Walk the plank. Do 12 burpees. Squat.
The DJ changes tracks, and ‘Neruppu Da’ from Kabali reverberates across the stadium. Lunge. Curl. Cheer. Watermelon juice shots and a round of high-fives.
When The Quad celebrates, it tends to be an adrenalin-pumping, high-powered, boderline-obsessive affair that leaves participants with shaky knees, sweaty selfies and soaring endorphins.
The recent Quad Sports Day, held every year to celebrate the group’s anniversary, brought together about 250 fitness enthusiasts from around the city to face off against each other in a competitively-charged atmosphere, at the Santhome Higher Secondary School stadium.
In 2011, founders Arvind Ashok and Raj Ganpath quit their jobs in California, and relocated to Chennai to start the Quad. They launched the bootcamp a few months later in the Bamboola school playground, RA Puram.
The founders’ unapologetically no-nonsense style, combined with their functional fitness approach and the outdoor location has brought together a unique community, just as happy to roll on the ground doing Turkish get ups as they are capping off a workout with ghee podi dosas at the Sangeeta nearby.
From about 90 people in 2011, the group now has more than 700 trainees who work out at four locations. Their 25 fitness professionals, run a slew of programs, including Quad Play for children and the recently launched Quad Virtual, a personalised coaching service for clients around the world.
Schooled in the gritty bootcamp vibe, this community thrives on fierce competition, as the founders realised when they tried to turn the annual sports day into a carnival over the past couple of years, with food stalls, bouncy castles and a tug-of-war. As it turns out, ‘Quadsters’ prefer the sweet pain of screaming calf muscles to squandering energy on silly pursuits like ‘fun’.
“To be honest, Arvind and I are terrible at throwing parties,” smiles Raj Ganpath, a touch ruefully, as Sports Day winds down. He adds, “We also realised that they people who come to us, aren’t impressed by bouncy castles.”
So for the seventh edition of Quad Sports, they cut out frills and returned to the basics. (Fortunately, they kept the DJ, and the whey protein chocolate souffle stall.)
Raj states, “We realise that our trainees enjoy the structure and challenges of a workout, so we decided to take that to another level, instead of just throwing a party to celebrate the anniversary.”
The 2019 edition began with a gruelling 20-minute warm up, which included a number of planks, burpees, squats and audible groans. Trainees were then divided into teams and each team raced to complete a set of tasks, which included balancing on a plank, burpees, thrusters, presses and crawls.
“This is where we differ from Cross Fit Games. We are not looking for the ‘fittest person on earth.’ We want teams to be inclusive. We want everyone to participate,” Raj says, “We also realize, for our trainees, there has to be a challenge.”
