Functional Movements?

A commone buzzword in today's fitness industry is functional fitness, or to do functional movements. While giving specific exercises an ambigous name is good for selling memberships and personal training, it is not doing anything for your average gym goer. So let's first define functional fitness and functional movements. Functional fitness (and by association functional movements) is the ability to do real-world tasks or work at a high capacity. An example would be the ability to lift a heavy box from the floor and place it on an overhead shelf, or picking up a large rock off of a fallen compadre while hiking. At any rate, we can pare this down to being ready for any of life's challenges that may be presented to us at any time. A functional movement is an exercise that lends itself relatively well to any essential skill or task that someone could possibly face. Again, these skills or task can be simplified into squatting, jumping, running, upper-body pressing (overhead, horizontally, and from all positions), punching, pulling and things like that. At any point in time, all movements in life arise from any or all of these basic movements. The reason why this is important is that we want to improve our ability to cope with daily stresses as well as perform at a high level at a sport or during an unexpected challenge (like a fire, flood, etc). So in a nutshell, functional training would carryover quite well to improving a persons ability to do any and all tasks well. There is another benefit of functional training, and that is it is better for you from a standpoint on weightloss, aesthetics, and longevity. Bear with me, this is going to get good.

Most functional movements involve many body parts or muscle groups. This means there is an increase in muscle mass (cross sectional area) being used in a movement and therefore there is an increased demand for energy when compared to isolating a single muscle group. This leads to an increased use of oxygen, calories, metabolites, and coordinating mechanisms within the brain. The outcome of a gym session chocked full of functional movements at a high intensity (heavy weight or high reps done in a short time period) will be an increase in calories expended, increase stimulus for increased cardiorespritory capacity, increased proprioceptive (balance and coordination) awareness, and increased hormonal response to exercise (insulin sensitivity, increased growth hormone, etc). Let's take for instance a squat compared to a leg press. The squat requires the legs to function at a high level, the core for stability, the hips for extension, and the arms for balance. The leg press only requires the legs to move the weight stack, and also doesn't require any balance so the core can rest, and the hips aren't allowed to move through a full range of motion and so their involvement suffers. Also this doesn't take into account placing a relatively heavy load on the back of a client and having them squat. This involved the spinal extensors of the back and hip flexors to an even greater degree during both the concentric and eccentric phases of exercise. So with all these advantages of this functional movement, why would anyone use the leg press? Because it's hard and can be very taxing if done correctly. Let's go to another example...

People do bicep curls like crazy in front of the mirror everyday to exhaustion. What purpose does this serve? I'm not really sure, but these guy's and girl's arm never seem to get anymore muscular, that's for sure. I would propose that these curlin' fools try to do 10 pullups in a row with full range of motion. I gauruntee that the effect will be more profound as far as growth, aesthetic value, and body compostion are concerned. This is because the range of motion is greater in a pullup, the muscles overcome a greater load, and you can't take the load off of the bicep at any point during the movement, it is there during the eccentric and concentric portion of the movement like it or not.

The whole point of this is to get people away from isolation movements like bicep curls, tricep extensions, leg extensions, dumbell flyes, front raises, lateral raises, and crunches. I would like to see a shift to pullups, dips, squats, overhead press, rows, lunges, deadlifts, and things like this. Of course these are difficult movements but someone can teach you if you have the desire to learn. The juice is definitely worth the squeeze so get to your local trainer or coach ASAP and get after it.