Bill's Blog - Keep Your Exercises Functional

By Bill Katinsky, Next Level Training

Good Morning and Happy New Year!

Now that the holidays are over, there is usually an influx of new gym members—people who are desperately trying to develop a gym addiction in the hopes of keeping their New Year’s resolutions.   As I mentioned in last week’s blog, most people end up abandoning the gym after a few short weeks or months, having had a negative experience simply because they did not have the proper plan in place.  Today I’d like to talk about how to make those workouts successful as well as functional.

Functional exercises are exercises that will help you through your daily life.  Most people associate functional exercising with exercise labs or physical therapists’ offices.  However, even if two groups of people—such as varsity athletes and stay-at-home parents—train in different manners, both groups can train functionally.  Injuries and problems can occur when you start demanding things on your body that you cannot handle.  No two people are the same, so, along the same lines, they should not work out in the same way. 

Unless you are an amateur athlete, are a professional athlete, or are training for a specific event where specific workout regimes are needed, there is almost no reason to train for power-specific exercises.  A power-specific exercise consists of using either an Olympic or standard barbell—usually very heavy in weight—with 1-5 reps.  Power-specific exercises place a huge demand on your joints and, if performed incorrectly, can really hurt your body.  These exercise selections offer more risk than reward and offer no real function for you in real life, unless, of course, you are the type of athlete described above.

So, instead of performing power exercises with long breaks in the middle, increase the reps to the 6-12 range, making muscular strength and hypertrophy (muscle growth) the goal.  Squats, bench presses, pulls, rows, push-ups, lunges, planks, and rollouts are all very challenging functional exercises that can reshape your body nicely without the greater risk of injury.

Another big NO for functionality is to only train a muscle group one time per week.  That is a very old-school bodybuilding approach.  Muscles repair themselves in 24-48 hours, so waiting 7 days to train that muscle group again is counterproductive. 

Instead, let’s do full-body circuits or consecutive “splits” (for example, breaking the workouts down to doing legs and pushes on a Monday and pulls and abs on a Tuesday).  This way, you maximize the amount of times per week/month/year that you are training those muscles.  If you train each muscle once a week, that’s only 52 times a year, compared to 104 times a year (if you train each muscle twice a week) or, even better, 156 times per year (if you train each muscle three times a week).  Which one sounds like the quickest and best way to improve your everyday life?

Below is a piece of a functional full-body workout that I recently did with a client (an active female 47-year-old doctor):

• TRX Squat

• TRX Row

• TRX Pushup

• TRX Plank

3 sets - 12 reps of each exercise, with each exercise performed one after another (with a 30-second rest after the plank before performing them all again).

Now, here is a sample of a workout from a 21-year-old male hockey player who trains here at Next Level Training three days per week:

• Front Squat

• Bent-over Barbell Row

• Dumbbell Alternating Press

4 sets - 4-6 reps of each exercise, with each exercise performed one after another (with a 60 second rest after the stability ball rollouts before starting them all again).

If you look closely, both exercise programs work the exact same muscle groups in different settings, in order to optimize what each client is working towards.

This was a small look into how we keep each client working towards his or her goals by exercising functionally instead of by performing power-specific exercises, which can pose risks to a person’s health.  By keeping your workouts functional, you will be able to meet the long-term goals that you set for New Year’s with ease!

As always, please keep the comments and emails coming…bill@nextlevelnj.com!

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