Functional Fitness

You may have heard about it recently.  Functional Fitness.  What is it?  A new fitness buzzword?  Some bizarre trend?  Something only gym rats do?!!  Well, let me just tell you all about it!  Functional Fitness exercises are designed to train and develop your muscles to make it easier and safer to perform everyday activities.  Lifting your kids out of the car, carrying a laundry basket upstairs, standing up from sitting down, helping your brother-in-law move…..These are all examples of things we do in our day to day lives.  Performing functional fitness exercises makes these things easier to do.  Most of us aren’t training to be bodybuilders.  We’re just trying to have a better quality of life.  We want to feel good.  Functional fitness exercises emphasize core stability. For example, a squat to bicep curl is a functional exercise because it trains the muscles used when you pick up an object from the floor or a table. By training your muscles to work the way they do in everyday tasks, you prepare your body to perform well in a variety of common situations.

 

Functional fitness exercises are easy to incorporate into your current workout.  You can use familiar equipment you’ve seen at the gym: stability or balance balls, medicine balls, kettlebells, wobble boards, Bosu balls, foam rollers, hula hoops, yoga blocks, resistance bands or tubes and standard free weights.  Exercises emphasize working several areas of the body at once, rather than isolating a particular muscle or group of muscles, as with bicep curls.  You may do exercises that combine upper and lower body movements or require lifting and twisting at the same time.  Or you may do a rowing exercise from a standing, bent position rather than seated with your chest against the pads, so the movement activates core stabilizer muscles as well as back and arm muscles. The goal isn’t just to gain strength, but also to improve flexibility, range of motion, joint alignment and body awareness.  Here are some examples of functional fitness exercises:

Lunge with a twist

Squat with curls

Bosu exercises

Turkish get ups

Bent over row

Clean and press

These are just a few examples!  There are TONS out there and many programs that utilize functional fitness!  Try it!  You just might like it!  J

 

And here’s another friendly reminder to sign up for the Get Fit Program if you haven’t already.  Did you know that you could earn up to $125 every six months?  Just for being healthy and in shape?!!  That’s $250 a year!!!  I don’t know about you, but that’s sounds pretty good to me!!! Just sign the agreement and bring it to the Leisure Services Administrative Office at City Hall, the Cane Creek Rec Center or take it to Human Resources.  Please let everyone in your department know and encourage them to sign up!     

 

Have a wonderful and safe weekend!!!