Improve the quality of your life with functional fitness

Functional fitness is currently one of the most popular areas of fitness, so let's take a brief look at it. The idea was derived from rehabilitation methods that were used to retrain patients with movement disorders sustained from injuries, stroke, heart attack etc. The activities performed mimic what patients did at home or work as treatment to help them recover and return to their lives or jobs after an injury or surgery. Functional fitness develops and adapts activities that allow us to perform our daily activities more safely and efficiently.

Improve balance, strength

Functional fitness focuses on improving the quality of our life with physical activities that are designed to train and develop our musculoskeletal systems to improve our strength, balance, joint mobility and stability. It emphasises the body's natural ability to work together and prepares it to overcome more and more difficult challenges from daily tasks by simulating common movements we might do at home, work or play.

One of the benchmark factors of functional fitness is the emphasis it places on the use of multi-joint and multi-muscle exercises to get targeted results. The development of core strength and stability, for example, can be achieved by strengthening various muscle groups in the upper and lower body at the same time. A fitness workout session could involve your shoulders, elbows, wrist and fingers; spine, hips, knees and ankles all at once in one or more activities, to achieve total body development.

Aquatic activities

Much of this can be achieved with the use of our body weight to develop core strength, for example by doing sit-ups. Aquatic activities will also provide us with water resistance that we will strive to overcome with the individual force we can initiate. By training our muscles to work the way they do in everyday tasks, we prepare our body to perform better in a variety of challenging situations.

The versatility of functional fitness allows us to perform the relevant exercises at home; they can be incorporated in a boot-camp programme, strength training, rehabilitation, sports-specific fitness or even be used as a diagnostic tool. Functional exercise programmes should include elements that can be adapted to specific individual needs, goals and tailored to individual needs. They include a variety of exercises that stress the development of flexibility, strength and power being applied in multiple-plane movements.

Progression is another underpinning factor in functional fitness, this is displayed in the increase in difficulty of subsequent tasks. The activities/exercises are repeated frequently during a session. The activities are also performed in a context -specific environment which enhances improvement more so when you incorporate experiences of past performances in subsequent performances.

Dr Kenneth Gardner is an exercise physiologist at Holiday Hills Research Center; email: yourhealth@gleanerjm.com.