Functional Strength - Do You Know What It Is?

When I talk about real world functional strength I talk about situations I have had in over 30 years of being a laborer. I have seen many many with bad backs, shoulders, knees. Most comes from lack of real functional strength. Real functional strength is built by using your body as one unit.

It's never about isolating any muscles or looking pretty.

Taking weight gain and supplements won't help build any type of functional strength as a matter of fact steroids won't build functional strength. Steroids will actually weaken the tendons and ligaments of the body and cause more injuries.

The only real way to build real functional fitness is to train functional whenever you can. You want your body to operate like a machine, a machine that can move, bend, stretch, reach, jump, run, twist, turn and climb without getting hurt.

You can't fool your body into thinking it's functionally fit. Your body will let you know. I gave up trying to be the real big guy or that ripped to shreds guy, I found it doesn't matter what you look like it's how your body responds to the rigors of functional training.

There are a lot of experts who will tell you they are experts and will tell you how to be functional fit, but few are functional fit. Functional fit is not the guy with the 19? arms it's that little dude over there throwing tons of concrete in the back of a truck, it's that guy pushing wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of stone.

Training with awkward type movements, unbalanced, no place to grab makes training that much harder and builds functional fitness. I see a lot of men doing farmers walks and I would love to know where in real life you would be carrying two of the same objects of the same weight in your hands at the same time?

Try doing a farmers walk with 100lbs in only one hand, doing that will force your body to tighten and work the muscles on the opposite side of the body forcing the body to try and stabilize. Try shouldering a weight, sand bag Heavy bag on one shoulder and squat or try to squat down and pick things up.

John Grube B.C.S is an expert on the subject of bodyweight training He has over 25 years of training experience and is the author of The Wildman Training Program manual, The New Expanded version The Wildman Training Course and The Super Strength Playground Training Manual. For more info http://www.wildmantraining.com.