public service announcement.
If you want to lose body fat…
If you want to maintain your muscle mass or even gain more muscle…
You should be doing functional movement – that’s it, end of story.
If you’re interested why, well I guess you can read on.
The term “Functional Movement” is thrown around a lot in the fitness industry and it has been for quite some time (I remember doing my Pilates certification back in 2001 and hearing this term used a lot). However, what a lot of people don’t understand is that functional movement has some core principles that make it ‘functional’.
WHAT IS FUNCTIONAL MOVEMENT?…
Before I go into the ‘why’ of functional movement, the starting point is to help you understand what makes a movement functional.
The first thing to understand is that functional movement mimics real world movement. Whether it be on the sporting field, working around the house or yard, functional movement patterns can be observed in our every-day routines (keep in mind that often we’re not performing them at all well – but that’s beside the point for right now).
When we’re moving in every-day life, what you’ll notice is that our body works to perform the daily tasks using multiple joints. As a rule, our body doesn’t move in isolation (think of a single joint moving on its own – it just doesn’t do this). What really happens is that some of our joints are trying to maintain stability, while others working on summating a force (that’s a fancy way of saying moving the body or a load of some description).
Digging into the functional movement pattern even further, the order in which we move these body parts also determines whether it’s functional. Functional movement is a movement that starts in the core and then translates through to the extremity. While not a perfect analogy, think of a whip cracking; the movement starts at the thick handle (that’s our body’s core) and then as the movement occurs, it moves from the handle, then along the thong (think or our arm or legs), before releasing all of its power along the fall (hands and feet) and cracker (fingers and toes).
, but by and large if you want to lose body fat, if you want to gain or maintain muscle and you don’t have all the time in the world to train, functional movement is the way to go.</p>
<p>The primary reason why we do this is for the neuro-endocrine response.</p>
<p>Neuro what?….</p>
<p>The neuro-endocrine response refers to the way our body produces and releases hormone/s (this is the endocrine part) after performing a specific movement (that is the nervous system part). Weight loss, maintaining or gaining muscle, these fitness responses are the product of our body creating the ideal hormone environment. I’m not going to nerd out on you too much and go into the detail of said hormones (that’s a whole other blog post), just rest assured that when you perform a functional movement, it will result in a 3 times greater neuro-endocrine response.</p>
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Yep, that’s right. It is 3 times as effective!
For that reason, when you come into EmpowerFit, we spend a lot of time programming and teaching you how to move functionally. Not only is it going to give you much, much better training response (in a much shorter time), but it also transfers a heck of a lot better to everyday life.
With all of this in mind, it would be incredibly arrogant to sit here and say that functional movement is the only way to train for results. Put simply, that is not true and not the point of this article. If you do have the time and enjoy milling around the gym, by all means, punch out those isolated movements. Do it enough and you will still get results. What I am trying to articulate however is that if you don’t have the time or inclination to become a ‘gym rat’, then you’re far better off spending your time becoming more functional.
