Squaring off at the gym to get fit
The Grid involves high-intensity moves one after the other, which means that you can’t zone out
THE GRID, a high-intensity interval training programme which can burn 500 calories in half an hour, is taking Virgin Active gyms by storm, says the company.
Programme designer Ceri Hannan says: “The Grid involves high-intensity moves one after the other, which means that you can’t zone out on the treadmill. It’s the moves and the pace that count.”
He says The Grid is part of the global trend of functional training or “life movements”. “Functional training,” he says, “uses six primary movement patterns which incorporate all the muscles you need to function in your day-to-day activities – playing sport, running for the train or just getting shopping bags out of your car”. The movements are: push, pull, squat, bend, twist and lunge.
There are four classes: Grid Active, Grid Lean, Grid Fit and Grid Strong.
This means you can change your training programme at regular intervals to keep your body working harder, while still giving it adequate rest. You could, in fact, do a different Grid class each day of the week, with one or two days’ rest a week.
Hannan says it’s also a simple set-up: the floor is marked out in a square grid. You start in one square and move along the grid as the series of exercises unfold.
Catherine Viljoen, a Virgin Active biokineticist, says: “The Grid focuses not only on moving front to back (basic squat, basic lunge, bicep curls and crunches, for example), but, through functional training, aims to train all muscles to work together. So it includes exercises that make you move side to side (like side lunges) as well as those that have elements of rotation (like twists).”
Battle ropes, monkey ropes, tyres, tombstones, Y-squats, burpees, renegade rows, flutters, curtsy squats, inch work and side shuffle touchdowns are buzzwords on The Grid.
Basically, you can get the same or higher benefit in terms of fitness and calorieburning effects from a 30-minute high-intensity session versus a 60-minute low- to moderate-intensity session.
Virgin Active says The Grid is set to roll out to 92 of its clubs countrywide.