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Beyond hindering your daily activities, injuries may also indirectly affect your emotional well-being. Imagine being unable to partake in activities with friends and family, or losing focus at work due to body pains. This may lead to loneliness and decreased self-esteem. Functional training is known to be effective in improving strength, flexibility and proactively protecting against injuries. This is made possible through exercises that involve multiple joints, and loaded with either free weights or your bodyweight. These exercises help improve your movement patterns, which equips your body to handle a variety of physical challenges and tasks. At Retrofit, we go beyond that. We believe that the result of improved strength and flexibility is improvement in the way you move so that you can better adapt to, and excel at your activity. By helping you move better, you can live better.This article will share how the holistic exercise approach can help you to embrace a life of strength and vitality.
1. Improved Daily Functionality
Functional training as the name suggests, is designed to enhance your body’s ability to perform your ‘function’ safely and efficiently. For instance, if your job requires you to constantly lift heavy objects, and your back hurts as a result of it causing you to be stressed about missing work, functional training will be a useful mode in the circle of care for your back. By implementing proper movement mechanics, and improving your capacity to handle the task, functional training can equip you with the form and strength to perform this function safer, and prevent further injuries down the road. The training prioritises engaging the right muscle groups, keeping a neutral spine, and using the legs and core to lift objects, rather than heavily relying on the back.
2. Enhances Balance and Stability
As we get older, activities may get more physically demanding due to a gradual loss of strength especially if one has not been regularly exercising. This can affect one’s balance and confidence to go for and enjoy trips with their loved ones that include longer walks, or nature hikes with uneven terrain. Fortunately, functional training can help address this concern so that you can enjoy these activities and improve your quality of life. Beyond working on single-leg balances, core strengthening movements and other stability exercises, functional training engages multiple muscle groups at once, further promoting strength and confidence to confidently undertake challenges like hiking steep terrains and even conquering the Great Wall of China.
Learn more: Frailty for Seniors
3. Correcting Muscular Imbalance
Muscular imbalances can make movement less efficient which could lead to injury. Imagine if there’s an imbalance preventing you from raising your arms overhead, and you enjoy your weekly badminton sessions with friends. The repeated overhead smashes can be done, but because of the imbalance, the act of raising your arms to that angle have to be compensated from somewhere. This could help explain the neck pain, and maybe even back pain that you experience after playing which could prevent you from playing to your full potential. A customised and well-structured functional training programme looks at addressing such imbalances to improve joint stability, flexibility, and strength, and more importantly integrating this back into the movement chain so that you can safely perform overhead smashes more powerfully and with lesser effort. Ultimately, a robust foundation for injury prevention can be built to help you move better and live better, thanks to functional fitness.
4. Increased Body Awareness
A common phenomenon: individuals in their 40s and 50s often experience aches and pains which they tend to attribute solely to age. The chain reaction is usually then to avoid exercise so as not to aggravate the pain; reduced muscular capacity and balance resulting in further injuries or aggravation. What if it was due to poor movement patterns and habits? Functional strength training then could be what’s needed, rather than something to avoid. In the journey of functional training, you’ll learn and re-learn how to move more efficiently. This not only helps you develop greater awareness, control, and appreciation of your body, but improved movement patterns can help reduce aches and pains, and minimise the risk of injuries. Through this journey, you can reclaim your confidence in your body’s abilities, and springboard it to do or try things that were previously limited by pain or fear or injury. By moving better, you can then start to live better.
Functional training is an indispensable approach to prevent injuries and develop confidence in enhancing your physical abilities and robustness. With the benefits listed above, we hope you find functional training an ideal way to enhance physical well-being, leading to a life full of vitality and resilience.
Retrofit operates as a fitness service provider in Singapore. We reimagine your functional training through experience and expertise, offering you various safe and effective ways to improve your body wellness. Get in touch with us now to book your slot. If you are experiencing knee pain, we work closely with our physiotherapy partners at Core Concepts Physiotherapy Singapore to resolve the pain.
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