Functional Fitness

Things are going great for you and your workouts, you are lifting more than ever before, going nuts on the cardio machines and able to leg press a half a ton. You go home from the gym and you are taking the garbage out and your back goes out on you. What happened? More than likely your training is not geared toward functional fitness. You might look great, ripped and toned but your not prepared to carry a case of water into your house, carry a load of fire wood or many other everyday activities.

Functional fitness focuses on building a body capable of doing real-life activities in real-life positions, not just lifting a certain amount of weight in an idealized posture created by a gym machine.

The main purpose of functional fitness is to teach the muscles to work together rather than isolating them to work independently.

A good example of a functional exercise is the squat. Not a leg press but a real squat, the kind of squat where you break parallel. We should be bending at the knees to pick things up and unfortunately things are on the floor a lot and not above parallel. If you train your body to squat in a partial range of motion when you go to lift something heavy below that range your risk of injury greatly increases.

For example the leg press, you may be strengthening certain muscles but your body is learning very little because you are not activating core stabilizer muscles.

In a good functional fitness class you should push, pull, run, throw, climb, lift, and
jump, effectively and safely.

Functional exercise is much more neurologically demanding than machine exercises. For this reason people jumping into functional fitness may be startled as it is harder than working with machines. But this is not a bad thing!!

Functional fitness classes are now available at Jim's Gym!! Contact us for more info. Your first week is free because it is something that has to be experienced. Hope to see you soon.