5 Reasons You Need to Start Incorporating Functional Training into Your Fitness Routine

Did you know a walking lunge can train your body for climbing stairs or a steep hill? Or that a squat trains the muscles used when you rise up and down from a chair or to pick up low objects?

Our everyday activities rely on Functional Training (Wikipedia: Functional training attempts to adapt or develop exercises which allow individuals to perform the activities of daily life more easily and without injuries.), so we move our bodies with purpose. Functional Training exercises typically involve weight-bearing activities, compound movements and multi-planar movement patterns that train your muscles to work together while stabilizing and strengthening the core.

Where traditional exercise isolates certain muscles, Functional Training prepares us for everyday activities such as walking, squatting to pick up a child, pulling a door open, competing in a sport, or enhancing your overall fitness.

When looking for new things to incorporate into your wellness routine, look no further than Functional Training. Here are 5 reasons you need to start incorporating Functional Training into your workouts!

 1. Strengthens Your Core

Almost all functional exercises incorporate your core muscles - even if the focus is on another part of your body. For example, when you correctly execute a plank, you are strengthening your arms, glutes, and legs; improving your posture and alignment; and enhancing your endurance and stability while training your core. Engaging your core is critically important as it increases your stability, protects your organs and central nervous system, strengthens and reduces pain in your back, and improves your posture. Friends don’t let friends forget about their core!

2. Decreases 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. Practicing compound movements that strengthen multiple muscles together will greatly reduce this risk. Don’t know where to start? Here’s a classic compound exercise to get started with!

3. Increases Range of Motion

Functional training requires you to move your muscles in many different directions and patterns which results in flexing, stretching, and strengthening your muscles in a variety of ways. This helps to improve your range of motion and flexibility while having a large range of motion can help progress your overall fitness level greatly.

4. Decreases Back Pain

Functional training focuses on strengthening the core and increasing mobility to support and stabilize the spinal cord and back muscles. Developing strength and stability in your hips, core, and back promotes better posture, which in turn decreases back pain. Bye, bye WFH computer hunch!

5. Increases Strength, Speed, and Fitness Level

Focusing on traditional strength training makes you strong, but not very fast. Not only that, but it only makes you strong in certain areas. If you introduce Functional Training into your workouts, you’ll be putting yourself on a fitness level that other people can’t touch! 

 Never deviated from the treadmill or squat rack? Dip your toe into the world of Functional Training with this simple workout you can do at home or at the gym! Try this HIIT workout from our Snap Fitness Trainers!

Blog submitted by Aktiv Solutions. At Aktiv®, we amplify functional training spaces with premium equipment and digital guidance powering today’s most sought after workouts. Our mission is to establish safe, functional, and engaging spaces, while our clients deliver inspirational exercise experiences. Gym Rax® is the world’s leading fitness rigging solution for modular storage and suspension. Integrating the principles of functional fitness with the technical expertise of functional design is our calling.