What Is Functional Training And Why Do You Need It?
Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 9:16AM Every endurance athlete should incorporate functional training into their yearly plan. Functional training helps maximize strength and power while preventing injury. A properly designed functional training program will increase sport specific strength and muscular endurance, even-out muscular imbalances and increase flexibility and agility.
Functional training is the utilization of exercises which involve complex, multi-joint movements of the upper body, core and lower body in each exercise. These movements enable greater overall bodily functioning and performance enhancement through improved coordination and the proper stimulation of muscular "firing" patterns.
Functional training utilizes multiple muscle groups in an integrated fashion. This is beneficial for many reasons. You challenge your body to work as a whole, rather than isolating individual muscle groups, which is how we move in most of our daily tasks. For example, when you perform exercises on a stability ball or an unstable surface, you have to recruit deep muscles from the abdominals, hips, back and pelvis. Therefore, potentially more muscles are strengthened and more calories are burned during one exercise.
JC Santana says, "Functional Training revolves around two very basic principles. The first is the "kinetic chain", which simply illustrates that the body never moves a single joint in isolation. Rather, the kinetic chain is a series of joints working synergistically through multiple planes. By design, we are functionally, integrated beings.
The second main principle of Functional Training describes the physical world it deals with: gravity, ground reaction forces and momentum. These three physical factors act upon all movements and thus training. Gravity is the basis of resistance training. Everything we do requires that we overcome, or at least neutralize this force."
So, lets look at some important considerations to take into account when we are implementing functional training.
These points all, in one way or another, deal with the kinetic chain principle, gravity, ground reaction forces or momentum.
Functional training must:
1) Be specific, or mimic, the target activity. This includes all of the appropriate joints, as well as the speed and amplitude of movements. The principle of specificity dictates that you "train like you play/live".
2) Not be restricted or supported by external means. No machines or artificially stabilized positions.
3) Eventually integrate a significant amount of controlled chaos into the training. Sports, and life in general, are chaotic and unstable in nature. The more chaos an individual rehearses, the better they will react under unrehearsed-play conditions.
4) Deal with multi-joint, multi-planar movements. In real life, especially sports, movements do not occur along a single joint or a single plane of motion. Therefore, the kinetic chain must engage all three planes simultaneously.
5) Approach loading and development from the inside out. Load the system internally (i.e. bodyweight) first, then add external resistance. Develop the core of the body first, then develop the extremities.
6) Involve, in the case of rehab, the cause of an injury. The cause of an injury must eventually be part of its cure, or prevention. For example, if planting a foot and rotating to change direction injured the ACL, then, planting and rotating must eventually be part of the conditioning program to prevent the injury from reoccurring. It is specificity at its simplest form.
7) Have an evaluation criterion that is incorporated into the training. That is, the tests must be part of the training and the training part of the tests. This way a "test/evaluation" is merely seen as training by the athlete.
8) Be progressive in nature. Basic conditioning and skill acquisition before advanced conditioning and skill execution. Slow and controlled to fast and chaotic.
9) Be fun and make sense. If it is not fun, then compliance will suffer and so will results. If it does not make sense, chances are it's not functional and not optimally effective.
In the end, functional training is the most effective approach to performance enhancement. Year round, but especially out-of-season, endurance athletes should incorporate functional training into their conditioning routine.
A properly designed functional training program will increase one's strength, balance, stability and mobility. It will even-out muscular imbalances, strengthen weak muscles and relieve tightness so one can move and play more effectively all while avoiding injury!
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