Functional Fitness Fallacy

It’d be tough to scan the magazine section of your favorite airport terminal and find a fitness magazine that doesn’t mention “functional fitness” these days. Like any fad ridden market, things tend to lose both their meaning and their efficacy when things reach magazine cover status.

What, then, makes fitness functional?

Is it functional if it looks like yard work? If the workout isn’t on a machine, is it functional? Does it get the “functional” nomenclature if gymnastics rings are involved? As you can tell, things quickly become confusing and unclear.

For us, functional training is directly tethered to best practices. This is a truth for us because we define functional movement as the greatest repeatable expression of work capacity for a desired outcome. The clean, therefore, has its points of performance not because they are written in a book somewhere but because they support the greatest repeatable work capacity for the task of moving a load from the ground to the shoulder.

With this view, movement isn’t dogmatic or owned by anyone. It is an exploration into best practices that yield safe movement and greatest expressions of power. Functional movement has everything to do with movement quality and very little to do with gym choreography that looks like life or sport. 

Logan Gelbrich  

@functionalcoach