Functional Training: The Buzzword of 21st Century Personal Training

While different personal trainers use different training modules to create "functional training," most miss the point entirely. Functional training is not simply balance training, though training balance is a part of functional training. Similarly, functional training does not mean using a different medicine ball, stability ball, balance board or Bosu in each exercise. Instead, functional training simply means the training is useful, that it has function.

In Paul Chek's Movement that Matters, he lists the six primal movements as squat, lunge, bend, twist, pull and push. True functional training is training which trains these six movement patterns, not isolated muscles.

When I started lifting weights as a high school basketball player, the muscle-head body builder who acted as a personal trainer put me on a bunch of machines. Unfortunately, too many personal trainers continue to use a body building emphasis when training clients, regardless of the client's goals and needs. I overheard a Fitness Director orienting a new hire at the gym where I train (not where I am employed) and she told the new trainer that all new members are put on a routine which includes five machines: leg curl, leg extension, abdominal machine, shoulder press and one other I did not hear.

Why? What movements are these clients training? Do most new members join a health club to increase the size and definition of their quadriceps?

Most frustrating for me is when these "trainers" give the same routine to high school athletes seeking to improve athleticism; the workouts these trainers use do nothing to improve overall athleticism because they isolate muscles; they do not train functional movements: no sport movement requires an athlete to lay on his stomach and kick his heel to his butt in a slow, controlled fashion. Furthermore, these machines are potentially dangerous because they are built for an adult physique and often not biomechanically correct for young athletes.