Is functional training worth it for strength athletes?

Absolutely: Yes, functional training is also worth it for strength athletes. With functional training, you can engage and train multiple muscles and muscle groups through natural movements. Thus, you're not only strengthening a specific muscle but your entire body, automatically improving strength, endurance, and coordination. At the same time, you're also boosting your metabolism because you're working at full throttle during a functional workout.

This benefits strength athletes as well. Of course, there are sports and competitions, like weightlifting, where muscles in the upper arms are the decisive factor, but you should always ensure to train all your muscles evenly. This can prevent painful sports injuries and keep you in good shape. Functional fitness is perfect for this.

Functional Workout vs. Strength Training? What's the difference?

The difference is clear. The exercises used in functional fitness always target multiple muscle groups. This leads to a stronger body awareness, and you better adapt your body to everyday life. Not least, by doing various stabilization exercises during functional workouts, you can reduce the risk of injury in competition or daily life. Traditional strength training with machines, on the other hand, trains one muscle after another, and in isolation. With most machine exercises, the stabilization function is taken over by the machine.

Your only task is to develop strength; the machine does everything else by itself. Although there are machine exercises that require you to take over stabilization as well as building strength, these are in the minority. Classic training methods in strength training that always address only a partial muscle group still predominate.

What are the benefits of Functional Fitness?

Many strength athletes are not aware of the importance and success of a functional workout. It is still often associated with rehabilitation, which isn't entirely wrong, as it originated from training to rebuild strength after injuries. But functional training is much more than just rehab. With these special exercises, you train your entire body for the long term. An intense workout can be completed in a short time. Just 15 to 45 minutes can be enough to leave you completely exhausted but happy.

Functional fitness is suitable for both professional athletes and recreational athletes who want to treat themselves well. For the former, functional exercises must first be tailored to the respective sport to train the skills required in that sport specifically. For example, as an advanced athlete, you can start with squats on an uneven surface or push-ups on a medicine ball. These exercises sound simple, but the effect is immense. You stabilize your core, firm up your abdominal muscles and upper arms – all at the same time. As a progression, you can use tools like kettlebells for "swing exercises," latex and rubber bands for band training, or aerobic steps for push-ups with elevated feet.

Recreational athletes can strengthen their core muscles and prevent back pain and other complaints with a functional workout, to name just a few benefits of this special training method. As beginner exercises, you can start with regular squats and push-ups before daring to try more difficult exercises. Initially, the goal is to increase your well-being and performance. Muscle building is secondary in this function form, but in the long term, you will naturally build muscles, regulate your body weight, and achieve better conditioning. This is not possible with strength training alone.

Final words.

Just try it: In addition to training for pure strength building, add some functional exercises as well. This way, you're not only training your entire body, but you're also ensuring balance between muscles and body awareness. When you supplement your workout with functional fitness, you just feel better!