Functional Fitness

Why do you want to get in shape?

Is it to be stronger, or have greater endurance, or fend off injury and aging, or lose weight, or simply look better? If you’re like most people, more than one of those reasons applies to you. For me, probably every one of those reasons was part of my decision to improve my health. But how do we get there? How do we get from Point A, existing through a sedentary and unhealthy lifestyle, to Point B, actually living every day to the fullest with a strong body and mind?

Walk into your local health club and you’ll see lots of people using one of the most popular methods out there: lifting weights. Biceps curls, leg extensions, triceps kickbacks...I can pretty much guarantee that wherever you are right now, there are people at a gym near you doing those exact moves. Unfortunately for them, that is NOT the most effective way to get from Point A to Point B.

The reason so many people try to get in shape by lifting weights, but ultimately get discouraged and stop, is because they’re doing small isolation movements that will have almost no effect on their body as a whole. Sure, biceps curls will give you stronger biceps, but will they make you stronger overall or help you reach your target weight? No, not really. This brings me to my topic for this entry: functional fitness.

Functional fitness is an umbrella term for exercises meant to improve your overall fitness and athletic ability. It refers to exercises that mimic everyday movements. Think about those biceps curls for a moment. How often do you perform that movement in everyday life? I don’t know about you, but personally I’m seldom called upon to hold a weight in my hands and curl it upward. I’m a lot more likely to have to move a box from one room to another, or be crawling on the floor trying to plug a computer cord into a power bar. This is where functional fitness comes in: by training all those different parts of your body to work as a unit, you become better at everything.

And it’s not about building the most muscle possible. Jon Hotten is a British journalist who followed professional bodybuilders around for a year while writing “Muscle: A Writer's Trip Through a Sport With No Boundaries". In one passage he describes seeing Ronnie Coleman move around. Coleman was one of the most successful professional bodybuilders in history, winning the prestigious Mr. Olympia eight times (and beating Arnold Schwarzenegger’s record of seven wins in the process). If anyone should be the picture of strength and fitness, surely it should be Ronnie Coleman. Turns out, he wasn’t. This quote describes Coleman on the competition stage, where you would think he'd be at his physical peak:

"Ronnie was back in line after a couple of call-outs. Big Ron stood semi-tense, breathing heavily. He kept towelling sweat from his shaven head with a white cloth. He drank water from a large bottle. He looked up at the ceiling several times. He appeared tired and unfit. His stomach was pretty big. Dorian (Dorian Yates, another bodybuilding legend) had told me that it was permanently uncomfortable hauling all of that bulk about. The heart was working hard. So was the metabolism and the digestive system. It was all high maintenance in there. Dorian had taken Ronnie to a restaurant...He said that Ronnie had struggled with the walk there."

How is it that someone of Coleman’s obvious physical development had trouble just standing on stage, or walking to a restaurant? There’s no doubt bodybuilders are strong; Hotten wrote how Yates would lift a total of 92,430 lbs over the course of one leg workout. But none of that strength is truly functional. Sure, building muscle is part of functional fitness, but it’s not the only part. A person who runs 100-mile ultramarathons might be in spectacular cardiovascular shape, but probably couldn’t bench press 100 lbs. The key is to treat your body and your health more like an orchestra and less like a solo performer. If every member of the orchestra is at their best, the group will make beautiful music. But no matter how good a solo trumpeter might be, he’ll never compare to the sound of strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion all coming together as one.

There’s another benefit to functional fitness training as well: when you get your entire body involved in exercise through cardio, weights, flexibility and core work, you stoke your metabolism. This means your body’s furnace burns hotter. So not only does your ability to clean the garage, do the yardwork, and chase your kids around get better, you also burn more calories 24 hours a day.

If I’ve convinced you of the importance of functional fitness, you might be wondering how to achieve it. The answer can be summed up in one word: variety. You need to do many different things so that your body is constantly challenged in different ways. I recently started a functional program that I really like. Here’s my schedule:

Monday: Speed and Agility training
Tuesday: Core training
Wednesday: Upper Body weight training
Thursday: Plyometrics (jump training)
Friday: Yoga
Saturday: Total Body strength workout
Sunday: Rest

Every day, I’m doing something different. I start with speed training, then mid-section, then upper body, then lower body, then yoga, and then finish with a full-body strength workout. I’m not isolating bodyparts or ignoring entire areas of my fitness. By including a bit of everything, I’m ensuring full, balanced development of my body and mind as parts of a unified whole. No, I’ll never look like Ronnie Coleman. But that’s ok. He might have bigger muscles, but I know I have a better, stronger, healthier body. You can too.