by Sasha Reddy
One hundred and fifty minutes each week of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise plus at least two days of strength training per week – that’s the industry-wide recommendation for maintaining health. You’ve probably heard this before, whether from your group fitness instructor, doctor, physical therapist, etc., and there are countless ways to squeeze in minutes of movement. Over two years and in collaboration with sports conditioning and performance experts, Les Mills has created a new program to satisfy your strength training needs – and it’s coming to HAC this month.
Following last year’s launch of Strength Development, a 12-week, structured strength-building program, Les Mills is gearing up to launch their latest offering, Les Mills Functional Strength, which follows a shorter 6-week format. Déjà vu much? As much as fitness instructors may jest about this, strength training is more than just picking weights up and putting them down. There are different approaches to weightlifting that aim to achieve different goals, and these two programs exemplify just how easy it is to customize your strength training regimen to fit your specific needs.
Where Strength Development seeks to help participants progressively increase muscle size and definition through a combination of hypertrophy (less weight/more reps) and pure strength (more weight/less reps), Les Mills Functional Strength aims to train movements over muscles. As Les Mills describes, Functional Strength “uses unique super sets of tempo-focused loaded compound moves with single-sided (unilateral) movements to challenge members in new ways – all while improving coordination, stability, and strength symmetry.” In layman’s terms, this new, shorter program uses exercises comprised of compound movements that better mimic the ways you move during daily activities. Training this way under load and incorporating explosive movements will ultimately help you feel a greater sense of power and control as you navigate the world. Each class will include a “strength” portion and an “athletic” portion, though the Functional Strength curriculum does not progress in the same way Strength Development does.
This program is intended not to replace Les Mills fan favorites like BodyPump and Strength Development but rather to complement them. That being said, we recommend no more than three strength training sessions a week with at least one day in between each session. And, to help ease members into this new, exciting offering, we’ll be extending the program this first time around from six weeks to 12. This means our instructors will be teaching the same sequence of exercises for two consecutive weeks before moving on to the next, allowing plenty of time for participants to adapt and get comfortable with the new format. Functional Strength will launch during our spring Group Fitness Launch happening April 12th – 14th; check out the HAC App for class times and dates!
