Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Functional fitness
Okay, I don’t want to hear any groaning. You all know that exercise, activity, something along the lines of fitness is part of the being healthy equation. I don’t even care if you eat perfect day in and day out. You don’t move, you lose!
A new term relating to physical health is “functional fitness.” What does that mean? Well, functional fitness involves training that actually works on what your body needs to do, not just muscle-building or toning exercises that might leave you looking good but not help when you actually need to perform tasks that require your muscles. Even something as simple as lifting requires you to be functionally fit — unless you want to throw your back out.
I realized the need for functional fitness a couple years ago while helping my daughter move. Even though I’m active and work out at a gym, I realized that carrying boxes up four flights of stairs (yes, she had to move to the fourth floor of a place with no elevator!) was wiping me out. I was stunned! How could I spend all that time strength training and on cardio equipment and still be panting like an overheated puppy?
Functional fitness — that’s how I see it. I had fitness to a degree but not functional fitness. What I was doing in the gym didn’t translate to real world needs. That’s when I realized I had to do something different. Now, I can manage those four flights a lot easier!
When you concentrate on functional fitness, you train your muscles to work as they need to work, not to get stronger in isolation of each other. Fitness experts note that any strength training you do on your own vs. assisted by a machine will incorporate a number of muscles at the same time, allowing your body to grow stronger in using those muscles the way they were meant to work.
Likewise, using something like a stability ball engages a variety of muscles while you go about your ab crunches and so on.
While functional fitness concentrates more on muscles working properly, I think that functional fitness also translates to cardio work. All that treadmill and cross trainer work — even with faster speeds and bumped up inclines — didn’t help when I needed to carry boxes up four flights of stairs repeatedly. Now, with hiking as one of my exercises, I can scale stairs because I hike hills. My body has learned how to carry itself uphill effectively.
Really, when you think about it, shouldn’t functional fitness truly be the goal? Yes, I know, in our body-conscious society, looking great in those skinny jeans ends up being the goal. While it’s fine to be proud of how you look, you actually need your body to be able to do what you want so you can enjoy life a lot more. Pains and aches and loss of function is, well, a pain!