Functional Fitness

Functional fitness was a term I had never heard before I started this class. I never thought about exercising for any reasons other than competition or weight loss. Matt Herring, the strength coach for the University of Florida men's basketball team, described functional training as keeping in mind the way the body actually functions, not doing some crazy exercise just to improve your physique.

Functional exercise mirrors the body's actual movements, according to Renata Du Plessis, a trainer at Gainesville Health and Fitness Center, in Gainesville, Fla. She listed six exercises that mirror the movements we make in everyday life: squats, lunges, pulls, pushes, twists and bends.

I think functional fitness is a very interesting concept, especially since I hate the weight room at the gym. Everyone is looking at you, and since I have always avoided it at all costs, except when coaches have forced me to go, I really have not idea how to use the machines. But all the exercises Renata listed are ones that I know how to do and can do without the judgmental stares of the residents of the weight room.

Eighty percent of Americans complain of lower back pain, Renata said, and a way to cure that is to work on abs and improve core strength. This is a great example of functional fitness, exercises I can do to improve my body in a practical way. Sit-ups and crunches are some of my favorite exercises to do, ever since my swim coach went through a phase when she would make us do eight-minute abs, we would do abdominal exercises for eight minutes and change the exercise every 30 seconds.

So I'm not going to pull any moves like the pre-Kevin Federline Britney Spears (rumor had it that she did over 1000 crunches every day) but I do plan on doing more sit-ups and crunches in hopes of reducing my back pain.