What Is Functional Training?

Functional training is a big buzz word around the fitness world nowadays. To some it is the holy grail, to others it is a bunch of nonsense. Most trainers and fitness fans are on the band wagon; a few think it is a lot of "sound and fury signifying nothing" advocated by idiots. The naysayers like to make the point that all exercise is functional. In a sense, that is true enough (we will get to that); in a profound sense it is simply a confession that they are too busy or too intellectually lazy to study the question. Alright, that no doubt P-Oed a few. If it hit a nerve, maybe you should ask yourself why.

Functional training is usually defined as training that mimics activities of daily life. We all have to engage in certain activities involving movement; e.g. standing, bending, reaching, walking, turning, bringing our hands to our mouths (which we probably do too often) etc. If we leave the definition of functional training at this point, then those who rant that all exercise is functional and the functional training movement is sound and fury have a point that will be hard to rebut.

I prefer to define functional training as exercises mimicking the activities of daily living that are done using proper form; i.e. correct dynamic and static posture. This means your trainer must have a good understanding of the human movement system. All exercise, then, is not functional. Exercise done using improper form is patently dysfunctional. The focus of  "functional training" is to undo the dysfunctional patterns of learned movement and retrain your body to move in the way it was designed to move;  thus alleviating and/or preventing the damage and chronic pain that inevitably accompany repeated dysfunctional movement.

When you have trained your body to move as it was designed, not only do you avoid the injuries and pain that follow dysfunctional movement, you improve the performance of both athletic activities and the activities of daily living. Proper human movement, requires less effort, provides an economy of energy and minimizes the likelihood of injury and chronic pain.

If you are self-training or considering self-training, do yourself a favor and hire a trainer knowledgeable in the human movement system to assess you. Just because it feels right does not mean it is right. If you have developed a pattern of  wrong movement, it will feel right and the right movement will feel wrong until you have corrected it. However right the wrong movement may feel, if left uncorrected it will not only negatively impact performance but will eventually lead to injury and chronic pain. A few half-hour sessions with a good trainer is money well spent.

If you have developed patterns of improper movement, that includes poor posture, you will do well to find a good 'functional trainer' or corrective exercise specialist, (Some make a difference between functional training and corrective exercise; I don't. Training proper function is correctional)

A Healthy Life View

It has been an unusually busy year of doing nothing. It happens. I just found this in my drafts and thought it worth a long delayed publish.

This is a different sort of post today. It comes on the end of a week full of life. It is a bit long. Perhaps something can be learned from it.

In the space of five days, I left my tenure at the Y to seek a new adventure yet to be defined, leaving behind friends and adopted family, those with whom I have labored and loved, and given my age, their age and unforeseen circumstances, those whom I will likely never see again in this life. I drove to FL to see family, cousins, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren whom I will see less often now. When I arrived at my daughter's, Sasha, my oldest great-grandbaby ran out to meet me. A pretty little girl sometimes too mature for her age. Life circumstances sometimes does that.

Friday night I stopped by the hospital to see my oldest living cousin. I was blessed to grow up in close proximity to my cousins. Seventeen of us grew up on and around my grandfather's farm. When I started school my nuclear family moved nearer the school I would be attending and another dozen of us cousins lived and grew to adults within a block of one another. I suppose if no one had told us differently we might have thought we were all brothers and sisters living in different houses. We were as much at home in the houses of our aunts and uncles as we were in our own homes. We don't see each other often anymore but the bond of close cousins, like the bond of brothers and sisters, cannot be broken by time and space - nor death itself.

There are moments in life that you take with you forever. Friday night held one of those moments. I had not seen Carol, my oldest living cousin at the time, since her father died and, truth be known, we didn't communicate very often. If you have close cousins you know that doesn't matter much. They are your cousins. When I came into her room, Carol was asleep. When her daughter told her I was there, she awakened, they said, for the first time that day and her face brightened in recognition. I leaned over to give her a hug; in return I got a smile and a kiss on the cheek. She died at 1PM the next day as I was driving to Pensacola to see children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Playing with Gavyn and little Kane, the two youngest of my great-grandbabies, I thought of the passing of years and generations. Closing lines from my favorite poem, appropriately enough written by a long distant cousin, a contemporary of my great-great-grandfather Tennyson, came to mind:

"Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

My wife has gone ahead of me to Utah and my youngest daughter is a world away in Tokyo; so I left her baby; i.e. Kira, her dog we had been keeping, with my niece who adopted her and then I drove back home to SC to finish packing for the move to Utah. An 8 hour drive home alone gives much time for reflection, reminiscing, and counting blessings. "Test me in this, says the LORD Almighty, and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it." As I drove I listened to the sound track from Somewhere In Time - as I have done when driving beginning with the many drives between SC and FL when my younger brother was dying. Eight hours is hardly enough time to begin a count of blessings. How does one begin to assess the value of family and friends in 8 hours, 8 days or a lifetime? Millions will not buy one moment of it. My younger brother's oft repeated advice to me during his last year: "Tell those you love often that you love them. You only have a short time to do that."

