Fitness Minutes 19: Fitness for Real Life!

Whether you are doing housework chores or working on a mini home renovation, an amount of physical stress is placed on the body. If your body is not properly conditioned, you are likely to experience nagging aches and pains. Therefore it is important to be functionally strong enough to handle such real-life situations.

Being functional strong simply means training with the purpose of gaining strength that is applicable to real life functions. In short you are training for the sake of improving the rest of your life — instead of just for vanity reasons (i.e. having bulging biceps).

Most people spend most of their workout time on NON functional exercises such as shoulder press and bicep curls with weight machines. These exercises isolate only one muscle and does not involve the use of others. Is there a real life situation whereby this ever happens? NEVER! -because our bodies always works as a "unit" in real life and never in isolation.

Compare the machine shoulder press where you sit on your butt in a back-supported chair and press overhead two handles attached to a lever, with what actually happens in real life where if you were to press a weight overhead, or exert a force in that direction, you would not be in a seated position and the item you are pressing overhead (i.e., a child or crate) would not be supported by a lever. Furthermore, the machine moves straight up and down, whereas a free object moves in countless planes of motion (i.e., up and down, side to side, around).

So What is a Functional Exercise?

A great example will be the squat, which involves the entire body. Majority of the movement comes from the leg muscles - quadriceps, hips, hamstring and glutes. The core and shoulder acts as stabilizers to the movement. This is applicable to real-life when you are sitting down or getting out of the chair; squatting down to pick up an object from the floor.

When comparing functional exercises to using fitness machines, the latter restricts the movement of the body and hence decreases the use of stabilizer muscles and at times isolates muscles as previously mentioned.

Here are the movement patterns that a good functional training session should include together with examples of the exercises that you can perform.

If you would like to train functionally without bulky equipment of going to the gym, you may want to consider using the TRX Suspension Trainer, one of the most functional and versatile training tool that can be used almost anywhere. The TRX easily attaches to any secure structure such as poles and beams and all the exercises performed with this piece of equipment are functional! 

I would like to end off with a quote by Annette Lang, Reebok Alliance which sums up the importance of functional fitness, “When we lose the ability to move in full and uninhibited ranges of motion, the quality of life, sport, and work are decreased.”

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Health and Energy
 
Hansen Bay
Coach (Life & Wellness Coaching)
BA P.E. (S'pore) NTU
Dip Hypnotheraphy (USA) NGH,IMDHA,IACT
www.vitagefitness.com
"The First Wealth is Health"-Ralph Waldo Emerson