combinations fresh, innovative, exciting, and most importantly — fun.

Urbankick® Is Not Pre-choreographed = Unique Swagger

UrbanKick® differs from every other format because we are NOT pre-choreographed. We have 2 puzzle pieces: (1) Punch and Kick Combinations & (2) Body Weight Athletic Drills. YOU put them together however you want to to create the most success for your class demographic. If you want to build 32 counts of combinations then bust out an athletic drill of squats or burpees, then you can do that! We provide content but you get to put the puzzle pieces together and design your class.

Every punch and kick combinations, (sequences), has a unique name such as The Duck, Terminator, Jackie Chan or Rock the Boat. You will not hear this language in any other class format and is uniquely Urbankick. Most punch and kick sequences have 2-3 variations each, which results in countless combinations so your classes are always fresh, exciting, and challenging, but FAMILIAR.

When you combine these sequences, (which allows steady-state, cardiovascular benefits), with athletic drills, you create an efficient workout that is packed with physiological and psychological adaptations and benefits. Our class never stops! You flow from a combination to an athletic drill without stopping by using UrbanKick glue: short transitional moves that allow you to keep the class moving, while you provide the road map cue to what is coming next.

The class is set to music, but the drills and combinations are not paired with any particular song, so there are never any musical breaks to trigger a stop in your workout. As the instructor, you will cue your class through seamless transitions of each puzzle piece ensuring your class remains active and in their steady-state training.

Think of each class like a puzzle with puzzle pieces of punch and kick combinations ranging from 4 – 16 counts in length and athletic drills. You can put the pieces of the puzzle into different orders and arrangements to create a different training experience from class to class. This blend of combining unique sequences along with athletic drills excites those that like to do punch and kick combinations as well as those participants that just want to have fun, sweat, and get a heart-pounding cardio workout.

The UrbanKick® Class…

Urbankick® Philosophy

Start where you are.
Use what you have.
Do what you can.”

~ Arthur Ashe

Every UrbanKick® experience is rooted in the foundation of inclusion and follows the principles below:

• Cardio kickboxing is for everyone
• Exercise is fun and exciting
• Building class community makes everyone feel welcome
• Start where you are regardless of age, gender, size or perceived ability
• Do what you can—everyone can do this class
• Movement is a way to celebrate your health and life

We want everyone to feel welcome in class and to have the most fun while safely working out. If people have fun in class and walk away feeling healthy and strong, they will likely return and a healthy habit will form. We want people to feel better about themselves after every class.

Urbankick® Beginnings

UrbanKick® was born when creator, Shane Barnard, started to blend her fitness and dance background with her cardio kickboxing fitness classes. She felt limited by the lack of versatility in cardio kickboxing formats so she began to create her own sequences and combinations ranging from 4 to 16 counts and would break them down and teach. She gave each move a funky name inspired by life events such as “ya mama” because she created it on Mother’s Day, or “humpty dump” because one of her students was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a fried egg on the front.

Shane’s cardio kickboxing classes LOVED this energetic and uniquely formatted class, and she soon realized she was onto something. Her classes at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) quickly became some of the most popular at the Recreational Sports Facility, packing over 100 students per class. The classes were so large the Group X program had to move her into a convention-size gym (equaling two basketball courts) and provided a stage.

The group exercise director approached Shane and asked her to share her cardio kickboxing style and train other people to teach her unique format. Shane created a cardio kickboxing instructor-training program for UCB and went on to create the UrbanKick® brand of cardio kickboxing.