The Benefits of Functional Fitness for Everyday Life
We all have had moments like getting winded on the stairs in the morning, trouble getting out of bed despite getting a good 8 hours of sleep, and feeling like we dedicate so much of our time to exercise only to feel less healthy as time goes on. Why is that? There are lots of reasons for this. Could be an underlying health condition, overly stressed out at work, or most commonly, our training is no good. I spent many years of my life training like a bodybuilder. Pounding protein powders and lifting in isolated, stable movements. I had to get real with myself. I am not the next Chris Bumstead or Arnold, nor do I even want to be if I was. So, I learned about functional fitness. Functional fitness is exercising with the intention to mimic everyday movements. It focuses on strength, mobility, and overall quality of life. I will be referring to all isolated exercises throughout this post as bodybuilding style, but it applies to all styles of training that involve muscles being trained in isolation.
What is Functional Fitness?
Functional movements mimic natural, real-world motions, engaging multiple muscle groups and planes of motion to build strength and coordination for everyday tasks. Bodybuilding movements often isolate specific muscles, which can limit their application outside the gym. Here’s a comparison:
Kettlebell Swing (functional) vs Cable Pull Through (bodybuilding)
The kettlebell swing is an explosive and dynamic movement that trains the posterior chain and increases core stability. It applies directly to everyday life for activities that require powerful hip extension such as jumping or lifting heavy objects. The cable pull through is an isolated hip-hinge movement that is designed to target specific muscle groups such as the glutes and hamstrings. While it is great in a controlled environment, it lacks any real-world application. How often do you need to grab a string from between your legs and pull it forward? Probably not very often.
Push-up (functional) vs Chest Fly (bodybuilding)
Push-ups build great upper body and core strength while doing an excellent job at mimicking real-life pushing actions such as shoveling snow or getting yourself up off the ground. However, the chest fly movement focuses only on the chest muscles which offers very little benefit for movements throughout our daily life. Great in isolation for solely muscle building, bad for real life application.
Benefits of Functional Fitness
There are countless benefits that come with functional fitness. These include but are not limited to, improved strength and endurance, increased balance as well as mobility, injury prevention, and last but not least, very time efficient.
Strength
Functional exercises target multiple muscle groups at the same time. This improves overall strength and endurance. Unlike isolation movements like the bicep curl that works a limited amount of muscle groups (with proper form), functional movements encourage the different parts of the body to work together. This creates greater efficiency throughout the body while performing everyday tasks.
Balance
Functional movements require you to move through different planes of motion that isolation movements don't, such as moving sideways, backwards, rotational, etc. It leaves the sagittal plane of movement that body building stays inside of and incorporates the frontal and transverse planes of movement as well. Multi-directional training improves coordination by teaching your body to move effectively in various directions.
Mobility and Time Efficiency
Dynamic movements take your body through its full active range of motion (the ROM achieved by muscle activation). Mobility becomes more and more important as we age. It helps to prevent injuries, improve posture, and enhance all activities we engage in on a daily basis. They also take much less time. If you train your quads and hamstrings at the same time, you just cut what could have been two exercises down to one.
Takeaway
If I could go back to the beginning of my health and fitness journey I would have tossed the idea of bodybuilding to the side and focused on longevity and overall health. I would have avoided physical therapy, headaches, neck pain, and worst of all, burnout from going into the weight room six days per week. Maybe that works for you, but it is not as necessary as the bigtime fitness influencers may say it is. Push pull legs, the Arnold split, whatever it may be, these cookie cutter plans made by “professionals” aren’t always worth the hundreds of dollars they are charging. Some are, most are not.
Now, I am by no means trying to tell you that any one style of training is better or worse than another. I believe that doing what works for you and what makes you feel good will always be the best training. What I am doing is giving you insight into what has helped me heal my body. After years of training to achieve an unachievable goal of being happy with a physique, it left me with aches, pains, and the hard learned lesson that if you chase something temporary, unimportant, and more often than not materialistic (such as the “perfect” physique), it will leave you less satisfied than before. It’s like money. Once you get it, did it really bring you happiness? Or was it the journey you took to get there that brought growth that gave you that. Something to think about.
Get your body moving because that is what it is designed to do. What a beautiful little vehicle we get to drive! Treat your body like the temple it is and it will give you more than you could ever think, trust me.
