Is Your Fitness Program Hindering Your Performance?

If you take your exercise seriously and/or if you have a personal trainer in your life, you would certainly have heard the term 'Functional Fitness Training'.

Functional Training originated with exercise rehabilitation but has been transformed in recent years by some of the world’s premier trainers and coaches into the most progressive form of athletic training available. Today it is used by all of the top trainers, therapists and coaches around the globe to maximise the performance of their clients, patients and athletes.

Body Building on the other hand is a method of training that has been used for many years to simply hypertrophy (grow) muscle. The unfortunate outcome of using a body building methodology to enhance your fitness is that you end up with large muscles that look great but don't have very much in the way of practical strength or performance value. Basically they look good but perform badly outside of a controlled environment, aka the gym.

These days, many people use gyms and trainers to develop better strength, lose body fat and of course improve movement performance, which incidentally isn't restricted to just athletes. In fact some non-athletes are actually more athletic than the athletes themselves. (Yes it's ok to re-read that one)

Let's look at the overall performance criteria of a rower for example. These guys and gals are in their own way great athletes. They develop great strength with both endurance and power output capabilities and of course have a high cardiovascular requirement to ensure they get their boat of choice across the finish line in a decent time.

Now let’s look at a carpenter as a non athletic example. A carpenter doesn’t need a high level of cardio fitness to perform his/her job and as I have a few good mates as nail pounders I know that a good majority would probably fall over dead if you asked them to run 5 km.

Carpenters do however perform great feats of strength, balance, coordination and agility every single work day. Imagine for example having to hammer in the frame work for a house for the next 5 days. Sounds like fun huh. Now add to that carrying long pieces of wood over uneven terrain and then having to nail it into place over your head… Hmmm. Now imagine that to get there you have to climb, with the 12 foot piece of wood, up a ladder and then balance on one leg over the frame work 15 feet in the air. Now add in a wet and windy day. Now do that ALL day long.

Both of these activities have their own aspects of athleticism and performance values that they need to develop. Unfortunately they are both more likely to try and achieve better performance from lifting weights like a body builder.

Listen to me people This training method is soooo last year.

Isolating your muscles during training and then putting them under increasing loads as in a bicep curl, triceps extension or a hamstring curl machine is a great way to make that muscle group bigger and stronger for that particular movement or exercise. Put yourself on a soccer field, up a ladder or in the garden pulling weeds and rest assured that all that work in the gym has very little functional benefit or carry over to your ‘real world’ activity.

In fact the lack of coordination, balance and agility development that occurs from isolating muscle groups will most likely create dysfunctional movement patterns, which in turn can cause both poor performance and injuries, both in and out of a competitive environment.

In basic terms functional training means adopting the movement patterns which are useful to you OUTSIDE of a gym environment and then adapting them into a controlled training routine. This can be done with dumbbells, barbells, medicine balls, band and pulley systems, step up blocks, pull up bars or rings and some cardio equipment.

Notice there is no fixed weight machines in that list. (I.e. Pec Deck or Leg Extension machine)

If you are interested in how your body works and performs while playing recreational or professional sport, performing ‘athletic’ work duties, playing with your grandchildren or backpacking around Europe then you should look at investing a little of your time into Functional Fitness Training. Not only will you feel and perform all manner of physical tasks better but it just also happens to be the best method I’ve come across with regards to changing the shape of my clients through sculpting muscle and burning excess body fat.

I call that a win, win and win again training method.

duncan