What is Functional Strength Training?
/Any amount of time looking into the various disciplines of strength and conditioning, you’ll quickly come across the term ‘functional training’. A cursory investigation of the definition will yield the following:
“any training that supports the efforts of everyday life.”
A broad and ambiguous answer. Sadly, this is very much the result of anything that becomes popular in health and fitness, especially when it comes to things reframed for the general public. Under the justification of ‘supporting everyday life,’ any exercise can loosely fall under this category. Functional training is more specific than that and has intention behind how it is organized and practiced. By understanding what it is, you can more effectively leverage it to achieve your fitness goals.
What is Functional Training?
The term ‘functional training’ has become mainstay terminology within the domain of health and fitness. Its popularity stems from the late 90s and early 2000s, when various strength coaches and trainers began using this term as a trendy signifier to describe a new methodology and paradigm of training that made it distinct from others. As with many trendy concepts in health and fitness, the term was quickly overused to the point of losing its definition. What makes functional training ‘functional’? Is there non-functional training? In what contexts do we apply this terminology, and how do we discern it from others? Many examples exist that all seem contradictory. You can find instances of the term to describe just about anything, leaving one quite disillusioned about its actual value.
Originally, the focus of functional training was geared towards athletes and their preparation for competition. For a long time, coaches simply relied on paradigms of powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, and bodybuilding as suitable methods for athlete preparation. The introduction of ‘functional training’ was an effort to apply more strategy and intentionality to the design of training programs. Rather than blindly choosing exercises that fit within a paradigm outside the sport context, functional training encouraged a principled approach to the how, why, and what of an exercise program. Sports are dynamic in nature, often chaotic and reactionary to the flow of the game. Athletes use their entire bodies and must apply force in ways that are explosive and unpredictable. These demands are often unaddressed within traditional training methods, which rely on the isolation of muscle groups, predictable and stable surfaces, and little demand on multi-planar explosive capability.
Why is Functional Training valuable?
Functional Training is not to be confused with sport-specific training, where training is intended to be myopic and emphasizes isolating all support to an individual sport context. Rather, it is a sport-general training approach, one where the common actions of sprinting, jumping, acceleration, and change of direction are reinforced and developed through specific exercise selection, technical execution, and a progression of variables associated with speed and power.
It should be noted that the term functional training does not exclude methods like powerlifting, olympic weightlifting, or bodybuilding. In fact, it supports and emphasizes their use to be more effective towards the needs of the athlete, as in all three examples, they are their own sport entirely. The advent of functional training was inspired to make training less dogmatic, and prioritize the needs of training around how best to derive specific qualities that supported the goals of the athlete. In many cases, powerlifting and Olympic weightlifting offer functional benefits that support aspects of athletic performance. Functional training helps to moderate the framing of those methods, and showcase that they in and of themselves are not enough to fully prepare the athlete for what matters most.
How do I use Functional Training?
The application of functional training is rather simple. You need to be incredibly honest about what matters most for your development and use that to help isolate specific areas to emphasize in your training. It should be noted that simple does not mean easy, as determining the most important areas of sport performance or health and fitness is always a contentious debate. Regardless, approaching your goal with a non-dogmatic approach and finding what methods work best for your environment, skill level, and time frame allow for the most ‘functional’ benefits to be derived from your training. Powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, CrossFit, and bodybuilding are all sports in their own right. They can provide ample benefits, but ultimately their function is towards their own end.
For an individual athlete or general fitness enthusiast, the following questions may help determine if your training is functional toward your goals:
Does this exercise provide the right stimulus for my desired changes in speed, strength, power, endurance, etc.?
Does the risk of injury outweigh the reward?
How does this exercise support my on-field performance?
Does this exercise minimize my risk of injury?
Does this exercise target the energy system I need for competition?
Is this an exercise I can measure progress with?
Functional training is a broad term, but it is still bound by the demand of context. One athlete’s needs may be exclusive to another, leading to mild to moderate differences in what exercises would be more or less beneficial. Overall, they still revolve around the major commonalities among sports.
