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Ever thought about hiring a personal trainer but worried you’d be too inflexible — or in too much pain — to make it worthwhile? Millions of people feel pain doing everyday tasks like going up and down stairs, reaching overhead or bending to pick something up off the floor — even some who think they’re in great shape.
Whatever is keeping you (or someone you know) from moving as comfortably as you’d like — injury, arthritis or other chronic conditions, overtraining, joint surgery — functional fitness may help.
You may have heard this personal training buzz term. Functional fitness has made headlines in The New York Times, on MSNBC, and in SHAPE and other fitness magazines. And both the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Council on Exercise named it one of the biggest fitness trends of 2007.
So what is functional fitness, and could you benefit?
Functional fitness defined
Best known for bridging the gap between personal training and physical therapy, functional fitness is designed “to restore yourself back to how you were designed to move,” says biomechanics expert Katy Santiago, M.S., director of the Restorative Exercise™ Institute in Ventura, Calif. She developed the Restorative Exercise series as part of her goal to educate the public and the healthcare community about “proactive, biomechanical holistic exercise that enhances movements needed to keep our body machinery working as long as possible.”
“Functional fitness training gives you the ability to do everything you need to do in your daily life without pain,” agrees Indea Leo, a trainer at Sam Iannetta’s Functional Fitness and Wellness Center in Boulder, Colo. In short, it’s exercising to improve the way your body works.
How are functional fitness exercises different from other workouts?
The link between functional fitness and physical therapy may conjure images of being strapped into clinical-looking contraptions — but the tools of a functional trainer include familiar equipment you’ve seen at the gym: stability or balance balls, medicine balls, kettlebells, wobble boards, half-balls, foam rollers, hula hoops, yoga blocks, resistance bands or tubes, and standard free weights.
Some of these tools of the trade hint at one way functional fitness and restorative exercise are different from standard workouts: They place a lot of emphasis on balance, requiring the body to activate smaller stabilizer muscles not used in many other forms of exercise.
Functional fitness differs from standard workouts in two other important ways: Rather than emphasizing a certain number of repetitions of each exercise, a functional fitness trainer will likely focus more on your level of effort, comfort and improvement of any physical conditions or limitations. And functional fitness emphasizes working several areas of the body at once, rather than isolating a particular muscle or group of muscles, as with bicep curls.
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