Announcement
October 1, 2024
October 2024
Functional Fitness
Bench pressing 200 pounds is cool, but can you move your sleeping toddler from the car seat to the bed without struggling? Functional fitness is exercise that prepares your body for everyday tasks, such as walking upstairs, picking objects up off the floor, or in this example, avoiding a meltdown.
Functional fitness vs. weightlifting – Functional fitness trains muscles for everyday movement patterns such as bending, twisting, squatting. It differs from traditional weightlifting, which focuses on heavy loads moving on a guided track for a relatively small number of repetitions. The goal of functional fitness is to improve quality of life by strengthening your body to perform basic functions with ease, whereas the goal of weightlifting is to build muscle mass.
Functional fitness exercises can be performed bodyweight, using resistance bands, or with weights such as dumbbells or kettlebells. Regardless of the method you choose, when performed with proper form, functional fitness exercises will increase strength.
Functional movements – Functional fitness relies largely on compound exercises, which are movements that work multiple muscle groups at the same time. For example, a deadlift is a compound movement because the upper body engages to hold the barbell while the lower body activates to complete the standing motion.
A few common compound exercises include:
- Squats engage the legs, glutes, and core simultaneously. This movement pattern is found in daily activities such as getting out of chairs or walking up stairs.
- Overhead press targets the chest, arms, and shoulders. Stowing luggage on a plane is one example of this movement pattern in real life.
- Farmer’s walk improves arm, core, back, and leg strength, and mimics actions such as carrying bags of groceries.
- Deadlifts target upper and lower back, hamstrings, glutes, and core, the same muscles required to move heavy objects or lift something off the ground.
There are dozens of other compound movements, including push-ups, pull-ups, and walking lunges, to name a few.
Additional benefits of functional fitness – Many functional exercises challenge the core to improve stability and balance by requiring the body to move in different planes simultaneously. Single leg squat to chair (modified pistol squat) provides the benefits of a squat with the added challenge of maintaining balance and stability on one leg.
Functional training can improve aerobic performance because it can easily be incorporated into HIIT classes. Exercises like box jumps or squat jumps elevate your heart rate and provide a cardiovascular workout while engaging multiple muscle groups.
Overall, with its focus on performance rather than size, functional fitness improves quality of life by training the body for everyday activities.
