Functional fitness is one of the latest buzzwords in fitness trends, and for good reason. Functional fitness not only makes you stronger, fitter, and more agile, but one of the specific aims of functional fitness is to help you become more capable with everyday tasks. When it comes to workouts that are fun and practical, functional fitness leads the way. Functional training programs are focused on holistic goals promoting healthy living, and so produce the best outcomes not only for daily life but also for objective fitness skills. Coordinating exercise and diet helps to produce even more clear benefits for functional training, leading to better overall health. Here we look at 5 ways functional training programs work to improve your health and boost your quality of life.
Functional Fitness Aids Daily Tasks
Have you ever spent weeks on a training program at the gym lifting weights and training specific muscles, then find yourself out of breath while running to the bus stop? Gym focused training programs, especially those that involve machine-specific exercises, often only help you to lift a certain amount of weight rather than helping you function better in daily life.
A functional training program is specifically designed to train you for competence in daily tasks and activities. This kind of training helps you to not only build muscle strength, but a range of important fitness skills that help you to feel fitter and live with greater ease and wellbeing.
Functional Training lower leg Promotes Muscle Synergy
While gym training and weight training focus on developing specific muscles and muscle groups, functional training programs provide a total body workout. Because functional fitness works on whole body exercises, it trains muscles to work together for greater total body strength, fitness and balance. This muscular synergy actually helps you to be stronger and more agile, as all the muscles of the body work together to create efficient movement.
Functional Fitness Boosts Core Strength
Many gym based exercise programs are great for building muscle and perfecting certain movements, but they don’t often take total body strength into account. One of the major issues with strength training is that it often focuses on larger, major muscle groups such as biceps/triceps, hamstrings/quads and abdominals/back, without developing the smaller core muscle groups. Because functional fitness trains the body using whole body movements, these programs better train your inner core muscles, preparing your body for the rigors of daily life.
Functional Training Coordinates Fitness Skills
Developing great fitness means building more than just strength, muscle mass or endurance. True fitness means cultivating all ten fitness skills, which include endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, agility, balance, coordination and accuracy. Because of the integrated and diverse range of training activities functional workouts provide, you have a greater opportunity to cultivate the full spectrum of fitness skills, rather than just one or two.
Functional Training Builds Real Endurance
While ‘endurance training’ usually means slogging it out or a treadmill or exercise bike for hours at a time, real endurance is the ability to keep up with an array of different activities, as well as the challenge of our busy lives. This is the direct focus of functional training programs – to provide workouts that are fun and also prepare you for the challenges and strains of everyday life. Helping you to feel energized, fit, and well, in addition to creating positive body changes, is the sign of a truly beneficial exercise program.
Cultivating functional fitness is the ideal way to boost strength, endurance and total body fitness in a practical, rewarding and dynamic way. Working with a skilled personal trainer or local gym on a functional training program targeted to your needs can help you see the results you want in your body and fitness in less time.