The idea of functional fitness is to give your body a practical full body workout, training your body as a complete unit as opposed to splitting it into isolated body parts. The logic behind it is that this type of training exercises your muscles in a similar way to how your body works in everyday life doing everyday activities, thus maintaining body strength and endurance.
Every session of functional fitness training should include flexibility, mobility, core stability, balance and strength training principles. By taking into consideration the physical laws applied to daily body movements, functional training is aimed at boosting your health and general wellbeing.
Functional training exercises include squats, lunges, push-ups, pull-ups and rowing. As you add more functional exercises to your workout, you should see improvements in your ability to perform your everyday activities and, thus, in your quality of life.
Without question, balance and coordination are crucial elements of functional fitness. Think about the importance of these in our daily lives. When you are doing simple things such as walking, getting in and out of a car or climbing a ladder you are balancing and need coordination. It’s vital that we consistently harness how our body and brain work together and covert those patterns over to what we do on a daily basis.
The key benefit of functional training are:
- Increases the ease of everyday life
- Greater muscle memory
- Low impact
- Increases flexibility and coordination
- Improves balance and posture
- Helps with joint pain
- Reduces risk of injury
Consistency is the key with exercise – and when you can successfully perform basic functional movements it motivates you to keep challenging yourself and trying new things! That’s a win right there.