Do activities like carrying bags of heavy groceries, climbing stairs or reaching down to gather your children’s toys from the floor wear you out?
Such tasks can be made easier through a regimen of functional fitness exercises, which strengthen your body by simulating movements that are part of your daily life. This kind of fitness program — which utilizes multiple muscles — can increase your quality of life and reduce the risk of injury.
Functional exercises keep you “healthy and fit to do all you need to get done,” says Maria Beall, a Richmond-based certified sports exercise physiologist and registered yoga teacher. She says a squat is an example of a functional fitness activity: It trains the muscles used to sit down and rise from a chair.
That’s what you want, an exercise that mimics a particular function or activity, says Damien Howell, a physical therapist. “If you want to avoid falls when getting in and out of chairs, you need to practice getting in and out of chairs, by doing sit-to-stand exercise,” he says.
Since such exercises are crucial, prioritize setting aside time to perform them. Beall recommends marking time on your calendar for exercising four or five times each week. “Keep that appointment as you would for a doctor’s appointment,” she says. “Once people get moving, they’re glad they did it.”
Beall knows firsthand the positive benefits of functional fitness training. She and her husband, Mike, are regularly involved in home improvement projects at their rental properties throughout Richmond. In between tenants, there’s often lots of work to be done, but Beall says that she has the physical endurance that allows her to accomplish this pain-free, thanks to functional fitness exercises.
Her routine includes pushups for upper body strength, which makes it easier to paint walls for longer stretches of time. Yoga is helpful, she says, because you learn to rotate and twist while keeping your spine protected. And planks are fundamental in strengthening your core, which also protects your back.
Beall says this came in handy when “I was on the floor scraping caulk for eight hours. I didn’t have any back strain. That was eight satisfying hours,” she says, because in addition to how beautiful the new caulking looked, it was achieved without taking a physical toll on her body.
