What is functional training really?
Functional training helps provide you with the strength, stability, power, mobility, endurance and flexibility that you need for sports or even just for every day life! There’s some debate in the fitness world about what actually constitutes functional training – but if you think about it as generally making life easier – you’re on the right track. When people age they often lose balance and flexibility, range of motion in the joints becomes more limited and strength deteriorates. By incorporating functional training into your routine you can slow down these conditions.
Functional Movements
So what is a functional movement? You use basic functional movement patterns like pushing, pulling, hinging, squatting, rotating, carrying and walking and running every day. Functional training utilizes exercises that improve your movement proficiency in these patterns. Think of exercises like lunging, (in various directions) farmer’s carrys (or farmer’s walks) – lots of different exercises can fall under he banner of ‘functional’. Except bicep curls… they’re not functional – I put them in the ‘aesthetic’ category…
Exploring Functional Training Further
I saw great presenter at Filex (the annual Australian Fitness Industry Convention) – Todd Durkin, who not only does an awesome bootcamp, but he also presents at industry events and is a well known strength and conditioning coach working for sports teams and athletes in the US. I recommend reading his blog on How Functional is Functional? And how training has moved away from simply training muscles to training movements.
Give functional training a go!
If you’d like to try some functional training you can either book in with one of our trainers and get them to update your program to make sure it includes functional movements or how about a two week trial of Small Group Training? The team in the MyGym Small Group Training Studio make functional training a focus of their workouts. Try a functional workout today!
