Functional FITNESS
Burn more calories, increase your balance, core stability and postural strength, whilst improving your running
through functional training. Lucy Fry Reports
WHAT IS FUNCTIONAL TRAINING? Most of us have heard the words ‘functional’ and ‘training’ spoken together a lot in recent years. We’ve probably nodded while fitness junkies bang on about functionality and how it might help improve our PBs to train in this way. But what does it actually mean? At its most basic, it refers to any kind of training which prepares your body for the demands of real life. Anything that prepares you for your specific goal (whether it’s carrying a toddler round on one hip or playing in a world football championship) is functional, in that it’s targeted training - it has a function in meeting your own personal physical needs. Richard Tidmarsh is a Strength and Conditioning Coach and founder of Reach Fitness London (www.r4reach. com). He says: “There is plenty of mystery around functional fitness but really it’s any movement that uses a number of different muscle groups at once, for instance, a walking lunge combined with a body twist holding a medicine ball. Movements like this are a much more economical use of training time in comparison to fixed resistance machines that only work one body area; the functional move burns more calories, increases your balance,
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core stability and postural strength.” So, not only does functional training enhance performance, but it also reduces the risk of those crushing injuries that seemingly came from nowhere – the back injury incurred by bending badly while brushing one’s teeth, or the calf muscle which tore during a 10K race, which also happened to be the first run of the year.
FUNCTIONAL TRAINING FOR RUNNERS What does functional training mean for runners? Isn’t just getting out there and running the most ‘functional’ way of being a good runner? Well no, actually (not in isolation anyway), and it’s certainly no way to come back from injury. We need more, as runners, than just speed work, distance running and rest. Improving posture, ankle stability and core strength are all functional ways of becoming a better runner, but are done through strength training rather than pounding the pavements. Chris Wilkes is an osteopath at London’s sports injury clinic, Pure Sports Medicine (www.puresportsmed. com) where the clinic’s goal is to offer non-elite athletes the kind of access to a full medical team that elite athletes get. He says: “When we’re looking to rehabilitate someone back to running, we might look at strength or flexibility
imbalances and ask what range of motion and strength they need to achieve a good running technique. We look at how the body moves in running and recreate a training environment that improves that function.” Take one common running injury, the
hamstring strain where, after an initial period of rest, rehabilitation involves strengthening of that muscle. A non- functional approach to this might be simply to use a hamstring curl machine in a seated position, which trains the hamstring to flex at the knee. A functional approach, like that advocated by Wilkes, is quite different however. He says: “In running the function of the hamstring is more to extend the hip,
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