Carl Hall Is the King of Spin

NEW YORK — On a recent Sunday, the fitness instructor Carl Hall was at the Crunch gym in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn leading his regular 10 a.m. spin class. The dark, stuffy room held 53 stationary bikes, every one of which was occupied by a sweating cyclist in workout clothes.

“Move it up, move it back. Move it up, move it back,” Hall ordered calmly but firmly through a headset over a dance remix of “Rolling in the Deep,” by Adele. “Lower, lower, lower, lower.”

He was presiding from a tiny stage with a bike on it at the front of the studio, sometimes pedaling along, sometimes jumping off to patrol the digital monitors affixed to participants’ handlebars. As his glow-in-the-dark baseball cap loomed up suddenly behind them, they would pedal with renewed fervor. Despite, or perhaps because of, their simplicity, Hall’s mottos — “Today!”; “Life, not life support!” — have been known to elicit grateful tears.

“That’s fat knocking,” he may say, banging on a wall. “Are you going to let fat knock on your door?”

In the mind-bogglingly popular field of indoor group cycling, the supposed cool quotient currently belongs to boutique studios like SoulCycle and Peloton, which sell a fashionable athletic lifestyle complete with $35 branded water bottles.

Founded in 1989 with a creative approach to exercise (one of the original classes was Abs, Thighs and Gossip, taught by a drag queen), Crunch’s spin program, the Ride, is less heralded.

But Hall, 53, is its high priest — one regular called the 10 a.m. slot “the church of Carl” — and his devoted followers are nothing less than fanatical.

Besides spin, Hall teaches calisthenics and weight classes at Crunch branches in Park Slope, on the Bowery in Manhattan and in Tribeca. Spots in the Sunday Fort Greene doubleheader of the Ride and a class called Chisel can go as fast as Beyoncé tickets.

Yvonne Gerald, a vice president of marketing for Meredith Consumer Revenue Group, sets an iPhone alarm for 11:45 a.m., then two more at 11:57 and 11:59, to secure her Sunday 10 a.m. bike at noon on Saturday, when enrollment opens.

It may sound crazy. But so is the hectic pace of city life. “Part of what makes you sane is going to Carl’s class,” said Ariel Ray, another devotee. “He’s part of my routine.”

So popular is he that for years, if Hall took a day off or otherwise missed a class, his flock would revolt.

“The members would show up and just be steamed,” said Marc Santa Maria, the national director of group fitness for Crunch. “For bringing in a sub, the front desk got chewed out.” Some members took one look at the fill-in, packed up in disgust and left. “The poor sub, they’re instantly set up for failure,” Santa Maria said. “The members expect Carl.”

“Carl, his class was very special,” said Astrid Myers Rosset, the widow of the Grove publisher Barney Rosset, who began exercising at the Bowery Crunch 10 years ago when she was in her 70s (she is now 86). “There are some good instructors, but they’re not watching everyone and making corrections. He’s concerned with form. He’s watching. He’s always present.”

Another regular of Hall’s spin classes, K. Holden Rumph, a project manager at a design firm, likes to be up front so “he can see me,” and hold her accountable. “I want to make sure I’m making him proud,” she said.

Though Rumph, like many of her classmates, knows little about Hall’s life outside the gym, she feels their relationship is intimate. “It’s like a therapy session,” she said. “He’s really been a nonpaid therapist.”

Hall is hardly unaware of his following and the dependence people have on him. Indeed, he partly engineered it.

“I say, ‘I’m a puppet master.’ I like to make people respond,” he said with a laugh, sitting in a restaurant near his apartment in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood, where he has lived for 30 years. The first gym that hired him as a trainer, back in 1993, a branch of New York Sports Clubs, was up the street; after a stint at the higher-priced Equinox, Hall is now exclusive to Crunch.

Before he worked in fitness, Hall, who grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, studied fashion illustration at the Fashion Institute of Technology, discovered nightclubs like the Mudd Club and Area, and did some modeling for the designer Patricia Field.

But his main job was as a graphic artist for the New York City Department of Sanitation. At 22, riding a crowded subway each day with other 9-to-5 office workers, he saw his life flash before his eyes.

“Oh my God, this is like an assembly line,” Hall said. “I was like, ‘I can’t do this for the rest of my life. It’s not creative enough for me.'”

He had joined a gym, and he liked learning about anatomy and fitness. Soon, he was giving members advice. The staff noticed and hired him as a personal trainer. But it was only when he traded one student for 30, initially teaching high-impact aerobics classes, that he found his calling.

“When you teach, you become like a rock star,” Hall said. “I got to do my own music, my own routines. I developed a following very fast. It was a high. You can’t wait to teach the next class.”

For the next 15 years, Hall stepped, spun and chiseled seven days a week. The more he taught, the more “I was being the star that I wanted to be,” he said. But Hall discovered what fitness gurus including Jane Fonda and Gunnar Peterson have learned: Spiking endorphins and changing bodies can have a profound effect on people’s sense of self-worth.

Some gym members told him they did not feel noticed at work or home, but that he made them feel seen. They relied on his consistency: The church of Carl was always open.

Hall worked during holidays, including Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the gym would open for him. His class members would leave to be with their families afterward, while “I would just go home,” he said.

“These people are looking to me for joy, happiness and to get them up,” Hall said. “I was, like, ‘OK, I need to really be there.’ Also, I had it in my head that if I’m not there, they’re not going to need me.” A few years ago, Hall began dating a man in Australia, a long-distance relationship that took him out of the country and away from the gym, sometimes for up to a month. It was a welcome change for him, but an adjustment for his fans.

“I won’t go if he’s not there,” said Chris Lee, a city administrator. “I won’t enjoy it. It’s not the same. I tell him, ‘Please, don’t retire. Don’t let anything ever happen to you.'”

In 2016, Hall’s boyfriend, a fellow fitness instructor named Sonny Thai, relocated to New York, and the couple were married. These days, Hall is teaching 20 to 25 classes a week; caring for the couple’s two basenji puppies, Brooklyn and Sydney; and learning how to DJ.

The church of Carl is now closed on Saturdays. “I used to never have a day off. I wouldn’t allow myself to take a day off,” Hall said. “I’m so happy that I did.”

He added, however, in an afterthought that may send panic through the congregation, “I’m trying to figure out how I can get another day off.”