Weight Management and Your Eating Habits

As we noted in our last post, weight management is primarily a function of eating habits rather than exercise habits.  The likelihood that you will manage your weight in a healthy zone by exercise alone is only slightly better than no likelihood at all.  To manage your weight by exercise alone simply takes more time and energy than most of us have available.

More importantly, managing your weight by exercise alone, assuming you are successful in doing that without regard to what or how much your eat, offers little hope that you are consuming a healthy diet. Malnourishment means improper nourishment as well as the more commonly understood meaning of lack of nourishment.  You can be well fed; yet, be malnourished if you do not have a balanced nutrition eating plan.

Rule number one for healthy living in my healthy eating book is this: Stay away from diets.  A sensible diet can sometimes get things kick started and may be an alternative beginning for 6-8 weeks.  They can help with some rapid early weight loss if you need that to get you started. However, just keep in mind that beyond a possible bit of early weight loss, diets are always ultimately useless and more often than not they are counter-productive to weight management.  Have you ever dieted before? There you go! If they worked, you wouldn't be thinking about dieting again. Point made.

Rule number two: Eat mostly fruits and vegetables. That one is simple. Avoid adding sugar and salt to your fruits and veggies. You will be pleased to find that they actually have a unique flavor of their own. Cherry pie is not a fruit. In fact, you will have to walk about 4.5 miles to work off one slice of cherry pie. You get the idea.

Rule number three: Limit red meat to once a week. I know there are those who will argue this but the fact is that too much red meat will give you more saturated fat than you need. Have fish/seafood at least once a week. I know, they can be expensive; so are heart attacks. AVOID FARM RAISED FISH. Many will not agree with that bit of advice and I do not mean it for an absolute. A cigar twice a year may do you no good but it will also do you little harm. You get the point.  Here is a link to the best fish to eat: http://health.usnews.com/health-news/diet-fitness/slideshows/best-fish/8  Chicken (white meat), turkey and lean pork are always good. Scratch the fried meats. That is for special occasions. Yes, you can have fried chicken once in a while. (Remember the cigar?)

Rule number five: You are going to love this one. Eat snacks. Fruit, yogurt, cottage cheese, veggie pieces (carrots, bell peppers, celery with low fat cream cheese, almonds and walnuts (no more than 15 nuts) are always suitable snacks. Don't go more than three hours without eating. Eating regularly stabilizes your blood sugar, helps maintain an even energy level and prevents the urge for the whole cow at the next meal.

Rule number six: You knew this was coming sooner or later, didn't you? Eat no more than you need. 50 calories a day more than you need will add about 6 pounds a year to your pant size. How do you know how much you need?  Determine the goal weight you want to reach and maintain. If you are female multiply that number by 13 to  depending on age and activity level. That is your calorie goal for the day. If you are male, multiply by 16. How do you determine activity level? Easy guidelines: If you are on your fanny more than you are on your feet, you are sedentary unless you engage in a regular daily exercise program. You may need to use 12 as a multiplier if you do not see the weight moving downward. If you are on your feet most of the day and engage in some exercise each week, you are most likely moderately active and the multipliers given will be close to your needs. If you have a physically demanding job and/or engage in regular daily exercise you will probably want to increase your calories a bit. As long as you are not dragging for want of energy, try not to make upward adjustments in the calories until you have reached your goal weight. If you find you are falling below your goal weight, which should be somewhere near BMI chart suggestions unless you are athletic and heavily muscled, then is the time to add calories to maintain at goal weight.

Bottom line? As long as you are following a healthy diet of mostly fruits and vegetables, eat whatever you want. If you want an ice cream, have an ice cream. Just remember - calories. If you down 600 calories a day in ice cream you will pay. That may be 1/3 of you calories for the day, it will taste good but it will spike your blood sugar, dump out of your system almost as fast as you put it in and you don't get any more fuel until the next mealtime. With that in mind, enjoy your ice cream.


Watch for new posts of healthy meal ideas, recipes and snacks.

The Secret to Weight Management

There really is no secret. We all know that but we need to be reminded from time to time.  I am a Personal Trainer and personal training is generally considered to be about moving and exercising.  That is important to weight management and optimal health.  In fact, only about 20% of those who lose weight keep will it off unless they include a regular exercise in their weight management program.  That said, however, exercise alone, for most people, simply will not get the weight off.

I know, a lot of Personal Trainers are screaming heresy, but truth is truth and misinformation does nothing to help people.  Technically, yes, you could exercise your weight off and keep it off.  But we don't live in the "technical" world.  We live in the real world, and in the real world, the truth is that you have to create a 3500 calorie deficit to lose one pound. That is roughly the equivalent to walking 5 miles per day 7 days per week to lose 1 pound a week - assuming all that walking doesn't make you hungrier than usual. At an average walking speed of 2-21/2 miles an hour, that means spending at least 2 hour every day walking.  Given the reason most people offer for not exercising regularly, i.e. "I just don't have time.", walking two hours per day isn't going to happen for most of us. 

