Functional fitness training is a type of strength training that readies your body for daily activities. These exercises equip you for the most important type of physical fitness, the kind that preps you for real-life, daily living stuff like bending, twisting, lifting, loading, pushing, pulling, squatting and hauling.
Most functional fitness contains multi-joint movement patterns that involve your knees, hips, spine, elbows, wrists, and shoulders, which all build strength and improve your range of motion. It all comes down to being practical, but don’t mistake that for boring.
A great example of one of the best functional fitness exercises would be a simple squat. How often do you squat to get into your car? To use the bathroom? To sit down and stand up? To pick up a child off the floor? According to our definition of functional training: a squat may arguably be THE most functional strength training movement.
Why Should I Try Functional Fitness Training?
Increased Balance and Stability
There are plenty of things in life that can throw off your balance or stability. It’s a good idea to work toward mitigating these things in the gym to prepare yourself for the outside world. As we always tell our clients, a truly fit lifestyle is not about how fit we look, it’s about how fit we live. What good is working out if it doesn’t prepare us and strengthen us for everyday activities?
One functional exercise that increases stability is a lunge with a shoulder press. If you ever find yourself reaching for a box on a shelf, then moonwalking away, arms aloft, until you can pivot and find a spot to place the box, you’ll be glad you practiced this exercise.
Increased Strength
Functional exercises increase your overall strength. This is because most functional movement can improve your core and stability. The more stable your foundation, the stronger you are.
Most exercises on machines serve a great purpose and isolate muscle groups. This is excellent for building muscle mass, but if you want to increase your strength, it’s a good idea to engage in a training program that builds all the stability muscles.
We rarely use just one of our muscle groups in isolation during our daily activities. As an example, if you’re shoveling dirt in a flower bed, you’re not just using your biceps to move the shovel, you’re using both your upper body and lower body…your legs (quads) to push the shovel into the dirt, your lower back to bend over, and your shoulders, and abs to lift, then throw the dirt.
Decreased Risk of Injury
Functional exercises can greatly decrease your risk of everyday life injuries. In our collective experience as fitness professionals, we have never seen clients injured using proper form on a deadlift or a squat. We have, however, seen plenty of clients injured by picking up their kids, a potted plant, or lifting soil bags, then throwing out their back. (Just ask any physical therapist.)
These everyday life activities can injure your smaller muscles when you least expect it. A great exercise to equip you for these functional movements is a Lateral Shuffle Bar Pickup (see description below). This will help you train for the simple motion of picking something up off the floor or a table, and setting it aside.
How to Incorporate Functional Fitness
We like to make sure functional fitness exercises are part of every workout. We’ll either add some to a typical gym workout or create an entire plan using functional exercises, like the one below. But on those days when you can’t get to the gym, you can do lots of these exercises using just your body.
This type of training isn’t high intensity. (You could be doing any number of these moves while on a call if you’re working from home!) You already know many functional fitness exercises, and if you need a prop or two, you can use what you already have around the house like soup cans for bicep curls, pull-ups on a door jam (or pull-ups using that pull-up bar in the basement, because many of our clients have them and consequently, they’re really good at pull-ups!) Or according to the Mayo Clinic, simple lunges, squats, and push-ups will do the trick,