Putting the F-U-N into fitness

What does it mean to be fit? Years ago when I was in graduate school, we were asked to come up with a working definition of fitness. Our ragedy band of future exercise professionals determined that being fit is "having the capacity to do all required and desired activities without undue stress or risk of injury". I don't think that the American College of Sports Medicine has adopted our definition as its official position statement, but we did manage to include a very important consideration for a fitness program and that is the program must be functional.

Some definitions of fitness focus on numbers: cardiovascular capacity, body fat percentage, 1-rep max, sit and reach distance. While these numbers have their place, they don't acurately reflect how functional we are. You can determine how functional you are by your daily experience.

What do you need your body to be able to do everyday? What activities that you may take for granted now do you want to be able to continue indefinitely? If getting up out of a chair is important to you then you need to make sure you have a functional level of fitness that will allow you to get your fanny up today and many years into the future. Squats are a functional exercise that will help ensure that you will maintain your ability to get up out of a chair. Leg extensions, a machine exercise also targeting the quadraceps, will do little if anything to improve your chair exiting capacity.

What is a functional exercise program? In essence, it is any program that engages you in movement patterns that are primarily standing, uses your own body weight or a combination of bands, balls, tubes, etc for resistance. Functional exercises require you to be the stabilizer for the movement, not a machine, just like real life. An advanced functional exercise program will include ways to further decrease your stability (like wobble boards) forcing you to apply greater effort without necessarily increasing resistance. The rule is to demonstrate the ability to stabilize first, add or increase resistance second.

A good functional exercise program will keep you ready for anything. It improves balance and stability, strengthens all the muscles that support and protect the back, helps to increase range of motion in the joints. It burns lots of calories because everything is working not just an isolated muscle group. It will improve all those "biomarkers of fitness" such as cardiovascular capacity, strength, flexibility and body composition.

But what is the most important benefit to functional training? It's F-U-N-ctional! Fitness can be fun!

Would love to hear your comments on functional fitness training. Have you tried it? What was your experience like? Success stories? Favorite functional exercise?