So, we have that bit of a problem with attempting to manage weight by exercise alone.  The other bit of the problem, for those few who actually do manage to exercise enough to keep their weight well managed without any other consideration, is the question of good health.  Being slim, trim and looking great is not the same as being healthy.  Being at a "healthy body weight" is not the same thing as being at a healthy weight.  You can neither conclude from BMI alone, as health screenings tend to do, that someone within in a "healthy BMI range" is really following a healthy lifestyle nor, as a matter of fact, that they are healthy.  All else being equal, a person who is no more than 20% overweight, exercises regularly and follows a healthy eating plan, is far more healthy than a person at the magical "healthy chart weight" who eats junk - and that is true whether the junk eaters exercise regularly or not.

And that brings us to the "secret" of weight management.  Your weight, and far more importantly, your health, depends on what you eat as well as how much you eat.  Ultimately, weight is about calories in and calories out.  I know, you see a lot of headlines and blurbs in the media now proclaiming that it isn't all about calories in and calories out.  There is a modicum of truth in that box of donuts but I wish they would find a better way to market their articles.  "It isn't all about calories in and calories out"  is just what overweight people who love their food want to hear. What did they just hear? Yep! They missed everything except "It isn't about calories in and calories out."  I beg to differ.  Folks, it doesn't matter if you eat nothing but donuts and candy bars, if keep it down to 1000 calories a day, you will lose weight. You won't be healthy, but you will lose weight.  Point No. 1 - Calories Count.

However, what you eat, the kind of calories you get, is just as important for weight management as the number of calories you eat and far more important for health.  In our next post we will talk about healthy eating.  Meantime I leave you to digest (I know, shameless.) what we have covered today.

Sitting for long lengths of time is unhealthy. Those who sit for long lengths of time have larger bottoms and, much more importantly, slower metabolisms. In fact, studies have demonstrated that prolonged sitting will kill you. The risk of heart disease from sitting too much has been found to be about the same as that of smokers. How great is the risk? According to an Australian study the all cause mortality rate of those who sit for prolonged periods of time is 50% higher than in those who are more active and the risk of cardiovascular events is 125% higher.

"Prolonged sitting time...independent of physical activity, has emerged as a risk factor for various negative health outcomes. Study results have demonstrated associations of prolonged sitting...with premature mortality (you die younger. HTM); chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer; metabolic syndrome and obesity." (http://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2012/11_0323.htm) "Prolonged sitting has been shown to disrupt metabolic function resulting in increased plasma triglyceride levels, decreased levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and decreased insulin sensitivity," Dr. Hidde van der Ploeg, a senior research fellow at the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health in Australia, told TIME's Healthland.

For reasons not yet fully understood, "these relationships have been found to be consistently stronger for women than for men." (http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/43/2/81.full)  On the other hand, "...breaks in prolonged sitting time have been correlated with beneficial metabolic profiles among adults, suggesting that frequent breaks in sedentary activity may explain lower health risk related to waist circumference, body mass index (BMI), triglyceride levels, and 2-hour plasma glucose levels. (http://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2012/11_0323.htm)

Concerned to help their fellow beings (and make a profit) entrepreneurs have been quick to respond to this crisis with new and innovative workplace gadgets to minimize sitting time. We now a variety have treadmill desks and stand up desks. There has also been a proliferation wellness programs made available to employees along with more ergonomically healthy work-stations offered by employers as they have become more aware of the financial costs of unhealthy employees and the financial benefits of healthy employees. Moreover, studies have consistently shown that standing burns 40% more calories than sitting. "However, systematic reviews indicate a lack of evidence of effectiveness  related to work-site-based interventions intended to reduce sitting time." (CDC)

The various work-site-based interventions are not inherently lacking in effectiveness. Allowing for the fact that not all devices are suitable for every workplace environment, the primary lack of effectiveness in work-site-based interventions is caused by failure of employees to use them.S

Standing is a simple intervention often recommended and employed; however, standing for prolonged periods is not panacea. Lack of optimal blood flow is one of the problems caused by prolonged sitting and simply standing, while it significantly improves metabolic activity, does little to improve blood flow. Not only that, but standing for long periods of time significantly raises risks for musculoskeletal disorders.

The problem with prolonged sitting is that the larger muscle groups, the contraction of which drive the metabolic system (as well as the flow of blood thus lowering the workload on the heart) are not being contracted when we sit. That is improved when standing; however, standing by itself makes a much more significant use of stabilizer muscles than it does of the large global muscle groups.

What can you do? Here are a couple of simple suggestions that activates global muscles, requires no gadgets, and will not interrupt your work. They may look a little silly but you will not look nearly as silly as being dead. It only takes 2-4 minutes of these activities every hour to win the battle against sitting

• Stand and walk in place or dance a bit.
• Do chair squats. Simply stand up and down from your chair for a couple of minutes. 
• Go to the water cooler and have some water. Not only will that get you moving for a couple of minutes but it will help overcome the chronic dehydration that most Americans suffer.
• It may not sound like much, but an Australian study found that these types of mini-breaks, just one minute long throughout the day, can actually make a difference. 
• The increased risk was separate from other traditional risk factors for cardiovascular disease, such as smoking or high blood pressure.