4 Reasons Functional Training is Better than Regular Workouts

There are fistfuls of elements that make up the perfect workout. Functional training hits all of them. If you want to lose weight, ramp up your health, and enhance your body in the most time-efficient way possible, functional fitness is the one. In fact, many exercise buffs argue it’s the only way to train.

So what is it? Put simply, functional movements are those that serve a purpose – conditioning the body to mimic day-to-day activities and optimize human performance safely and efficiently. When compared to other exercises, whether that’s the gym, Crossfit, or something completely different, functional training is the one that improves your quality of life the most. Here’s why:

4 reasons to choose functional training

1. It focuses on everyday movements

Pulling, pushing, lifting, squatting, climbing – these primal movements, the ones that were so easy as children, are at the heart of functional fitness. This trains and builds your muscles to the point that performing everyday activities is a breeze and day-to-day tasks are carried out smoothly, whether that’s carrying shopping from the car or bending down to pick up the dog’s ball in the park. Moving naturally is something many of us are lacking, thanks to desk jobs and other sedentary lifestyle factors.

2. You don’t need to spend hours at the gym

Many people are turned off by the prospect of slogging it out in the gym every day. That’s not the case with functional training. Due to the high-intensity nature of these workouts, you don’t need to take a lot of time out to have a routine that shapes your body to optimum levels of fitness. You’ll also be focusing on more than one muscle per workout, so instead of grinding the same groups of muscles on one machine, you’ll hit a wide range in less time.

3. Your body is your workout equipment

Functional training is built on the principles of natural human movement – which means it can be done anywhere. It’s all about how you interact with the environment, whether you’re stretching, climbing, throwing, crawling, running, balancing, bending, curling, twisting or turning. But in our urban lives, we can’t always step into nature. That’s why our cutting-edge EVOmove training system is designed to enhance primal movements through playful training, from our innovative Kinesis Wall to our freestyle Playground with its bespoke octagon frame, traverse wall, gymnastic rings and Swedish ladders.

5. There’s less chance of injury

Our bodies rarely move one joint at a time, so your workouts shouldn’t either. Functional fitness incorporates multi-joint movements to achieve a better training session in less time. The aim is on powering up on your strength, speed, agility, cardio, coordination and efficiency through high-intensity training. Instead of only singularly working your elbows doing bicep curls, for example, a more functional movement would be dumbbell rows – giving both your shoulders and elbows a workout and stimulating more muscle fibres. Muscles are targeted from all angles, moving smoothly with the body to avoid those injury-inducing imbalances.