Formosa Fitness

There’s been a lot of talk lately about functional fitness and as a trainer who specializes in functional fitness, I mostly welcome the discussion. The problem is, like any new thing that comes along, some of the details get lost in the excitement of the discovery of the new thing. When the shiny newness wears off, will there be anything left? This article will hopefully lead a few to look past the outside and understand what functional fitness is really about. Functional fitness is fitness that stresses quality of movement over muscles. We train movements, not biceps. We don’t break the body down into segments but instead use whole body movements. Leg curls get replaced with deadlifts, tricep extensions get replaced with overhead press. For people used to doing bodybuilding training, functional fitness is a very foreign idea. Single joint exercises get replaced with multiple joint exercises in functional fitness. The basic movements of the human body break down into a few simple categories: squat, deadlift, lunge, push, pull, twist, walk/run, and jump. That’s it. Any type of functional fitness must start from these movement basics in order to be considered functional fitness. The potential benefit of this type of training for most everyone is enormous since every movement you make every day is a combination of one of the above movements. People that intelligently adopt functional training often find that knee, back, and shoulder pain clears up very quickly. Fat loss also happens quickly do to the amount of muscle used in these multi-joint exercises. Conditioning rapidly improves due to the whole-body exercises used. The list of benefits could go on and on. Functional fitness really is a revolution in fitness programming. Unfortunately, getting stronger and better in basic movements proved a bit too….well…basic for some trainers. The basic workout template was expanded to include a lot of silly ideas. In the US and other Western countries where functional training started, functional training rapidly drew criticism from strength coaches and athletic trainers who had been using functional fitness training for years, for good reason.

The problem was the introduction of a lot of silly gadgets that somehow had the idea of functional fitness attached to them. A great example is the Swiss or stability ball. In a physical therapy setting, the stability ball helped patients build their stabilizer muscles so they could recover from their injuries sooner. Some trainers made the leap of therefore including it in nearly every exercise they were doing. For example, doing squats on a stability ball.

Or doing curls with 5lbs. weight on the ball.

These examples are ridiculous because the same core stability could be gained from actually doing an exercise like squats but with heavy weights and on a stable surface. Doing weighted squats on a ball makes them dangerous and adds nothing to the exercise. It’s just a gimmick that fools people into thinking they’re working harder. Other current functional fitness gimmicks include shake weights and vibration plates.

These gimmicks supposedly help people lose weight and look great in just minutes a day, but even when they’re used with real exercises, the product actually gets in the way of progress. The gimmick, not the movement, becomes the focus on the program. Therefore, the customers’ movements do NOT get better, nor are they able to lift more weight or do progressively more reps after using these products. In short, these products take away the effectiveness of functional fitness. Functional fitness as a method of physical fitness programming has now become a joke due to the flood of largely worthless gimmicks that seem to come out every month. Body Blade, VIPr, Bosu balls, wobble boards, Body Bar, light weight bands, Wii fit, etc. all promise to get you in great shape and be the only tool you need for fitness. But it never works out that way. You never end up looking like the 20-year-old model using the product in the ads because he or she never used that product to look like that either.

Unfortunately, functional fitness has become nothing but a marketing tool to sell people an endless stream of worthless fitness gadgets. These gadgets actually prevent people from getting into shape by using the simple movements the body was meant to make. If you want to get in shape the functional way, pick up tools that have been around for a long time and that have a proven record of getting solid results. If your trainer talks about the latest functional fitness gadget they think you should buy, then ask them if they themselves got in shape with that gadget. They likely didn’t. Does the trainer even use it themselves to work out? Probably not. We need to take back functional fitness from the marketers who are just out to sell gadgets to the public. Functional fitness has real potential to turn people’s loves around by getting them stronger at the basic motions they do every day like picking stuff up off the floor and putting it over head, picking up their children, moving heavyfurniture, etc. But that can only happen if we put the toys away.