..............IBIZA PERSONAL TRAINER - HEALTH & FITNESS ARTICLES

.......................... ....... .FUNCTIONAL EXERCISE IN MORE DEPTH

.......................................................- Kev Grant

............................................www.ibizapersonaltrainer.com

As anybody who knows, has worked or trained with me will be aware, “Functional Exercise” is one of my pet subjects. Although there is a lot of talk about the subject in Fitness circles, and the theory behind this approach to Fitness Training isn’t exactly new, first filtering into public perception amongst high-end athlete coaching circles as far back as 10 years ago, unfortunately I still see precious little of it in practice, especially with regards to the general public, in gyms, in publications and more puzzlingly still, whilst watching other PT’s working with their clients.

In this article I will explain my take on the Functional Approach, and why I am so adamant that “if it’s not functional, I won’t train it” with my clients, be they overweight ladies, sub 11 hour Ironman Triathletes, or anyone in between.

Functional Exercise can be defined as Training for a Specific Purpose. It is often represented as Sports-Specific Training, which although it can be, is not necessarily so. Michael Boyle, [TA1] author of “Functional Training For Sports [TA2]” calls it Sports-General Training, which I feel is closer to the truth, but even then is still implying that the only people who are engaging in functional work are those also engaged in Sports. In my opinion, very little training should be engaged in by anybody*, which is not Functional, the reasons for which I will explain later in this article. We will start by considering functional work in a “Sports” context, and then later I’ll look more closely at how the thinking also applies to non sports-related training, and to the general public at large.

Ok, so before getting into the science in depth I’d ask you to think of your favourite sport and ask yourself two questions about it.

o Can players partake whilst sitting down? - With the notable exception of Rowing, this is likely to be a “No”

o Are players able to partake in the sport from a rigid environment, where stability is provided to them from external sources? - Again, apart from unless you chose Aerobatic aviation as your sport, this is likely to be a resounding “No”

Hence from these two questions / answers we can see that any training from a seated position is not a functional activity, and training using resistance machines, whereby you are seated, laying down, or externally governed in any way in your planes of movement by rigid external structures is also not a real-world functional activity.

Now think about your sport again, and ask yourself is there any part of it, any movement where the player operates a single body joint, on it’s own, with no other part of the body involved? - I don’t care what sport you’ve chosen, the answer to this is definitely “No”

Hence Functional Training attempts to focus on real-world patterns of multi-joint movement, and emulate real world stresses on the body throughout the entire kinetic movement chain. Isolation exercises such as Biceps Curls or “The Pec Deck” are effectively useless in a functional context, because ask yourself what movements you can ever do in the real world, that are accurately emulated by those movements, and where you are held, supported, forced to move through one plane only, and use no other muscle groups other than the ones targeted by these ridiculous exercises? Again, I would suggest, the answer is none. This applies to most Gym based machines, and exercises on them. At the end of the article I will list the specific machines / exercises that should be avoided & replaced, and their functional replacement.

Proponents of the isolation approach (Bodybuilders usually) are engaging in the building of a muscle, for no other sake than to have it be big, and in their opinion look good. That particular muscle may also be strong, but if it has been trained in isolation there is a very good chance that if the individual tries to use that strength, injury will likely result, due to not having trained stabiliser and fixator muscles adequately, or not having a strong enough “platform” to deliver the force from. We will also come back to the concept of platform, as it is crucial to the functional ethos.

To explain the functional ethos properly it is necessary to first reconsider in detail the human kinetic chain in action, looking at for example a sprinter, and taking just a snapshot of a split second, of one step, from footfall, to drive off. For this purpose it is necessary to temporarily abandon the old concepts of flexion, extension, abduction & adduction of individual joints and look at the human machine as a whole. As the athlete’s foot lands, the whole of the skeleto-muscular system is engaged in one task only for that instant, and that is absorption of the impact force, in eccentric contraction, and preventing the leg and hence the athlete collapsing to the floor. The muscles of the foot, ankle, calf, thigh, hip, pelvis and core are all simultaneously and in a highly coordinated action performing one task, or movement.

A fraction of a second later the kinetic chain reverses in its purpose and the muscles are now mostly contracting concentrically and driving the kinetic chain through the push off the ground and into the next step. The quads and hamstrings are acting simultaneously in dual or multiple roles both in deceleration roles initially, and them microseconds later reverse into acceleration roles in complex coordinated movements.

At no time is the equivalent of a quad leg extension performed. Why then would anyone think that performing that movement in isolation have any appreciable benefit to a sprinter’s performance?

