There’s been a lot of talk about functional fitness lately, but what is it and what does it do? Functional fitness prepares your body for real-life movements, making daily tasks easier and more efficient. According to the Mayo Clinic, functional fitness focuses on simulating common actions like squatting, reaching, and lifting, enhancing your body’s ability to navigate everyday life.
Unlike traditional strength training, which often isolates muscle groups using machines, functional fitness emphasizes building strength for real-world activities. You may excel at lifting heavy weights in the gym but struggle with practical tasks like getting up off the floor or picking up a child. If this resonates with you, integrating functional fitness into your routine could be beneficial.
Functional training typically uses compound movements, meaning you bend at multiple joints and recruit several muscle groups to achieve the movement. If you think about how you move throughout the day, you might notice that rarely do you just bend one joint in one plane of motion to accomplish any movement.
Functional fitness is not just as trend; it’s a practical approach to improving your quality of life, By focusing on movements that reflect everyday activities, you can boost your strength, balance, and coordination while making daily tasks easier. Who doesn’t want that?
At Say Fitness, our trainers can help you seamlessly incorporate functional fitness into your workouts. As you add more functional exercises to your workouts, you should see improvements in your ability to perform your everyday activities. That’s quite a return on your exercise investment!