YOUR FUTURE IS FUNCTIONAL

Rediscover the fun of fitness and build a body that’s fit for life. Trainer Andrew Tracey introduces a workout style that will transform your day-to-day routine

In my opinion, “functional training” is a catch-all term for exercise protocols that aren’t designed with narrow goals in mind, but whose benefits carry over to daily life. How functional are you as a human being? Does a lack of physical prowess limit you in day-to-day activities? And to what degree can you increase your functionality through exercise?

To me, being functionally fit means never letting your physicality become a limiting factor. It’s about training your body so that, beyond a few specific physical tasks, you’re ready to “go” at a moment’s notice (and can keep going). It’s everything from not getting out of breath running around the park with your kids to being able to bump-start your partner’s car

without needing a lung transplant. If your training pushes you beyond the requirements of these everyday challenges, they will cease to be challenging. As the old adage goes: “Train hard, live easy.”

But how do you train for both everything and nothing, all at once? Well, you can start by breaking life down into the physical abilities it demands and ticking them off. In general, we want to improve three fitness components. The first is strength, making heavy weights light and hard work simple. Then there’s moving well under a load. Life very rarely presents you with a perfectly even weight on a perfectly even surface and asks you to perform 10 uniform reps. That’s why you should accustom yourself to pushing, pulling and carrying awkward and dynamic loads. Finally,

there’s stamina, the ability to sustain a prolonged physical effort. It all sounds like a lot. But by performing the workouts here, you’ll factor in everything from short, intense bouts to longer, prolonged efforts, and become as close to a genuinely functional human as possible.

However, most people will understandably wonder, “How do I fit all of that in?” This is where the definition of functional comes in: “Designed to be practical and useful, generally at the expense of looks or style.” We won’t waste time on impractical, flashy exercises. We’ll dispense with anything that needs a lot of practice and limit “accessory” exercises to those that directly improve compound movements and, importantly, help you build a body that will remain injury-free.

The workouts to follow are based on low-skill, high-yield movements. You’ll be recruiting more than one muscle, but you won’t be overloading them to avoid any soreness. You’ll do these workouts at an appropriate intensity, taxing a mix of energy systems and using dynamic, timesavvy methods with clear lines of progression to ensure a lifetime of continued improvement.

Just as a weightlifter trains to be a better weightlifter, a functional trainee tries to be a more functional person. You’ll identify and work on your weaknesses to ensure that those restrictions won’t hamper your life outside the gym. Let’s get to work.

Functional fitness means never allowing your physicality to limit you in your dayto-day life