I will be looking at all areas of fitness in the regular posts which will follow.
Firstly, let me share with you the secret to gaining your fitness goals......HARD WORK !!!!
No matter what crap gimmick or pill or potion is peddled on shopping channels, achieving your health and fitness goals is 'hard work' no matter if you are a professional athlete or regular person. Hard work is physical and psychological (you have to be doing the exercise but also have the will to train correctly, hard and eat right ) and there are simply NO SHORTCUTS.
In very basic terms there is a 'Holy Trinity' you need to observe when training.
1.Resistance Training (developing the musculature)
2.Cardiovascular Training (developing heart & lungs)
3.Nutrition (eating in a balanced way to maximise 1 &2)
Get a balance between the three and you've cracked it !!
Lets take a look at 'fine tuning' parts 1 & 2 and look at what functional actually means.
Functional - Func.tion.al
1. capable of operating or functioning
2. capable of serving the purpose for which it was intended
(Webster's Encyclopedia 2nd Edition, 1996)
Functional training has its origins in rehabilitation and physical therapists often use this approach to retrain patients with movement disorders and incorporate tasks specific to each patient. For example, exercises that mimic what patients did at home or work or in sport are used with the aim to develop or adapt exercises to allow individuals to perform the activities of daily life more easily and without injuries.
In the context of exercise, functional training involves mainly weight bearing activities targeted at core muscles of the abdomen and lower back. Most fitness facilities have a variety of weight training machines which target and isolate specific muscles. As a result the movements do not necessarily bear any relationship to the movements people make in their regular activities.
Functional training for sports Functional training may lead to better muscular balance and joint stability, possibly decreasing the number of injuries sustained in an individual's performance in a sport. The benefits may arise from the use of training that emphasizes the body's natural ability to move in six degrees of freedom. In comparison, though machines appear to be safer to use (recommended for beginners), they restrict movements to a single plane of motion, which is an unnatural form of movement for the body and may potentially lead to faulty movement patterns or injury over time. Standard resistance training machines are of limited use for functional training – their fixed patterns rarely mimic natural movements, and they focus the effort on a single muscle group, rather than engaging the prime movers, stabilizers and peripheral muscles
* In 2009, research was published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research which compared functional training to fixed training equipment (machines), this was considered the first research of its type comparing the two methods of strength training. Results of the study showed very substantial gains and benefits in the functional training group over fixed training equipment. Functional users had a 58% greater increase in strength over the fixed-form group. Their improvements in balance were 196% higher over fixed and reported an overall decrease in joint pain by 30%.
Many people, especially females, equate strength training with bodybuilding; This means individuals who are involved in endurance or flexibility-based sports do not strength train for fear of gaining too much bulk and losing flexibility or are concerned about ‘looking manly’ !! By utilising strength training principles and adapting workouts to their specific needs or sports, proper functional training can provide the performance/vanity benefits we want to achieve – so many people are missing out due to misconceptions!
* 2009 Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research
No comments:
Post a Comment