Are you walking back and forth in your living room pondering about how to lose weight? Keep walking. Walk faster. Walk while deliberately moving your body. Walk to break a sweat. Repeat this daily and you have already completed a whopping 10% of ‘Functional Fitness’ training.
Even though the term ‘Functional Fitness’ may sound like something that comes with a manual and a specialised degree, on the contrary, it is nothing but easy exercises that include movements such as lifting, bending, squatting, pushing, walking, and lunging. Such fitness routines prepare you for the things that you do in everyday life, that require proper form, strength, agility, and flexibility. For instance, lifting your heavy groceries without pulling a muscle. While most of us are hell-bent on losing weight either by following the advice of YouTube influencers (Chloe Ting anyone?) or googling ‘easy exercises for flat abs’, it is often difficult for us to walk their talk. Primarily because those exercises aren’t a daily occurrence in your everyday life. Subsequently, they demand you to be wringing yourself like a wet cloth just to lose some weight.
What is functional fitness?
Kimberly Maugeri; a certified athletic trainer and a pilates guru, defines functional fitness as developing a habit of “training and strengthening in positions you live and move in”. It is you doing simple exercises such as running, pushing, pulling, twisting, bending, and squatting in a high-intensity environment. These easy exercises target a variety of muscle groups to enhance overall body composition without isolating specific muscles. It may not be as flamboyant as lifting a dumbbell, but it will undoubtedly boost your daily life and also your gym-training activities. The most ideal starting point for a functional fitness workout is identifying parts in which you are lacking when it comes to your motion such as balancing your body or flexibility. When you kick start with the mentality of doing exercise for your betterment rather than as a burden, losing weight becomes much more interesting.
Functional fitness to lose weight
The trick to letting functional fitness become a permanent resident in your daily living style is to not let it barge in as an annoying stranger but to let it move in as your favourite roommate. This can only be done through the attitude that you adopt towards it. If you consider functional workout sessions as jarring exercises, you’ve lost the battle even before you have begun. But, if you view functional fitness as an extension of mundane movements that you are already acquainted with, you have got the game in the bag.
Because functional fitness zeros in on natural movement as opposed to machine-oriented exercises, inevitably your body weight becomes the main character. Therefore, the top priority of these exercises will be to improve your balance and maintain a strong body shape.
It is like functional fitness allows your brain to have a productive conversation with your muscles. This will ultimately lead to you discovering your body rhythm that enables shedding the excess pounds.
Amidst a multitude, two of the most popular functional training exercises that have gained traction overtime are:
- The Plank
Considered the MVP of homegrown exercises, the plank targets the core strength and the posture of your body. This may be subjectively categorised as an easy exercise because of its simple demeanour. But that does not imply that one can undermine the amount of brain and body control that goes into holding a plank for at least a minute. While the first 30 seconds may feel like a piece of cake, the last 30 seconds will have you in (good) pain and swimming in your sweat. The pros of holding a plank will be that it will help you lose your belly fat and as for cons? There are no cons when it comes to functional fitness training.
2. Squats
This exercise makes you stand on both legs and bend down, then back up again. By doing this on repeat and by doing variations of it, one can build an all-around functional lower body strength. Experts guarantee that squats will improve posture and strengthen your back, legs, hips, and even ankles. So the next time you squat to lift your gas cylinder, you will be aware of exactly what muscles to not tweak.
Benefits of functional fitness
Functional fitness focuses on the form. While losing weight may be the end game, the path to get there is to always prioritise form over weight. This is mainly because engaging in functional fitness can minimise the risk of injury by focusing on form.
It boosts calorie burn while widening the range of motions (which involves forward and backward movements, side-to-side and rotational) by engaging the entire body.
Functional Fitness capitalises on unilateral training. This is because human beings are a unilateral species. Even the simple act of walking is a unilateral activity. While most exercises (like bench press) require the use of both limbs to do the same movement at the same time, it does not resonate with real-life movements. This is why functional fitness is vital to strike a balance between both sides of your body where when you train a single side of the body, the adjacent side will be stimulated as a result as well.
It improves core strength. Having a wobbly centre of the body is like having a popsicle without its stick. The essence will not be retained. Without tightening/developing your core, the body will be unable to maintain the support of the limbs while in motion. This can cause severe injuries that can lead to chronic illnesses.
The ability to squat more than thrice your body weight does sound impressive, but it will lose its flair when you pit it against your inability to climb a flight of stairs without the aid of an oxygen mask at your disposal. Once you rope in functional fitness as a part of your daily life, not only will it give you the opportunity of doing easy exercises to lose body weight, and improve your breathing and endurance but it will also definitely give you an upper hand when you are having a tug-o-war with your dog. If losing weight is an art, you can be a Picasso of it, with the practice of functional fitness.
(Sandunlekha Ekanayake)