What is Functional Exercise and What Are its Benefits?

What is Functional Exercise and what are its benefits?

There are many different types of exercise programs to help you get into, and stay in shape these days. However, you don’t have to change your daily routine to an extreme level to enjoy a better and healthier overall lifestyle. Some people exercise by running full marathons and bench-pressing 300 pounds, but this type of rigorous activity isn’t really necessary if you simply want to improve your general level of fitness and quality of life.

Functional Exercises

Functional exercises have been designed to specifically help you improve the routine and daily activities that you perform. For example, these could be things such as mowing the lawn, shoveling the driveway, and carrying the groceries etc. You can benefit from functional exercises without the need for expensive and complicated workout machines. In addition, many of these exercise machines will focus on just one specific muscle group. This isn’t the case with functional exercise since many different areas of your body will benefit from it.

Functional exercise will focus on combining your coordination and strength when it comes to facing real-life situations and activities. For example, some people may use an agility ladder for the specific purpose of improving their athletic skills in a chosen sport. But for older adults, the exercise device will help them with their foot/eye coordination, body control, and balance. In turn this will help when it comes to reducing the risk of falling while performing their routine daily tasks.

Other types of exercise apparatus such as the kettle bells may help strengthen a person’s posterior chain and abdominal core. While this is helpful to athletes, it’s also an ideal way to cut down on lower-back ailments while doing things such as lifting loads of laundry or a sack of potatoes from your grocery cart.

How Functional Exercise can benefit you

Like most types of exercise and fitness programs, to benefit from functional exercise it needs to be unique and designed for an individual’s specific situation, body, and needs. What’s good for one person may be harmful for another. This is why it’s important to visit a professional, licensed physiotherapist before beginning any type of exercise routine. Once you’ve been provided with a unique functional exercise program you’ll benefit from it in several ways, such as:

1-It helps reduce injuries

2-The exercises are ideal for people of all ages

3-It will help motivate you to achieve your fitness goals

4-The exercises can be performed anywhere

5-It’s cost effective

6-Your progress is easy to track

Taking advantage of functional exercise

You don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars and join a high-tech exercise gym to enjoy an improved lifestyle. You can exercise various areas of your body with functional exercises and can perform them from just about anywhere, such as at work and home. A good functional exercise routine will give your muscle groups a daily workout and will help you perform your routine activities pain-free.