What is Functional Training

The training methods we use with valeo / personal training, LLC are functional for you and your goals. The word “functional” simply means “having a purpose” or “being useful and practical” and can certainly apply to one person very differently than it does another. For example, what is functional for a football player may not be functional for a busy mom chasing after her children.

This functional training methodology emphasizes the integrated, not isolated, nature of the body, replicating real-world situations where multiple muscles and nerve patterns work together to produce movement. The primary goals are to get you stronger, more stable and better able to execute power during those movements, be it kicking a soccer ball or walking up the stairs.

This cannot be reproduced in an artificial environment, such as the case with traditional machine training, where you are externally stabilized by a bench or locked in a path determined by the machine. Training this way reduces the activation of muscles and nerves to only one targeted area and only one direction of movement, situations rarely seen in everyday motion.

Though there is a place for traditional machine training, taking a more functional-approach produces greater useable outcomes because it trains your body to internally stabilize itself (by strengthening the core) and conditions a muscle’s action specific to its purpose in sport or everyday life. Many exercises mimic exercises similar to what you may encounter in a physical therapy or athletic training clinic. This is termed ‘prehab’ training – training the way you would rehab an injury in order to prevent the injury in the first place.

Each session is efficient and effective, keeping your time in mind and focusing on training to live, not living to train. Personalized programs are developed simulating the environment you function in everyday, one that involves instability, gravity, momentum, inertia, impulse, ground reaction forces and 360 degrees of motion. In the real world, you are either standing or moving, going up or down, pushing or pulling or rotating and often, all at the same time.

So…let’s train that way.