As we age and agility declines, mundane tasks and movements can become more challenging, potentially limiting your quality of life. Functional training is an ideal method for staying fit that is gentler on aging joints. Before selling your family home or canceling that bucket-list trip to Cinque Terre due to worry about climbing stairs, explore functional fitness first!

Functional Fitness Exercise Meaning
First, what is functional fitness and why is it important? As its name implies, functional fitness is about improving agility, mobility, and strength to promote better functioning and injury prevention, preserving optimal wellness. The emphasis isn't fat loss, weight loss, or muscle gain; it's exercising for better coordination and endurance. However, you will acquire muscle tone and definition over time, fueling weight management. Unlike grueling high-intensity workouts and their potential for injuries or burnout, which make people throw in their workout towels altogether, it is about fitness routines people can do consistently to improve strength and energy.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that you’ve developed a shortened, halting gait of someone with advanced years and want to overcome it. Or have you seen weightlifters who can’t straighten their arms or long-distance runners and cyclists develop a stressed, strung-out-looking appearance? In contrast, functional fitness helps people move better, look better, and feel better, too! We aren’t gaining miles at the risk of breaking down the skin barrier or muscles at the cost of our flexibility. This approach to movement is a happy medium between little to no movement and extreme exercise, focusing on strength with mobility - not one or the other. It aims to work in harmony with your body’s natural movements, promoting better muscular balance and daily functioning. Functional fitness involves exercise programs with resistance-based equipment designed to activate muscles and work through people’s range of motion for active aging.

Types of Functional Fitness
There are several ways how to improve functional fitness, all of which are intended to mirror common daily movements and activities, training your body and muscles to function safely and effectively.

1. Functional fitness exercise at home: Lunges (walking, regular, and reverse), planks, push-ups, squats, and shoulder presses are easy functional fitness exercises for seniors (and beginners!) As a bonus, none of these core-strengthening, bodyweight exercises require purchasing equipment. Remember to warm up a little first!

Don’t know where to start? Go online, and you will find abundant streaming and on-demand videos to learn how to get moving.

1. What is functional fitness equipment? It includes calisthenics equipment (parallettes, suspension trainers, and water-based equipment), kettlebells, plyometric boxes, pull-up bars, and weighted bags or balls to up your fitness game. You can also use exercise bands to do standing rows.

Can’t do some of these other exercises yet? Don’t fret! You can start with a bench press or single-leg deadlifts with free weights. Once you get the hang of these, try pushups and lateral lunges. But, if you discover you aren’t steady, get a workout buddy to spot you until you gain some balance. Just be sure to return the favor!

1. Outside the home: Want to get out of the house? Search functional fitness gyms near me to check out functional fitness classes. Most offer trainers who can instruct you on proper body mechanics or biomechanics so you can become aware of how you sit, walk, and move.

Efficacy of Functional Fitness
Is functional fitness effective? Absolutely! Functional fitness programs provide exercises that complement and facilitate everyday movements like bending, pulling, squatting, and twisting. With consistency, you will be able to crouch down to work in the garden, bend over to pick up your grandbaby or pet, reach for that box of mementos on the top shelf in your closet, or kiss your honey without worrying about pulling or hurting something. Functional fitness redefines the “no pain, no gain” motto we used to have about exercise. Low-impact workouts can achieve phenomenal results with energy left over without the possible risks—there shouldn’t be actual pain when you exercise—mental or physical!

Functional fitness embodies the lifespan philosophy. Living a long time for the sake of living longer without the ability to get around easily no longer works. Rather than exercising to live longer, functional fitness focuses on health span, as in well-living for the duration of your life. As we are living longer and our aging demographic is expanding, more of us want to see what the world has to offer for many more years, and functional fitness promises to help us do that.

Functional Fitness for Everyone
Functional Fitness is an inclusive modality, with young and “chronologically experienced” people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds prioritizing movement. People of all ages and fitness levels can incorporate movement in 10 - 20 minute increments wherever it fits into daily routines. This makes it more accessible to people who can’t carve out hours of gym time multiple days a week—students, boomers, beginners, and exercise veterans alike.

Active Aging
What is active aging? This concept was spearheaded by the World Health Organization and European Commission to help support longer activity within the aging population. Employers, governments, service and product providers are responding with principles and processes that promote working practices, higher retirement ages, and better social engagement with older adults. The overarching goal is to help postpone degenerative aging and inactivity with preventative measures and healthcare for improved mobility, wellness, and longevity for people from all occupations, incomes, family sizes, marital statuses, religions, and sexual orientations. Functional fitness is one way that older adults pursue active aging to stay strong and independent longer, while younger folks do so as an investment in their future agility.

Importance of Active Recovery
Embrace active recovery, an offshoot of the active aging trend, to sustain your new fitness routine. Incorporating solo and guided stretching, cryotherapy, professional massage, and at-home massage guns are essential for supporting healthy regeneration. Another way to support active recovery is to apply products. Whether in your golden years or just starting out, our Tension Relief Gel combined with Marine Magnesium is a winning combination, providing soreness relief, more comfortable mobility, and renewed energy! To up the ante on active recovery, aromatherapy Sea Salt-infused natural bath salts or a natural bubble bath will help rebalance ions for improved relaxation and equilibrium.