Photo Credit: Kim Payant Photography
TRAINING
FUNCTIONAL FITNESS: MORE THAN A TRAINING PROTOCOL FUNCTIONAL FITNESS. ONE OF MANY, IF NOT, UNENDING BUZZWORDS AND CATCHPHRASES BEING EMPHASIZED WITHIN THE FITNESS WORLD, INCLUDING EAT CLEAN, MUSCLE TONING, H.I.I.T., ACTIVE REST/ RECOVERY. IT CAN FEEL LIKE A LOT TO KEEP TRACK OF. According to canfitpro’s Fitness Trends Report, functional fitness was number one in the top fitness trends for 2023. What exactly is functional fitness? A quick Google search provides many definitions that are all, more or less, the same. They all seem to refer to “activities performed in daily life,” or how we “function” from day to day. Per Wikipedia: “exercise which involves training the body for 56 canfitpro November/December 2023
the activities performed in daily life.” The functional fitness philosophy aims to apply fitness to bettering human movement, daily lifestyle, and thereby preventing pain and injury. It is important to ask though, when talking about being functional for daily activities, functional for what? Functional fitness for a university basketball player is different than it is for a 70-year-old grandmother. Functional fitness should serve the individual in what they do in their daily life, but not all of us have the same daily activities, and the problem is that for many of us, daily life is sedentary and lacks activity in general. Functional fitness does not have to
be as complicated as the Olympic clean and jerk. Functional fitness is a spectrum; more functional to less functional, more like the activities we do (or should be doing) day to day versus less like those activities. More versus less happening at once. There is an especially significant difference however between simply functioning and being functional, or rather, functionally sound. As fitness professionals, we should focus on the ‘more happening at one time’ end of things. Both ends of the spectrum that we are describing here can have their respective impractical extremes. Functional fitness should be approached with reason of course. Practicality prevails here as in most
