What Is Functional Fitness And Is It For You?
Functional fitness is trending in the health and fitness industry at present. As the name suggests, it is a form of exercise that uses functional movements and exercises as the basis. These movements equip you for activities in daily life. It’s also known as functional movement, and it’s a buzz word that is filling up gyms and fitness studios around the world. It’s not dissimilar to CrossFit, except that it focuses more on fine-tuning and strengthening natural movements of the body.
Where gym training might focus on building certain muscles to be at their peak, functional fitness focuses on building those muscles in ways that they will complement natural daily movements. Actions such as picking up your child, pushing a lawnmower, carrying luggage, doing intensive gardening… these are all natural daily activities that would be supported by functional fitness.
Some of the functional fitness activities include:
- Pushing
- Pulling
- Lifting
- Reaching
- Squatting etc.
If you compare these activities to daily life, you could find yourself doing them quite often:
- Pushing a baby pram or stroller
- Pulling weeds out of the garden
- Lifting heavy boxes onto a shelf
- Reaching for the heavy boxes from the shelf
- Squatting to lift clean washing from a washing basket, and then reaching to hang it on the line
Components Of Functional Fitness
The components that make functional fitness unique are: strength, balance, co-ordination, power, range of motion and mobility. By focusing on enhancing these components, functional fitness advocates say that it gives them better endurance and strength in other natural activities, such as running, walking, jumping etc. It also prevents against injury by keeping the body and muscles in top form.
So Is Functional Fitness For You?
As with any form of exercise, you need to ease yourself into it. It’s best to start the exercises without any additional weights and then add as you go. The key with functional fitness is to have a unique programme devised for you and your capabilities. You can consult a personal trainer or specialist to help you with this and then start working on your own once you know what to do. The reason behind this is so that you can focus on your strengths and weaknesses, building up the latter and making sure you progress gradually in the strengths department.
Credits:
Photo by Alexander Redl on Unsplash.