Maybe you’ve heard the term functional training thrown around in the conglomerate of fitness conversations you had with your trainer and dismissed it as another fad.
After all, there is always something new coming out – some diet or some fitness trend that usually doesn’t work for the long-term. Functional training is not one of these fads. It works.
Functional training is greatly beneficial when you have extremely specific fitness goals.
It’s a type of training that will not only help you get into the best shape of your life but will allow you to move more efficiently in everyday life.
Plus, it’s suitable for anyone no matter what their fitness level is.
In this article, you’ll learn what functional training is and ten functional training benefits your trainer didn’t tell you about.
What is Functional Training?
The simple definition of functional training is training that has a function, or a purpose.
Essentially, instead of simply improving fitness, you have a specific goal in mind.
You do patterned movements that improve your efficiency of that particular goal.
The goal doesn’t have to be related to athletics or extreme fitness. It could be as simple as making it easier to do your job.
For example, if you want to get better at lifting things off the floor, you would perform moves that would specifically workout the muscles you would use to do those movements.
Functional training isn’t about isolation, it’s about grouping muscles and movements together.
10 Functional Training Benefits Your Trainer Never Told You About
1. It Improves Coordination And Balance
In the real world, you don’t rely on machines to give you proper form to do things. If you want to pick up your toddler, you pick them up.
If you want to push a cart full of groceries, you do it. If you’re playing football, you simply go out there and use your skill and strength to dominate the field.
You do all of this and more, every day, without the aid of any type of machine.
In order to do these activities and more, you must keep yourself balanced and coordinated on your own two feet.
Functional training helps to improve your balance and coordination by avoiding exercise machines.
The exercises you do in functional training use body weight and perhaps free weights.
This way, you practice movements in a functional manner that are close to everyday movements.
It improves your balance, stability, and coordination in the stances that matter the most.
2. It Makes Your Body More Efficient
Traditional exercises isolate certain muscles.
There is nothing wrong with doing that.
In fact, you’ll be strengthening areas of your body which will still help with everyday activities.
However, you’re not teaching your muscles to work together as one. In real life, you use more than one group of muscles at the time.
In fact, most of the time you’re probably using almost all of your muscles at one time. While they may be individually strong, you’ve had no practice using them as a team.
Imagine a football team where each player practices individually. Game day comes, and they enter the field as a team for the first time.
It’s impossible to coordinate with people you’ve never played with before
Functional training focuses on movements and exercises that allow your muscles to practice working together.
You’ll still be strengthening the individual muscles, but your body will become more efficient at working as a whole instead of individual areas.
3. It Prevents And Rehabs Injuries
When one part of the body is weak, stress can often be transferred to another part of the body to compensate for the lack of strength.
This can create an injury because the compensating part of the body isn’t trained to handle that type of stress.
Unfortunately, this happens often because people don’t practice functional training.
Functional training is often used to rehabilitate injured athletes. It’s very effective at healing muscles while simultaneously training them to avoid further injury.
Functional training is also suitable for non-athletes who are recovering from an injury.
It’s also a great way to prevent injuries from occurring in the first place.
This is especially helpful for adolescent athletes because 40% of all sports-related injuries occur in adolescents.
In a study published in the British Journal of Medicine, it was found that a preseason conditioning program in which female adolescent athletes worked on flexibility, strength, power and landing mechanics resulted in less knee-related injuries over the sports season.
This is just one example of how functional training aids in injury prevention.
4. It Improves Your Posture
Functional training makes your body work better as a whole, so it makes sense that it can improve your posture.
As you strengthen your back muscles, they’re able to support your upper body better. You’ll quickly find it easier to stand or sit straight instead of hunching over.
A lot of people suffer from poor posture. Poor posture has a lot of negative consequences. Some of these include:
- Back pain
- Painful muscles
- Spinal curve development
- Misalignment of the vertebra
- Constriction of nerve and blood vessels
According to Harvard Health, poor posture can even cause incontinence, constipation, and poor digestion.
These three problems alone should be enough to make everyone want to do functional training to improve their posture.
As your posture improves, so will alignment of joints in your body. You may find yourself standing better, walking better, lifting better and more.
Certain movements and positions will no longer feel awkward and you’ll have less back and joint pain.
5. You’ll Become More in Tuned With Your Body
Maybe you’ve heard the saying, “I know it like the back of my hand!” Most people can’t honestly say this about their bodies because they aren’t in tune with them.
