Way back when starting my residency in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of Utah (Salt Lake was a great place to live back in the mid-80s), the term functional fitness wasn’t a popular buzzword in the everyday fitness world.
Functional fitness (as a term) was really used primarily in a medical arena, most often as we worked as a team to restore injured and compromised individuals’ mobility as well as their ability to do what are loosely termed “activities of daily living” – all those things we do to manage ourselves, our households, and most often our work in a given day.
A great deal of what the members of the rehab team did in this functional training was very practical, geared toward equipping a person to perform useful tasks with greater ease, efficiency, and proficiency. (To this day I’m deeply inspired by some of the transformations in function I witnessed during those years.)
Functional Fitness is a hot topic these days it seems, and for good reason. I’m all about the functional fitness movement (no pun intended), particularly for those of us over 40 (you could really easily argue that could be 30) who are beginning to feel some of the symptoms of joint wear and tear (aching, stiffness, etc), aren’t as fit as we used to be, are a bit too sedentary, are beginning to pack on extra pounds, or are just overwhelmed with the urgent life tasks that seem to dominate some (if not most) days.
Getting a Grip on Functional Fitness
Like most involved in the wellness and health worlds today, it seems like I’m singing the praises of and talking details about functional fitness just about every day.
I like to keep things direct and simple, and define (more or less) functional fitness as movement and exercise that’s geared toward improving our body’s ability to complete often complex life tasks we face routinely, as opposed to building, for example, the biggest biceps or triceps possible, or trimming seconds off a timed run or swim.
Functional fitness implies personalization. We’re all unique in terms of our specific physical construct, metabolism, and psyche; the tasks we complete as part of our home and work days are different and unique to us, as is our play.
Why wouldn’t we optimally build out an exercise routine that is designed to peak our performance of both these daily tasks and our play?
Yet so often we try and force our bodies to grind through training routines that aren’t necessarily functionally targeted, that might isolate and build impressive individual muscles yet leave us woefully unconditioned and unprepared for various challenges we face in the real world every day.
[I’m always reminded of an interview I read years ago back in the infancy of triathlon competitions; one of the earliest heroes of the sport, Mark Allen, noted in an interview that despite his being a champion swimmer at the collegiate level, he found himself woefully unprepared early in his career to meet the challenges of cycling and running.]
Functional fitness focuses on core strength, balance and stability, functional strength, solid cardio (without overtraining), and multi-planar, multi-muscle (often arm, trunk, and leg together) movements and exercise.
There’s no magic program to simply plug into; as noted above, functional fitness implies personalization to the demands your life puts on you. At the most basic level, Mark Sisson’s 4 Essential Movements of the Primal Blueprint could be a great place to start, though we’ll be talking a great deal more about functional fitness over the next months.
It’s time to get moving, and start building up your functional capacity and reserve. Life is all about function.
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