Taking your athletic career to the next level: Functional Fitness 101

We train many different athletes who compete in many different sports so as an organization we focus on bringing the inner athlete out of our competitors.  Strength training can only take you so far and in most cases pure strength training via conventional weight training does not directly correlate to success in your given sport.  The main reason being that conventional weight training isolates muscle groups, and encourages lifting a certain amount of weight in an idealized posture created by a gym machine.  The key to functional exercise is integration. It's about teaching all the muscles to work together rather than isolating them to work independently.

This is absolutely critical in any athletic arena for the simple fact that muscles never work in isolation in any sports movement.  Does your squat help you make a tackle?  Certainly to a degree to bring power through contact, however it does not help you react, breakdown, wrap up, and accelerate through contact.

Functional fitness introduces core stabilizers that help you facilitate the full athletic movement of similar actions to a tackle.  Take seated row for example:  You're sitting in a chair with your chest pressed against pads, and you pull two levers back. You may be strengthening certain muscles, but your body's not learning anything, because you don't have to activate your core stabilizer muscles or the stabilizers of your arms and shoulders. The machine's doing it for you.

The next time one of your athletes does not see the value behind this alternative style be sure to point them to some of the most well rounded athletes for major sports teams such as Troy Polamalu of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Jens Pulver of the UFC and Floyd "Money" Mayweather just to name a few.  Functional Fitness is surely the next step to taking your athletic potential to the next level.

* Retrieved From:  http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/features/working-out-for-real-life-functions