I originally wrote the following story for The News & Observer, where it ran on Tuesday, July 13.  Saturday, I’ll post a similar story that ran July 13 in the Charlotte Observer.

It helped Josh Handest train for a half marathon. It was even more instrumental in getting him into shape to keep up with his preschool sons.

“My 4-year-old likes being picked up and tossed around,” says the 36-year-old North Raleigh resident. “And the 5-month-old is in a car carrier that gets heavier and heavier to get in and out of the car.”

Functional fitness for daily living and a workout regimen that helps runners and other competitive athletes perform better – all in one! 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. It is, for example, walking or running one day, doing yoga the next, maybe lifting weights the day after that.

“It’s like diversifying your portfolio,” says George Whitten, who with his wife Stephanie owns the Fitness4Life Training Center in North Raleigh. “You need to have that balance.”

Fitness4Life embraces the cross-training ethos, offering classes, from cardio kickboxing to karate to XFit to boot camp. Clients pay a monthly fee of $49 and can attend any class – and as many classes – as they want.
Handest signed on when he started having joint pain while training for a half marathon. Mixing in regular cardio kickboxing and boot-camp-type classes improved his overall body strength and allowed him to cut back on pavement-pounding miles. The real plus, though, was the extra energy and strength for surviving his boys.

“I can tear around with them now,” Handest says.

Katy Hijack of Raleigh dabbled with personal trainers and gyms to help with her running. The former proved too pricey, the latter, with traditional classes, didn’t seem to help. When she ran her first marathon last fall – the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington – she felt awful. Her takeaway from the race:
“If you run 26.2 miles, it’s not just about your legs,” she says. “You do use your upper body.”

She joined Fitness4Life, started taking cardio kickboxing and XFit classes, both of which involve exercises for developing strength, flexibility and aerobic capacity. Already, she says, she feels better prepared for her rematch with the Marine Corps Marathon this October.

“My core [midsection] is stronger, my lower back isn’t sore and my legs are stronger,” she says.
Whitten says another attraction of cross-training programs is that not only do they also work for both accomplished athletes and folks coming off the couch but they allow the two populations to work out together.

“Everything we do is scalable,” he says. By that he means if a particular routine calls for pull-ups, a class veteran may do classic pull-ups while a newcomer may use a lower bar, allowing him to get a little push off the floor.

The variety and the scalability are important, Whitten says. Above all, though, he says, cross-training is fun, the way exercise was when we were using all our muscles to run through the woods, to climb trees, to swim at the neighborhood pool. A successful exercise program, he believes, boils down to one thing.

“We need to feel childlike again.”