Functional fitness exercises train your muscles to help you do everyday activities…
Working out with focus on building your body capable of doing activities in real-life situations safely and efficiently.
What’s type of functional fitness exercises are there which you can do?
What if you’re not an athlete, do you even need to exercise?
In fact, most people exercise to improve their quality of life and that’s the focus of functional fitness.
Conventional weight training typically is being used to isolate muscle groups, it doesn’t train muscle groups you’re isolating to work together.
Functional fitness exercises are designed to make muscles work together…train and develop your muscles to make it easier and safer to perform everyday activities.
Daily tasks like carrying groceries or playing a game of basketball with your kids.
The key to functional fitness exercise is integration.
It’s about training all the muscles to work together instead of isolating them independently.
What is functional fitness training?
Functional fitness exercises train your muscles to work together and prepare muscles for daily tasks by simulating common movements you might do at home, at work or in sports.
While using various muscles in the upper and lower body at the same time, functional fitness exercises also emphasize core stability.
For example, a squat is a functional exercise because it trains the muscles used when you rise up and down from a chair or pick up low objects.
By exercising your muscles to work the way they do in everyday tasks, you prepare your body to perform well in a variety of common situations.
Functional fitness exercises can be done at home or at the gym.
Gyms may offer functional fitness classes or incorporate functional fitness into boot camps or other types of classes.
Exercise tools, such as fitness balls, kettlebells and weights are often used in functional fitness workouts.
What are the benefits of functional fitness training?
In context to integration, strong muscles get stronger and weak muscles remain weak.
So you create a pattern of compensation.
If you integrate functional exercises it trains isolated muscles how to work together because functional exercises are designed to make use of multi-joint, multi-muscle exercises.
For example:
Instead of only using elbows, functional exercise involve elbows, shoulders, spine, hips, knees and ankles.
This type of training, properly applied, can make everyday activities easier, reduce your risk of injury and improve your quality of life.
Functional exercise training may be especially beneficial as part of a comprehensive program for older adults to improve balance, agility and muscle strength, and reduce the risk of falls.
What are examples of functional fitness exercises?
Multifaceted physical movements found in activities such as tai chi and Pilates involve varying combinations of resistance and flexibility training that can help build functional fitness.
Other examples of specific functional fitness movements that use multiple joints and muscles include:
Multi-directional lunges
Standing bicep curls
Step-ups with weights
Multi-directional lunges prepare your body for common activities, such as vacuuming and yard work.
To do a lunge, you keep one leg in place and step out with the other leg — to the front, back or side — until your knee reaches a 90-degree angle and your rear knee is parallel to the floor.
Functional fitness training for sports…
Functional training, if performed correctly, will lead to better joint mobility and stability, as well as more efficient motor patterns.
Improving these factors may decrease risk for an injury sustained during an athletic endeavor or increased performance in a sport.
The benefits may arise from use of training emphasizing body’s natural ability to move in six degrees of freedom.
Although machines may be safer to use, a machine’s path of movement is typically in a single plane of motion, which isn’t an ideal natural form of movement.
Functional training has been well supported in evidenced based research for rehabilitation.
It has been shown that task specific training yields long-lasting cortical reorganization which is specific to areas of the brain being used with each task.
Studies also shown patients make larger gains in functional tasks used in their rehabilitation and are more likely to continue practicing these tasks in everyday living with better results.
In 2009 Spennewyn conducted research, published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research compared functional training to fixed variable training techniques…
This was considered the first research of its type comparing the two methods of strength training.
Results of the study showed very substantial gains and benefits in functional training group over fixed training equipment.
Functional users had a 58% greater increase in strength over the fixed-form group.
Their improvements in balance were 196% higher over fixed and reported an overall decrease in joint pain by 30%.
Are functional fitness exercises for everyone?
If you are older than age 40, haven’t exercised for some time or have health problems, it’s a good idea to check with your doctor before starting any new exercise program.
Similarly, women who are pregnant should check with their doctors.
It’s also a good idea to start with exercises that use only your own body weight for resistance.
As you become more fit and ready for more of a challenge, you can add more resistance in the form of weights, resistance tubing or performing movements in the water.
Components of a functional exercise program?
To be effective, a functional exercise program should include a number of different elements which can be adapted to an individual’s needs or goals:
- Based on functional tasks directed toward everyday life activities
- Individualized – a training program should be tailored to each individual
- Any program must be specific to the goals of an individual, focusing on meaningful tasks. It must also be specific to the individual state of health, including presence or history of injury. An assessment should be performed to help guide exercise selection and training load.
- Integrated – It should include a variety of exercises that work on flexibility, core, balance, strength and power, focusing on multiple movement planes
- Progressive – Progressive training steadily increases the difficulty of the task
- Periodized – mainly by training with distributed practice and varying the tasks
- Repeated frequently
- Use of real life object manipulation
- Performed in context-specific environments
- Feedback should be incorporated following performance (self-feedback of success is used as well as trainer/therapist feedback).
The functional fitness exercise payoff…
As you add more functional exercises to your workout, you should see improvements in your ability to perform your everyday activities and, thus, in your quality of life. That’s quite a return on your exercise investment.