Functionally Fit

Journalist Thulani Gqirana leaves the comfort of her traditional gym to find out why functional fitness has become the latest exercise trend.

- Thulani Gqirana

WHAT happens when a regular, wannabe-fit person takes the plunge and decides to take a functional fitness class? In my case it can best be described as a near-death experience. I might have seen a white light, not to mention my late granny – Nomgqibelo – sipping her customary vodka and Coke.

I came really close to throwing up a few times – that’s how bad it was. And strangely enough that’s also how great it was.

What’s functional fitness, you may ask? Well, functional fitness classes are the ones filled with people who look like they’ve made it in life. The women seem to have stepped out of a magazine and the men look as if they’re flexing their muscles even when they’re just standing there.

Could these classes make me look like that too, I wondered? Some of my friends and I had been discussing the benefits of mainstream gyms versus the so-called functional fitness gyms, wondering whether the latter might be just what we need to knock the lazy out of us.

So in the name of research I took my not-as-fit-as-I’d-like body off to a class. I called a few places around Cape Town and settled on Explosive Functional Fitness (EFF) in Salt River. The EFF gym is as simple as it gets – no treadmills, no stationery bikes and no swimming pool. Just you, the floor, resistance equipment and kettlebells.

The gym offers seven hour long classes a day and in the one I attended there were a few overachievers, but there were also plenty of “normal” folk who were trudging along just like me. It didn’t feel as intimidating as I’d expected.

The class kicked off and I lunged, squatted, pushed, lifted and huffed my way through the first 10 minutes. It felt like a lifetime.