It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when I almost threw up at SportAberdeen’s new Quad room.
I was far too exhausted to notice.
All I can say is that it was sometime during the 500-meter sprint on the rowing machine.
To be fair, I hadn’t felt great during the speed cycling. Or the burpees, the ski machine and the push ups.
But as I sat in the rower, huffing and sweating and wondering what I was doing with my life, I felt my stomach shift.
Oh, no, I thought. This is not going to end well.
What is SportAberdeen’s The Quad?
How did it come to this?
SportAberdeen, the charity that runs Aberdeen’s sport and leisure facilities for the council, opened The Quad only a few weeks ago at GetActive@Jesmond in Bridge of Don.
The facility is described as a ‘functional fitness studio’, but really it’s SportAberdeen’s answer to all those hot, on-trend workout classes you may have seen on your Instagram feed.
You know the kind I mean: where you push a weighted sled, climb a rope or flip a giant sandbag onto your shoulder, then run a kilometre and do it all again.
The workouts all have names like CrossFit or Hyrox and are so popular they are popping up all over the north and north-east.
Aberdeen has had its own dedicated CrossFit gym for more than 10 years, but more recently branches of the American fitness franchise have sprung up in Inverness, Inverurie and Dingwall.
Lots of gyms now run their own functional fitness sessions, while in Aberdeen a new dedicated Hyrox gym opened under the arches on South College Street in April.
A brand new CrossFit affiliate, Kimura CrossFit, opened in Cove Bay just a few months ago.
SportAberdeen’s ‘no brainer’ decision to open The Quad
The Quad is SportAberdeen’s answer to this new demand, bringing functional fitness to even more people.
And it’s no coincidence that the person behind The Quad, SportAberdeen’s health and fitness manager, Evelyn Mair, is a CrossFitter herself.
Evelyn says it was a “no brainer” for her to look to her own experience with functional fitness when trying to bring something fresh for SportAberdeen gym users.
To that end, she helped come up with Quad Energy, a four-week functional programme that delivers a range of training types that cover all aspects of fitness.
Meanwhile, SportAberdeen plan to open more Quads in its GetActive gyms, so there’s every likelihood that there will be one near most Aberdonians soon.
Functional fitness helps you get out of your car more easily
But what exactly is functional fitness? Evelyn says it involves exercises that help people improve “aspects of their daily life through improved mechanics and movement” while also helping general fitness.
Put simply, it is getting fit for life, whether that’s being able to get out of the passenger seat of a car without having to use a winch or lifting heavy Amazon parcels off your front step without putting your back out.
Functional fitness focusses on core work so there’s lots of squats, burpees and things like dumbbell snatches, where you pick the weight up off the floor and lift it above your head.
There’s also a focus on working out together and making a community of it. Plus, it really is for all ages and abilities. Most of the exercises can be modified so anyone can do them.
P&J vs SportAberdeen in fitness challenge for the ages
To show off all of this, SportAberdeen set up a fitness challenge that pitted the cream of the P&J against two of its fitness coaches.
Unfortunately, the cream of the P&J were busy, so instead me and Ryan Cryle, the paper’s joint sports editor, found ourselves in Bridge of Don last Wednesday, slightly nervous about what lay ahead.
Of course, I’m selling myself and Ryan a little short here. At 48, I no longer boast the burst of pace that saw me crowned Fife schools 400m champion in 1994.
But I do my own functional fitness these days in the form of CrossFit.
Ryan, meanwhile, not only keeps himself fit in the gym and through heated arguments on the five-a-side pitch, he also has a serious competitive streak that makes me never want to play him again on the P&J office ping-pong table.
Up against us were the Jesmond dream team of Lewis and Piotr, who no doubt fancied their chances against a couple of desk-bound pencil pushers.
But were they in for a surprise?
Ripping through the push-ups
The challenge featured four workouts, each representing a different exercise type of The Quad.
First up was a ladder workout, a favourite of functional fitness programmes. We started out doing 10 reps each of a box jump and rows on the distinctive yellow TRX bands you may have seen in gyms, and then proceeded to eight reps and then six until we were done.
It was a close finish, but Ryan and I just pipped it, much to the surprise of everyone, not least me.
Next was an AMRAP, which stands for As Many Rounds as Possible – another functional fitness favourite.
We did a circuit of five calories on the ski machine, five push ups and five burpees; burpees being a functional fitness standard that combines push ups, star jumps and pure torture.
The idea was to keep going for five minutes and count the number of circuits we completed.
This is where it started to get tough. But Ryan ripped through the ski machine and push-ups to complete more rounds than the rest of us. Score one more for Team P&J.
Where it all starts to go wrong
The next two challenges were combined into one.
While Ryan and Piotr duked it out on a 500m cycle and 500m row, Lewis and I faced off over wall balls and lunges, two exercises that really work the core and quad muscles.
Lewis edged me on this, though I put that down to him being less than half my age.
Over on the bikes and rowers, Ryan looked ready to collapse after his stint, which made me dread my own turn.
True enough, it was hell.
I got through the cycle ok, but functional fitness classes love to use something called an air bike. It has a big fan instead of a wheel – and an unnerving ability to sap all your stamina. By the time I got onto the rower I was exhausted.
Cue rumblings in the stomach and the distinct feeling I was going to spew. The only thing that kept me going was a sneaky peek at Lewis’s odometer. I was somehow beating him!
So, if you really want to know how I made it to the end, beating Lewis and winning it for the P&J (and not throwing up), it was simple ego, vanity and a refusal to accept I’m a middle-aged man.
And if that’s not functional fitness, then I don’t know what is.
The Quad is available to all members of GetActive@Jesmond. It is for individual use or through a Quad programming timetable that changes monthly.
Conversation