By Scott Fisher MS, RD
If you walk into any gym or health club in America, including our own Fitness Center here on campus, you will notice one thing - machines! In an effort to make fitness more efficient, equipment manufacturers have spent billions of dollars making it less useful. The original intent of exercise in ancient Greece was to develop your body to make the chores of daily life easier. Machines limit your exercise to a single movement of a single muscle. When during your daily life do you perform a single movement with a single muscle?
Functional Training is a style of training that leads to functional strength, which is strength that you can use. So what exactly is functional training? Well, function is essentially purpose; therefore functional training is training with a purpose. Functional training looks at the physical demands of your lifestyle and reinforces them through your workout.
To gain a better understanding of the concepts of Functional Training let's ask a few questions about your daily physical activity. How often are you physically active while sitting down? If you are a typical on-the-go student the answer is probably never, so why do we train in a seated position? How often is your physical activity stabilized by an outside force? Once again, if you are always on the move you must provide your own balance for physical activities, so why let a machine provide stability during your workouts? And finally, how often do you perform an activity using only one muscle and one joint at a time? Never! So why develop a complete workout based around a single joint, single muscle concept?
The rules of Functional Training are simple - there are no rules! By applying common sense and these basic guidelines you will be well on your way to developing a functional training workout.
1. Be Progressive
- Begin with exercises that you are comfortable performing and slowly modify them to duplicate movements you perform during everyday life.
2. Be Mobile
- Life does not always move in a straight line, so neither should your body. Incorporate exercises that involve elevation changes, lateral movements, and rotational movements.
3. Move at the Speed of Life
- Perform your exercises at the same speed that you move during everyday activities. Just make sure that you are not going so fast that you lose control of the exercise.
4. One at a Time
- Life consists of moving from one foot to the other and using one arm and then the other. Bring this into your training by performing single leg or single arm exercises.
5. Be Balanced
- Moving around campus brings many challenges that most people never think about. Did you realize that every step you take requires your body to willingly lose balance and then attempt to regain it immediately? Work on balance exercises in your functional training workout.
6. Have Fun!
- This is the most important guideline to follow! Try new and different things and spice up your workout with a few new functional training exercises and you will notice that everyday life will seem a whole lot easier.
A few of the functional training tools (toys) that you will find in our fitness center are stability balls, balance disks and pads, foam rollers, medicine balls, and your own human body.
