Yesterday you had a great workout at the gym, where you bench-pressed more weight than ever before, and pulled enough weight on the seated rowing machine. Today, you lifted a 60-pound suitcase to carry it downstairs and threw 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?
Functional fitness focuses on building a body capable of doing real-life activities in real-life positions, not just pushing or pulling a certain amount of weight in an ideal posture created by a gym machine.
The machine might be ergonomically designed and you will not injure other parts of your body while you perform, but still, training with free weights trains your whole body more effectively.
The key to functional exercise is integration.
Conventional weight training performed on a machine isolates one or two muscle groups, but it doesn't teach the muscle groups you're isolating to work with others. 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.
It’s about teaching all the muscles to work together rather than isolating them to work one at a time.
An example of a functional exercise
Think of a bent-over row; not the kind you do on a seated machine, but 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 also build the muscles that the seated row will, and in addition stabilise the trunk, shoulders, arms, and because of its nature, the whole body.
Compare that motion to a carpenter bending over a piece of wood and using an axe blade, a nurse bending over a bed to transfer a patient, or an auto-mechanic bending over to adjust your carburettor.
Contrast that with the seated row: You’re seated comfortably with your legs pressing against a pad and you pull two levers close to your body, You may be strengthening your upper back muscles, but your body’s not learning anything more because you don’t need to activate your core stabiliser muscles (trunk muscles) or the stabilisers of your arms and shoulders because the machine is helping your body to do the job.
Another example: You could lie down on a leg-press machine and press more than your body weight but this does not mean that you have the muscular control for a 20 inch high-step up because you may not have the stability or the muscles working together. That’s why, when we walk downstairs or reach up to get something out of a high cabinet, a lot of us experience pain at the knee and lower back.
In functional fitness, you should be standing on your own two feet and supporting your own weight when you lift, push and pull anything.
Getting started : You might want to forget about the weights entirely at first. Your first step should be to teach your body to control and balance its own weight. Start with simple movements with high step-ups, squats, lunges for your lower body, pushing and pulling by standing and also some exercises to improve balance and trunk stability.
Once you can control and balance your own body weight, then you can start working with added weights. Hold a heavy medicine ball or a 5 kg dumbbell and try to step up. That’s challenging your total body integration, and teaching the upper body to hold some weight and work with the lower body.
Incorporate a lot of functional workouts into your routine. Jumping into functional exercise may startle some people who have worked on machines alone.
It’s a lot harder too because functional exercise is much more neurologically demanding than machine exercises.
Don’t try to go too fast because the longer you've been away from exercise, the more time it takes to build your body back up.
Bhaskar is a fitness professional. Read more about fitness on his website >www.60minuteworkouts.com
