What Is Functional Fitness?

Functional fitness is focused on improving how our bodies work in natural daily activities. We use our bodies in so many ways simply living our lives day to day. Taking stairs, carrying groceries, walking pets, all tax our bodies differently. Functional fitness takes these movements and incorporates them into specialized high-intensity training that improves our bodies for activities both in and outside the gym.

How Does Functional Fitness Work

The focus is all about improved daily function. The more often you perform an activity, the easier your body and mind is able to approach that action. Some of the most common physical activities are lifting, bending, pulling, pushing, and rotation. For this reason, functional fitness is designed to improve and condition our bodies to perform these movements with strength and precision. 

Benefits Of Functional Fitness

Functional Fitness is built around compound movements. You don’t focus on just your biceps or thighs but instead your entire core, or back, or legs. Because of this, you will be improving primary and secondary muscle groups simultaneously. This lets your body grow in strength and stability evenly as you progress.

You progress faster. Focusing on functional movement involves working several muscle groups simultaneously. This allows your body to work as one cohesive unit instead of isolated muscles and lifts. When every part of the body is working in the same direction, the progress you can make increases as you improve. With functional fitness, parts of your body don’t need to catch up before you can move forward. Instead, your ability has improved evenly allowing you to continue to improve.

Fewer Injuries – The most common injuries are caused by imbalances between parts of the body. Isolated lifting focuses on specific muscle groups, but often ignores the countless muscles we use for stability. This imbalance is not an issue in Functional Fitness. By building movements based on how our bodies function in the real world, we increase capabilities not just in specific movements, but in movements in general. When we work to keep our bodies evenly fit, we also train our body to work together and to function safely while pushing ourselves.