If you are not incorporating functional training into your workouts, you are being left behind!What is Functional Training?
Functional training involves exercises or movement patterns that emulate movements and activities that are done in every day life. Functional Training often incorporates variations in stability to enhance total body muscle activation, nervous system activation and balance.
Why is it important?
1. Functional Training enhances our ability to function at our max ability outside of the gym.
2. You lose more fat! The full body movement patterns that are performed in functional training burn more calories than single joint movements often used in basic strength training and weight loss programs.
3. Greater strength increases! Functional training enhances full body muscle activation and enhanced nervous system function. Basically you teach the body to work together!
How Do I Incorporate Functional Training Into My Workouts?
A great way to make your workouts more functional is to add full body movements to your weight training exercises. For example: instead of just doing a shoulder press, squat first before pressing the weight upwards. This makes is a full body, multi-joint movement.
You could also take away stability for your exercises. For example: When doing a chest press, use a cable machine with no back support rather than a bench. This lack of supports forces your abdominal muscles to tighten and to add support to the movement. It's called "working the Invisible." You could also change the level of stability of your exercises. For example: you could stand on one foot, use a Bosu Ball, Balance Disk, etc...
Oh yeah...Do not get carried away and make the exercises so complex that they become "Dysfunctional" exercises. Keep them relatively simple. The picture below is very awesome, however; it is very dysfunctional.
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