Functional Fitness and CrossFit

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Functional fitness (using functional movements) is among the most widely spread buzzwords in the gym industry today, but for logical reason. Functional fitness focuses on body training and preparing your body to handle real life scenarios.

The difference between ordinary gym and functional fitness seems minor to many people but it’s actually huge. Functional fitness builds your body capability for carrying out real life activities in real time, unlike ordinary gymming where you just lift a specific weight in an idealized position, sometimes even formed by a gym machine.

There’s a shift of focus from traditional and obsolete ways of body strengthening fitness to novel and more effective ways of achieving functional fitness and CrossFit is surely one of the great options available.

Being fit is not the only objective of CrossFit, rather being healthy, strong and lean are the ultimate goals. CrossFit as a leading training system of athletes is known for designing and delivering the most comprehensive and high yielding fitness programs around, catering to all age groups and ability levels. With CrossFit, you will find a lot of true success stories and amazing transformations people have gone through.

 

Functional Movement: Making the muscles work together

Traditional weight training isolates muscle groups together but it doesn’t train some of the isolated groups with the others. The key to a successful functional exercise lies in integration, focusing all the muscles to work together instead of isolating them to function independently.

Here’s an example of what you might consider a functional exercise:

Consider a bent-over row; not the type of row you usually carry out on a seated machine, rather one that you do while leaning over a bench, having weight in one hand with arm hanging straight down, and then pulling the weight up to the extent your elbow points towards the ceiling, ending with your upper arm being parallel to the ground. This is the kind of exercise that builds your back, arms, and shoulder muscles, and due to its nature, it would really work for the entire body. Some of the foundation movements of CrossFit include air squats, front squats, shoulder press, deadlift, press push, push jerk etc.

CrossFit has designed its workouts on similar ideas that are comprised of functional movements, which also keep on changing. These include pulling, pushing, running, lifting and squatting. Many of these functional movements are executed at a high intensity. Instead of using machines like treadmills etc, CrossFit has equipped itself with kettlebells, pull-up bars, barbells and spacious open space for carrying out running, jumping, squatting, lifting, climbing and throwing. All this is tied together to move your body in the way it should. The CrossFit community has built its exercise methodology on the foundations of weight lifting, gymnastics and endurance/speed/agility- the fundamental components of functional fitness.

 

Body balance & control

Most of the people are not even able to control their body weight. They can’t even do a one legged squat without falling over. You can try it now. Can you? As stated by one of the trainers at CrossFit, your first step should be to train your body regarding balancing and controlling its own weight.

CrossFit aims to enhance the physical competence of an individual in ten general physical skills. These are defined by CrossFit as:

– Cardiovascular/respiratory endurance: It’s the ability of the body to store, process and transmit oxygen.

– Stamina: It’s the ability of the body to store, process, transmit and consume energy.

– Strength: It’s the ability of a body muscular unit, or group of muscular units, to gain force.

– Flexibility: It’s the ability of the body to have maximum motion range at a particular joint.

– Power: It’s the ability of a muscular unit, or group of units, to release maximum force in the least time.

– Speed: It’s the ability of body to decrease the time cycle of a repeated movement to the least level.

– Coordination: It’s the ability of the body to join different movements patterns into a single movement

– Agility: It’s the body’s ability to reduce transition time among different movement patterns to least degree.

– Balance: It’s the ability to regulate the position of the body’s centre of gravity relative to its support base.

– Accuracy: It’s the ability to regulate the movement in a specific direction or at required intensity.

 

CrossFit 6221  is more than an excellent centre for functional fitness training. Apart from this incredible program, specialty classes including endurance, mobility and power lifting are also provided to complement your functional fitness and enhance the overall value you are getting. In order to increase the awareness level of people and the community at large regarding the benefits of functional fitness, CrossFit 6221 also conducts special seminars and community events, bringing the people together from different backgrounds to avail strength for facing real life situations.