What is a Functional Strength Training Program
A functional strength training program focuses on ‘purpose’ through movement patterns. The purpose of your training depends on your age, fitness level, current health and goals. A workout should be sport specific to enhance the performance of an athlete or it could be focusing on bettering the movements that people make in daily life. Movements such as lifting a child, standing up out of bed or reaching for a highly placed object. Essentially, functional training improves the performance of everyday movements and the quality of your life.
Why functional training is important?
Like other training programs, functional fitness is great for the health of your body. It helps you build strength, power, and mobility that translates beyond the gym.
Want to try it for yourself? Here’s what a functional strength training program is all about and the benefits of functional training
By improving the overall function of your body, boosting muscle strength and endurance, and developing muscle and body stability everyday activities can be completed with more ease. Compared to conventional workouts, the benefits of functional fitness tend to out-weigh everything else because it’s actually targeting the movements we are doing every day.
2. Functional Fitness is Low Impact
Because functional training implements exercises that are low impact, it’s a great starting point for anyone at any fitness level to try. For newbies starting out with a different workout or fitness style, it can be really hard knowing what is going to work best for your needs. The functional movement will help to improve all your physical abilities without causing stress to your body and joints.
3. Increases Flexibility, Coordination, Balance & Posture
The range in the motion of functional exercises are quite large, and you need to start and finish in a position where your muscles are stretched. One of the primary goals of functional movement and training is to offer resistance. Implementing its exercises and programs works in boosting your body’s functional strength. This is turn increases overall flexibility and coordination. As your range of motion is enhanced, you’ll find day-to-day activities become easier.
The exercises implemented through functional fitness and training use multiple muscles to enhance your strength and balance, effectively improving your overall posture. Many functional training exercises are not stabilized and require you to use other small muscle groups to help support the larger ones. This will help prevent over-training one muscle group which often leads to incorrect posture.
4. Can Help with Your Joint Pain
For those that suffer from regular back, muscle and joint pain functional movement and training can be incredibly beneficial. Best known for bridging the gap between personal training and physical therapy, functional fitness and training are designed to restore your body. Because of this, chronic back, knee, neck and joint pain can all be significantly reduced. The exercises used in functional movement and can make daily tasks that were once hard, much more possible. To learn more about joint health Click here
5. Reduce The Risk of Injury
Functional training stands out from conventional training because of its way to reduce the risk of injury and stress to your body. Everyday movements can leave runners and sports enthusiasts in pain. By mimicking common movement patterns, your body is better able to cope with daily physical stresses. When training, muscles aren’t just strengthened but the surrounding ligaments too, which is the area that can often become injured.
6. Functional Training Builds Muscle
So, can functional training build muscle? Functional movement training doesn’t just strengthen one muscle group at a time. Rather, it works and trains several muscle groups at once. As a result, you build strength holistically, forcing your body to function as a single unit.
Health and fitness fads come and go all the time but unfortunately not all of them are worth your time and effort. Some of them don’t work, some of them are overhyped and some of them are just plain dangerous.
But ‘functional strength’ is different. While functional strength is very trendy right now, it’s not a ‘fad’ by any means. In fact, functional strength is the opposite of a fad and it’s a step in the right direction for all of fitness.
That’s because a functional strength training program takes it all back: takes it all back to the reasons that most of us started training in the first place. Or at least the reasons we should be training.
Because let’s be honest: far too many people train ‘for the mirror’. How many guys do you see pulling their t-shirt up in front of the mirror after a set of sit-ups? How many women do you see on treadmills wearing the tiniest pants in the world and barely working up a sweat?
Do you think these people are training for the right reasons? Make sure you are training for the right healthy reason. A functional strength training program is the way to go. Click here to access your program
