A good friend of mine, Brad Schoenfeld, author of Womens Home Workout Bible, recently wrote a great article about functional training. Functional training has been all the rage in the world of fitness for the past eight-to-10 years. In my opinion it has been taken way too far and is being used in ways that are far from functional.

What do we mean by functional training? Basically, any activities that help you in your everyday life are functional because they make daily tasks easier or more efficient. For example, someone who sits at a desk all day needs exercises that strengthen the abdominals and lower back.

They also need exercises that promote good posture, not the hunched over position they are likely in most of the day at their desk.

If you are an athlete training for a very specific purpose, then your training program should be specific to your sport. Marathon runners do not need to sprint short distances and football players do not need to go for long runs. These activities are not what they do during competition.

Below is a summary of Schoenfeld’s article:

– For all practical purposes, there is no such thing as a “non-functional” exercise. Rather, the functional transfer of exercise exists on a continuum, where some exercises are more functional than others based on the needs of a particular task.

– The primary reason most people lose functional capacity is the loss of muscle tissue. Therefore, simply increasing strength helps. This can be achieved through any type of resistance training, whether it be using machines, cables, body weight or free weights. Generally, as muscles get stronger they get bigger, so increasing muscle will promote greater functional capabilities in most people.

– The closer training replicates the movements a person wants to accomplish, the better the transfer to performance of the movement. While a machine will promote functional improvements, free weights tend to promote better results because they more closely approximate the way everyday tasks are performed. This does not mean that free weights are what everyone should start with, but they are a more functional piece of equipment.

– Unstable surface training — using exercise balls or other unstable devices — is generally inferior to stable surface training for promoting functional fitness. The vast majority of activities of daily living are performed in a stable environment.

The ground does not normally move when we are on it, so training this way does not really transfer to the real world. What’s more, stable surface training increases strength to a greater degree than comparable exercises performed on unstable surfaces, providing yet another advantage from a functional standpoint.

Functional training is great for everyone. All you need to do is find out what works best for you.