I originally wrote the following story for The Charlotte Observer, where it ran on Tuesday, July 13.  Yesterday, I posted a similar story that ran July 13 in The News & Observer of Raleigh.

Back in the spring, Andy Cole would have been happy to just keep up with his 5-year-old and almost 2-year-old at the local playground, let alone squat-lift 285 pounds and run two miles without stopping.

The 43-year-old Pineville resident’s slide into tubbydom was a familiar one: Participate in sports in high school (basketball and football); graduate from college; get a job; get married; have kids; gain 100 pounds.

“I went for 20 years doing no exercise at all,” says Cole, whose nearly 6-foot frame was carrying 300 pounds.

Then in April his neighbors turned him on to the magic bullet – an exercise program that did what countless gyms could not.

Sounds like the stuff of late-night TV paid programming, but in fact it dates back to the “days of the Olympic decathlons and pentathlons of ancient Greece,” according to the American Council on Exercise.

This latest exercise phenomenon? Cross-training, or simply not doing the same exercise over and over until you’re tired, bored and on the verge of debilitating injury. Cross-training is, for example, walking or running one day, doing yoga the next, maybe lifting weights the day after that.

In Cole’s case, he enrolled in a rapidly growing international network of gyms built on the fundamentals of cross-training: CrossFit. In Charlotte, CrossFit has grown from two gyms two years ago to eight.

“The workouts vary from day to day; it’s pretty much never the same thing,” says Brandon Cullen, who owns CrossFit Ballantyne, the gym where Cole works out. “We stress full-body functional movements. We’re not working on machines; we’re not lifting in front of mirrors. We’re not reading Us Weekly on the elliptical.”

CrossFit Ballantyne is in an abandoned warehouse, so you might get the impression that cross-training is for aspiring Navy SEALS. It’s not, says Cullen. Unless you want it to be.

If a workout calls for pull-ups, Cullen says, a veteran exerciser might do unvarnished pull-ups, while a newbie could use big rubber bands to lessen the load.

That was critical for Cole when he first walked into CrossFit Ballantyne in April.

“I was a 300-pound guy who hadn’t been exercising in 20 years,” he recalls. He needed that giant rubber band (“I couldn’t do one pull-up”), and that day’s two-mile run involved more walking than running.

But the environment was supportive – classes are small and victories of all sizes are reported on the gym’s blog and Facebook page – and not knowing what he’d be doing when he walked in the door every day kept his interest. Three months have passed, Cole has lost 35 of those 100 post-college pounds, he can squat-lift 285 pounds and he’s more like the Andy Cole he was in high school.

“I can see my body firming up, my chest [and] my arms are stronger and my midsection is tightening up,” Cole says. He’s also doing a better job of keeping up with his energetic kids. All of which contributes to his ultimate endorsement of cross-training and CrossFit.

He says, “I’m a happier person than I was three months ago.”