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Functional fitness for every day activities

As hard as it might be to hear, and in spite of how much you fight against it, you're not getting any younger - unless you're part of an off-the-wall Oscar-winning Hollywood blockbuster starring Brad Pitt - so maybe it's time to start thinking of a more functional approach to your fitness.

The simple idea behind functional fitness is to use your strength training to improve balance, coordination, force, power and endurance in your daily activities. Functional fitness may be among the latest buzzwords in gyms these days, but for good reason. It's about training your body to handle real-life situations.

Yesterday you had a great workout at the gym. You're bench-pressing more weight than ever before, and pulling enough weight on the seated rowing machine to try out for the Olympic sculling team. Today, you lift a 23-kilogramme suitcase to carry it downstairs - and throw your back out. What happened? In all likelihood, you're not paying enough attention to your functional fitness. You might be toned, tight, and ready for the beach, but are you ready to lift your toddler out of his car seat or hoist the spring-water bottle onto the dispenser?

Conventional weight training isolates muscle groups, but it doesn't teach the muscle groups you're isolating to work with others. The key to functional exercise is integration. It's about teaching all the muscles to work together rather than isolating them to work independently.

So what's an example of a functional exercise? Think of a bent-over row; the kind you do leaning over a bench, holding the weight in one hand with your arm hanging straight down, and then pulling the weight up as your elbow points to the ceiling, finishing with your upper arm parallel to the ground. That's an exercise that will build the muscles of the back, the shoulders, the arms, and because of its nature will really work your whole body.

Compare that motion to a carpenter bending over a piece of wood, a nurse bending over a bed to transfer a patient, or an auto mechanic bending over to adjust your carburetor. Anyone doing a bent-over row will find a carryover in things you do in normal life.
In functional fitness, most of the time, you should be standing on your own two feet and supporting your own weight when you lift anything. In fact, to get started with functional fitness, you might want to forget about the weights entirely at first. Most people can't even control their own body weight. They can't do a one-legged squat without falling over. They could lie down on a leg-press machine and press 200 kilogrammes, but they don't have the muscular control for a one-legged squat because they don't have the stability or the muscles working together.

Your first step should be to teach your body to control and balance its own weight. Start with simple movements, like the one-legged squat, and other balance exercises. Then try standing on one leg on a step-stool that's perhaps eight inches high, and then lower the heel of your other foot to the ground, while controlling your body weight as you go down and back up. Switch sides during each maneuver to promote balance and muscle integration on either side of your body. Once you can control and balance your own body weight, then you can start working with added weights.

Other popular tools that promote functional exercise are things like stability balls and the "wobble board," both of which force you to work your core to keep your body balanced while you're lifting a weight.

So should you abandon the weight machines at the gym for a program that's all about free weights and balance? Not necessarily. If there are isolated weaknesses, they'll cause a detriment in functional movement. If you don't address integration, strong muscles get stronger and the weak ones stay weak, and you create a pattern of compensation. If you blend the two together, functional exercises teach isolated muscles how to work together.

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