Last month, on a not-too-hot Wednesday morning, I found myself hanging from a pull-up bar in Riverfront Park, doing something called a “scap pull,” while Front Street’s southbound traffic whizzed by. “Awesome,” said Ivan Black, a fitness instructor who was standing beside me, adding (generously, I thought) “good stuff.” Minutes before, I had done a series of forward, sideward and backward lunges, teetering on my feet like a cardboard skeleton. Now Black was talking me through some verbs that, in theory, corresponded to what I was doing with my shoulders. I drove, I squeezed, I pinched, I pulled. Then he had me drop from the bar and run in place. “So,” he said when I was finished, “that was our warm up.”
This month, Black will open a fitness studio, Next Step Performance, at the corner of 3rd and Herr streets in Midtown. The studio will focus on calisthenics and training that relies on the exerciser’s own body weight. It will look like a “typical CrossFit studio,” he says, referring to the high-intensity fitness regime, with lots of open space and some minimal equipment, like medicine balls and a pull-up bar.
Black, a former college baseball player, moved to Harrisburg with his wife three months ago from Washington, D.C. There, he taught classes at Reformation Fitness, an area gym, and launched a personal fitness website. When he arrived here, he had already formed plans for the studio, but he also wanted to get involved in something while he ironed out the details. “To sort of ground myself and find some normalcy, I had to start playing baseball,” he said. He joined the East Hanover Braves in the amateur Pennsylvania Midstate Baseball League, where, as of this writing, he was batting .375 in 16 at-bats. “The guy that runs the team is awesome,” Black said. “His name is Harry Hitz. Perfect name for baseball, you know?”
Next Step Performance will take up residence in a block that has struggled to find a stable mix of businesses. Across the street is Pastorante, a sleek fresh-pasta restaurant, but also a recently vacated corner property. The studio will occupy the site of the former T-Mart convenience store, which was evicted by the landlord late last year after repeatedly running afoul of neighbors and city officials. “It was an absolute wreck, but there was something charming about it,” Black said of the space. “I had a bat hanging from the ceiling. I took a picture of that.” When he learned that vocal neighborhood opposition had helped lead to his predecessor’s eviction, he found it encouraging. “That made me feel good, because the sort of business I have, I need the community involved,” he said. “I knew if I did the right thing, I’d be OK.”
My post-warm-up workout with Black in Riverfront Park proceeded in two stages. The first was a seven-minute rotation through a sequence of reverse lunges (hands behind my head, in “prisoner position”), crawling in a pushup stance down a rope ladder he’d laid out on the pavement, and a set of six chin-ups on the bar. I am to upper body strength as Escalades are to fuel efficiency, and when the chin-ups weren’t working out, Black switched me back to scap—short for “scapular”—pulls. While I toiled, he would dole out snippets of encouragement interspersed with philosophical reflections. “There’s that unconscious, like, boost in your, not to say your ego, but just how you feel, how you walk around, how you approach everything in your day-to-day, just because you’ve got—there you go—a little bit of added mental and physical strength,” he said. After the seven minutes, he joined me for a leg stretch. “Whoooo!” he cried. “Hamstring City. Hamstring City.”
After that, Black led me to another station for something he called “tabata intervals,” which, when Googled, returns as the top hit a page titled “The 4-Minute Fat-Burning Miracle.” The routine involved timed pushups on an incline, followed by jumping jacks with a rubber resistance band wrapped around my ankles. “Ready to bring it home? Let’s get her done,” Black said, as I went into my final 20 seconds of jumping. “So much work behind you, so little in front of you.”
Whether he was reacting to the pace of my breathing or the fact that the park drinking fountain was malfunctioning, I don’t know, but after the intervals, Black decided it was time to “Zen it out a little bit.” We sat on a bench facing the river and did some yoga stretches. “I went on a cruise with my wife about a year and a half ago, and the yoga instructor was awesome,” he said. “Young kid, and just, like, more excited about yoga than anybody I’d seen. And I’m in fitness. And then bring it down. He taught the same class every day. Said the same thing—everything.
“I can definitely remember saying to my wife a couple times, ‘You know, this is the same class every week, it’s hard to get excited about this. It’s just sort of something we’re doing.’ Right now, we’re just gonna keep it going, from there just bring it down right in between the legs, big stretch through the lower back. And so, at the end of the cruise, the last class we were in, I go into that class with that same sentiment in my mind. And, like, the first portion of the class I’m doing profoundly better at everything. So I’m like, all right. There is something to doing the same routine. You learn from that.”
The morning of our workout, Black was a few weeks from putting the final touches on his studio. He still had to install the flooring and the pull-up bar. He had already started to lock down some clients, though, including a high-school baseball player from Susquehanna Township. He was excited about the prospect of working with young athletes “with potential and a brand-new, like, love for the game,” at “that point where taking it seriously makes sense, you know?”
“I’m all about progression,” he said. “That’s why I train. That’s like the poetic side that I love. You come out of it a different person. Even if you give just a decent effort. And you learn so much about yourself—not just the physical, beyond the physical. You learn about what you can stand mentally. How much pain you can take. All of that resonates with the person you are.”
Next Step Performance will open soon at 1100 N. 3rd St., Harrisburg. For more information, visit https://www.nsp.fitness or call 717-382-6398.
