You always knew exercise was good for you. But the type of exercise is important as well. Functional fitness trains your muscles to help you do everyday activities SAFELY and EFFICIENTLY. Sitting down & getting up from a chair? Grabbing a glass from a tall kitchen cabinet? Picking up a heavy Amazon box from the porch? (oh wait, is that just me!?!)

Maybe you don’t love to exercise, but for all of us, it’s a way to maintain and/or improve our quality of life. That’s the main goal of functional fitness. And that’s why you absolutely should be adding it into your workout routine.

These types of exercises train your muscles to work together. Functional fitness is all about prepping the muscles for daily tasks by simulating common, every day movements that you do at home, work and in sports. While using multiple muscles in the upper & lower body at the same time, these types of exercises also emphasize core stability. It’s like multi-tasking for fitness.

Some of my favorite functional fitness exercises are:

• Air Squats (using bodyweight only and varying the tempo: slow squats, pulse at the bottom, slow to the bottom and faster on the rise up)
• Multi-directional lunges (back, forward and side lunges with or without weights)
• Planks (all of them – elbow plank, high plank, side planks, etc)
• Hand-release pushups

Cheers in Health,
Erin

Erin Waldner, Founder of Proving Ground Studio (Hull, MA), offers myriad functional fitness training workouts designed to achieve complete muscle conditioning with optimum recovery. For a full class schedule, please visit wwww.provinggroundstudio.com.