Functional Fitness Means Training for Your Real Life
What good is having the sexiest biceps in town if you can't scramble up steps with ease, run after your child without knee pain or lift a toddler without wrenching your back?
That's the premise behind the newest school of thought called functional fitness, an approach that is transforming the techniques of many trainers.
Functional fitness means that the goal of working out is preparing your body so it can perform daily activities -- walking, bending, lifting, climbing stairs -- without pain, injury or discomfort.
Think training for life, not events. At TV Fitness Pros, our professional fitness trainers regularly put clients through workouts that have them kneeling on oversized rubber balls, racing up and down stairs and balancing on multicolored yoga blocks -- all in pursuit of core strength, flexibility, coordination and balance.
This approach, which borrows liberally from disciplines as varied as yoga, Pilates, dance and physical therapy, is very much the direction of the fitness industry.
The average person today has goals other than toning their abs or butt. Most of our clients are coming in overweight, with injuries, knee pain, and back pain. Some people who are gym-fit and lean have postural and muscle imbalances.
The whole-body regimen may be particularly well suited to women. Ninety percent of women want to tone their buttocks, stomach and the back of their arms, but unless they straighten out the front of their hips, strengthen their abdomens and learn how to use their glute muscles they won't get the muscle tone they're after.
The remedy - learning to use multiple muscle groups in an integrated way. Functional fitness workouts challenge the body to work collectively as a whole, firing up the muscles in a sequential pattern.