They don’t know what their bodies can handle and what they can’t (which is how injuries occur).
It’s very concerning knowing that you may be performing activities every day without knowing how much your body can take.
Sure, you can isolate certain muscles and build that strength, but you’ll rarely ever use just one muscle to do something.
What you need to know is how your whole body works together to handle activities. It’s preferable that you know this before you exceed your limit and throw your back out.
Functional training is the best way to get in tune with your body.
Through functional training, you’ll learn what you’re capable of and what you need to work on for real life, everyday applications.
6. It Increases Your Range of Motion
Functional training requires you to move your muscles in many different directions and patterns which results in you flexing and stretching your muscles in a variety of ways.
This helps to improve your range of motion. It also increases flexibility.
Having a large range of motion can help progress your fitness level even more. This allows you to work even more of your muscles without as many limitations.
A full range of motion gives you better muscle balance, proper usage of the working muscles, and excellent stability of the joints.
You’ll have an overall higher quality of movement during exercise and in everyday life.
Having a full range of motion is incredibly important for people who are limited in movement throughout the day, such as people who have desk jobs.
Due to the limited mobility, joints can get stiff and lose flexibility.
Practicing functional training ensures that they keep their range of motion.
7. It Helps to Improve Your Explosive Power
Explosive power is the ability to put forth maximum power in a minimal amount of time. In other words, you need to be really strong, really fast, and able to demonstrate that strength quickly.
Examples of people who need explosive power are sprinters, competitive swimmers, powerlifters, football players, cyclists, and speed skaters.
Functional training is an excellent way to improve your explosive strength.
To build explosive strength, you need to be able to put forth maximum effort, move fast, and use lighter weights (as opposed to using heavier weights to build muscle).
The movements also need to be concentric. This isn’t something you’ll be able to do with machines.
Of course, overall strength helps because you’ll be able to increase the amount of weight that feels light to you.
In this case, combining functional training with traditional strength training can be beneficial.
8. It Improves Your Cardiovascular Endurance
In order to improve your cardiovascular endurance, you need to do one thing more: move.
Traditional exercises help with this, but functional training can help a lot more.
Functional training is all about movement, so it’s the perfect solution to building cardiovascular endurance.
Traditional machines keep you in a stationary position with the exception of rowing machines and treadmills.
Even though ellipticals and exercise bikes are great choices for cardio, they have you exercising in place. This builds your cardio endurance, but not very efficiently for real-world applications.
This doesn’t mean you should quit using cardio machines. They serve a purpose just like anything else you do. Instead, try combining these machines with functional training.
Functional fitness addresses this by adding the real-world movement into traditional cardio and strength-training exercises.
Exercising like this increases your cardiovascular endurance more than you could ever expect.
9. It Gives You a Competitive Advantage
If you’re an athlete of any type, your main goal is to win. You would likely do anything within the rules of the sport to bring home a victory.
After all, that’s why you train so hard and that’s the whole point of competing.
Functional training can give you a competitive advantage because, as efficient as it is, many people still do traditional exercises.
Many athletes are still focusing on their strength instead of on their movement. This makes them strong, but not very fast. Not only that, but it only makes them strong in certain areas.
If you participate in functional training, you’ll be putting yourself on a fitness level that other people can’t touch.
Even if they begin functional training later, you’ll be further along so you’ll still have the advantage of the functional training benefits. It pays to be ahead of the game.
10. It’s a Low-Impact Exercise Suitable For Everyone
Not everyone can go to the gym and go hard. The average person is a non-athlete and they’re simply trying to stay in shape, not raise the bar.
Functional training allows them to tailor the exercises to their specific goals while still efficiently working out.
There are many people who need low-impact exercises.
Examples are seniors, people with mobility issues or injuries, beginners, morbidly obese people who need to ease into exercise, or people with joint pain.
Functional training is suitable for anyone of any age.
Final Thoughts About Functional Training Benefits
One of the biggest functional training benefits is getting better at everyday tasks.
You’d be surprised at how much stress you’ll be taking off of your body by just getting better at living. Doing this can be enough to keep you physically fit without excessive effort.
With so many amazing benefits, it’s surprising that more trainers don’t incorporate functional training into their programs.
However, functional training is becoming more and more popular. Ask your trainer about adding functional fitness to your exercise regimen or create your own program.
Either way, you’ll be glad you did when you see how much easier it is to navigate your daily life.
