What Is Useful Health, Anyway?

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For the past several decades, “functional” fitness has been viewed as anything from a niche practice to a trend to a joke. The styles of training called “functional” also vary, from pushups and lunges to working with kettlebells and barbells. What is functional fitness anyway?

Functional fitness is more of a buzzword than a training style

If you ask someone who trains functional fitness, they will likely tell you that it’s about doing exercises that will help you in everyday life. Perhaps that means taking farm walks with heavy dumbbells so that you are strong enough to carry all of your groceries in one trip. It might do hundreds of squats so you can bend down to pick up your kids. Maybe it is balancing on a bosu This means you are less likely to slip and fall on an icy sidewalk.

Historian Conor Heffernan traces the roots of functional fitness to exercises prescribed for general health rather than specifically for strength or exercise. Sometimes they used unusual equipment such as pulleys and weighted balls, or today battle ropes or suspension trainers.

Today’s trainers often define functional fitness in contrast to what they consider “normal” fitness. For some, exercising regularly means doing lots of single-joint exercises, like biceps curls, so that they program compound movements that involve the whole body. For others, exercising regularly means using heavy weights, so they view functional training as workouts that use light weights or body weight only. And for others, regular exercise means doing sets and resting in between, while functional training keeps you moving all the time.

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In other words, “functional” can mean any type of exercise your trainer prefers.

Sometimes it’s a code word

Just when it looked like the craze for functional fitness was subsiding, it seems that more and more gyms and trainers are picking up the term again. But this time around, I think something specific is happening: “Functional” is the code for “CrossFit exercises, but not the CrossFit brand”.

CrossFit is a mix of barbell training, gymnastics and calisthenics movements, and cardio. Workouts can include skill exercises, strength training, and the most popular “WODs” (workouts of the day) that require cardio fitness to persevere.

But the CrossFit name is trademarked and tied to a specific company, and that company has some unpleasant things in its story. What do you do if you like the training style but don’t want to do CrossFit CrossFit? You call it another way.

No exercise is inoperable

The idea of ​​exercising better in everyday life is not a bad one. We all need strength and mobility to exist as a human without complaining about your knees and back all the time, and that doubles as you get older.

But does it take a certain type of exercise to do this? Not really. Simple, boring barbell squats may not seem “functional” in the eyes of some people, but they still build a lot of leg strength to help you pick up your kids. Anything that improves your fitness will help you in everyday life.

If you’re looking to take a lesson from the world of functional fitness, don’t be limited to fitness stereotypes. Balance training can be fun and helpful; so can Grip trainingand core training and interval cardio and all sorts of things that you normally wouldn’t do in the gym. Learning new skills is an exercise for your brain and body, and it’s worth it too – even if you will never find a “functional” use for something like handstand push-ups.