The principle of Specificity [TA3] is well known and understood amongst Fitness professionals, and so it should really come as no great surprise to anyone that performing what is an “Open Chain” exercise, i.e. a leg extension, performed in a seated position, extending the leg into the air against resistance, will produce no appreciable performance gains in a “Closed Chain” environment where the athletes foot is in contact with the floor, the leg is supporting the whole body weight, the pelvis and core are in play and the proprioception (neuromuscular balance and feedback system) are in use. The two things are almost completely unrelated.

To produce performance gains in this context, the athlete must exercise and strength train the quads in the same environment in which they will be used, i.e. standing on his feet, Closed Chain, and using the appropriate balance systems. Hence it is the bodyweight support and balance aspect of this line of thinking that is most critical. Hardly any sport is played in a static position, on a stable surface, and so Functional Training will seek to introduce a certain amount of instability into the equation and train the athlete’s balance systems as well as the appropriate strength systems. The strongest individuals are the ones most able to display high level of control and strength in an unstable environment.

“Functional Training is bet described as a continuum of exercises that teach an athlete to best handle their own bodyweight in all planes of movement.” – Michael Boyle.

It can be seen then that Functional Exercise trains movements.

Coming back to the issue of a platform from which to issue force for a moment, it is important to understand that any force we want to apply to anything, ever, is completely dependent on, and related to our platform to deliver the force from, i.e. our connection with the ground. If we doubt this, we only need to attempt to push a colleague away from us whilst (we) stood on a skateboard. How far did the colleague move?

Clearly if we are not firmly connected to the ground, our ability to impart force to anything else is severely diminished, if not totally negated. So it follows that the most important part of the functional chain, and the first part to concentrate on is functional lower body strength, closely followed by core strength, with which to stabilise the rest of the body for whichever task the athlete needs to perform. Taking this one stage further it also follows that rarely, if ever, in sport will an athlete be stable on both feet during the course of the action, and so it makes perfect sense to strength train each leg individually, both for the added difficulty of effectively doubling up the weight by removing the other leg from the exercise, and for the individual balance training each leg will receive.

Strength + Balance = Functional Strength.

Which leads me nicely into my favourite exercise, bar none. The one-legged squat. The king of the functional exercises, is the one-legged box squat, on an unstable surface, foam roller, core board or the like. It’s not in the remit of this article to go into the hundreds of functional exercises for the whole body which are available for programs, except to illustrate principles. However the one-legged squat is a case in point. It is a perfect illustration of the functional ethos. I see many well-conditioned individuals, able to (2-legged) squat large weights on bars in a gym, who cannot perform a single one-legged squat with correct form, and who in my opinion have no need for any weights at all, until they can master 3 sets of correct form of the one-legged version.

At this point we will leave the world of athletes and sport, and apply the ethos to non-sports training and look at the benefits of the functional approach to the general public. The ethos is equally valid to general training because you don’t have to be a competitive sport person to be performing physical tasks in your daily life. We all do it, every day. Every time we get up from the sofa, one leg will lead, every step we take, one leg leads, every time we stop, turn, walk up steps, one leg is taking the weight whilst the other moves.

Hence it makes every bit as much sense to perform strength training with balance training, well into later life, and indeed with statistics showing that the fifth most common cause of death amongst the elderly is falls and fall-induced injuries in older people, this is a major public health problem in modern societies with aging populations. source Nationwide trends in fall-induced deaths of older people in Finland for example for more than 3 decades (1971–2002), showed that the number of fall-induced deaths among elderly Finns is clearly increasing, especially among men, and this is as a direct result of the falls, not including those who were just incapacitated, hospitalised and then started a gradual deterioration culminating in early death.

Clearly Functional Training, which addresses both strength and balance issues and without doubt quickens balance reflexes in unstable scenarios could possibly play a part in preventing accidents such as this, and without being overly melodramatic, could quite feasibly actually save lives.

Kev Grant is a REPS3 Qualified Personal Trainer based in Ibiza. For a full functional Exercise Program contact Kev for your initial assessment.

 [TA1]Michael Boyle is a renowned strength & conditioning coach and a staunch advocate of Functional Training.

[TA2]In my opinion one of the seminal publications with regards to Functional Exercise, I would recommend anybody with an interest read this first.

[TA3] The Principle of Specificity simply states that the adaptations to exercise will be specific to the types of exercise performed, i.e. Strength Training will produce greater Strength, Endurance Training will produce Endurance gains etc.

* With the notable exception of bodybuilders, and I’m not entirely sure exactly what they think they are doing ;)

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