Cross-Disciplinary Training: Your Secret Weapon For Turbocharging Your Fitness Journey.
Break Plateaus and Smash Your Goals By Mixing Things Up!
Fitness evolves over time. Sometimes this manifests in obvious ways, and sometimes it can be more subtle. While visible, numbers-based accomplishments (like finally nailing that heavy bench press or setting a new mile time) are an excellent way to track your growth, subtle milestones are equally important. Graduating from the feeling that you have to work out and realizing that you want to work out is an important accomplishment that’s hard to put into numbers.
At the end of the day, a successful fitness journey is constantly evolving. That doesn’t have to mean entering competitions and conquering titles, however. Rather, it means that good fitness builds on someone’s strengths, skills, and reflexes–allowing them a chance to raise their limits by pushing them.
To that end, cross-disciplinary training has become increasingly popular amongst athletes of all sports and skill levels to push boundaries and maximize workouts. But what is cross-disciplinary training, exactly? Read on to learn more!
Let’s Get the Obvious Out Of the Way: What Is It?
On paper, “cross-disciplinary training” is exactly what it sounds like: a fitness or training routine that incorporates workouts from multiple different sports or disciplines. For example, many runners or weightlifters will include lower-impact activities like Pilates and yoga. Likewise, it’s not unheard of for tennis players to lean into a martial art as a way of practicing focus and footwork.
In other cases, the cross-disciplinary aspect of this training can come from workout elements that get “borrowed” from other sports. For example, styles of circuit training like HIIT and Crossfit incorporate basic lifts with heavy amounts of cardio to maximize the intensity of weightlifting sessions.
Club Greenwood’s unique HIT FIT program does something similar, combining boxing, kickboxing, cardio, AND strength training! The result is a program that burns more calories and offers more opportunities to build muscle and reflexes than any of these activities normally would on their own.
It Helps You Approach Progressive Overload From Another Angle
The term “progressive overload” is one of the most important concepts in weightlifting, and its principles apply to virtually every other type of exercise.
Simply put, your body is really, really good at adapting to the stress of a good workout. In time, things that were once challenging become routine as your body builds muscle, cardio endurance, and neural pathways. As a result, seeing sustained improvement over time requires you to progressively overload your workout routine. Basically, your body will eventually adapt to challenging workouts, requiring you to increase the difficulty, intensity, or scope of these workouts.
However, training with multiple different fitness areas allows you to engage this from a different angle. By picking a supporting discipline that covers different areas than your “main” workout, you can raise your performance by targeting muscle groups, ranges of motion, or reflexes that would otherwise be ignored.
For example, long-distance running is a fantastic source of cardio. Still, it can be difficult on a person’s joints, and it relies on fairly repetitive movements–which can lead to a limited range of motion for runners. As a result, plenty of distance runners practice yoga to “loosen” their joints, increase the range of movement of their hips, and cultivate better full-body coordination.
In fact, plenty of weightlifters at Club Greenwood also participate in Pilates classes! The focus on small, controlled movements in Pilates allows lifters to target smaller muscle groups that would otherwise go neglected during heavy lifts, allowing for better full-body strength and control. There’s a reason why Club Greenwood offers a complimentary Pilates class to new members: it’s an awesome way to discover how new forms of exercise can complement the muscles you’re already using.
Cross-Disciplinary Training ALSO Helps You Refine Your Technique
In addition to helping round out your physical progress, training cross-discipline helps you learn new concepts that you can apply to various workouts! For instance, workouts that target small muscle clusters (like barre and Pilates) are fantastic support for fitness that focuses on explosive power–such as weightlifting or martial arts. Learning all the subtle movements that comprise these fitness styles means naturally widening your conceptual understanding of fitness, offering more control and a different perspective as you chase your goals.
It doesn’t matter what sort of fitness you’re pursuing; virtually everything benefits from cross-training in some capacity. Whether using martial arts to practice footwork for tennis or supporting swimming with HIT FIT, going cross-discipline is an amazing way to bring new perspectives into your fitness journey.
As an added bonus, it’s also a great opportunity to discover new passions, especially if you’re training at a place with as many diverse options as Club Greenwood! With so many various fitness outlets in one location, Club Greenwood is the perfect place to cross-train and discover new fitness passions. It doesn’t matter whether you’re visiting for Club Greenwood’s indoor swimming pool, clay tennis courts, weight room, or group studios, your next cross-disciplinary passion could be just one visit away!
There’s a reason why Club Greenwood is the best fitness club in the Denver Tech Center: We believe in offering our members plenty of opportunities to explore new passions! Visit today to see just how many options we have to turbocharge your fitness journey!