ABOUT FUNCTIONAL FITNESS
What is Functional Fitness?
Functional fitness is about conditioning your body to function correctly during day-to-day activities. Whether that means lifting your children/grandchildren, carrying a laundry basket up a flight of stairs or maintaining an active lifestyle, functional fitness is a system that trains your body with exercises that are similar to real-life patterns of movement.
At Best Bodies by Saul Benamy, we create personalized programs that train movements, not muscles, in isolation. Examples of this include rowing exercises while seated on a physio ball and squats with an unbalanced load to work your back, abdominal and gluteal muscles in order to develop better stability and balance.
The Best Bodies Difference
Many "fitness experts" break down the human body into a series of single joint actions, but this form of isolation fails to take into account that real-world muscle action is task-dependent. Simply put, it's best to train movements, not muscles!
Because your body is pre-programmed with "basic patterns" of motor control with a relative timing sequence (the rate at which body segments move relative to one another), which allows them to be easily modified in countless ways to react to gravity, ground reaction forces and momentum. This trained movement is the very definition of functional fitness!
Movements such as squatting, reaching, pulling, and lifting are made easier with functional fitness. A personalized program ensures your success by strengthening your specific weaknesses to achieve your goals.
Benefits of functional fitness
Improves everyday life: Functional fitness improves overall quality of life due to the stress relief factor. It helps you perform daily tasks more safely, giving you peace of mind.
Increases mobility: Functional fitness helps to improve balance, coordination, flexibility, muscle strength, and agility.
Improves balance: Since functional fitness trains your body to make your muscles work together, it results in better overall strength and balance. Training the muscles to manage weight properly also reduces stress on your body!
Reduces risk of injury: Functional fitness training encourages muscle and ligament strength, which are the areas that are highly susceptible to injury.