Functional training is a popular and effective way to enhance your fitness, performance, and health. But do you know how functional anatomy can help you design better training programs? In this article, you will learn some basic concepts of functional anatomy and how to apply them to your functional training goals.
Functional anatomy is the study of how the human body moves and functions in different situations and activities. It focuses on the relationships between muscles, joints, nerves, and other structures that enable movement and stability. Functional anatomy helps you understand how your body works as a whole, not just as isolated parts.
Understanding muscle fiber direction, and the origin and insertion of muscles, enhances exercise effectiveness by aligning movements with biomechanical advantages. Knowledge of strength vs. resistance profiles allows for selecting and modifying exercises to match muscle strength curves, optimizing tension and efficiency. This approach leads to personalized, effective training programs that maximize strength, hypertrophy, and safety, catering to individual needs and biomechanical characteristics.
Functional training is based on the principle of training your body to perform specific tasks or movements that are relevant to your daily life, sport, or occupation. Functional training aims to improve your strength, power, mobility, coordination, balance, and endurance in a realistic and efficient way. To achieve this, you need to know how your body moves and functions in different planes of motion, ranges of motion, and levels of intensity. Functional anatomy can help you identify the key muscles, joints, and movements that are involved in your functional training goals and how to train them effectively.
Understanding functional anatomy and biomechanics is key to functional training, aligning exercises with natural movements for daily activities and sports. It aids in injury prevention, optimizes force production, and enhances movement quality. Knowledge of muscle mechanics allows for customized training, directly transferring to improved functionality and performance in real-life tasks. This approach ensures training is safe, effective, and tailored to individual needs.
Functional anatomy can be used to design functional training programs tailored to individual needs, preferences, and abilities. To do so, one should assess their current level of fitness, mobility, and function. This can be done with tests and tools to measure strength, flexibility, balance, endurance, and movement quality. Additionally, it is important to define functional training goals and objectives in relation to daily life, sport, or occupation. Once this is done, one should select the appropriate exercises and modalities that match their goals and challenge their body. Lastly, one must plan their frequency, intensity, volume, and progression according to goals, abilities, and recovery in order to optimize results and avoid overtraining or undertraining.
Understanding and using functional anatomy for creating workouts can be more helpful than just using basic anatomy principles because functional anatomy better shows us how different every individual is. Everyone has different movement patterns, limb lengths, joint angles, strength differences and needs, we need to account for differences in sex, age, weight, motor skills and so on. Let’s put it like this: anatomy is theory, functional anatomy is practice.
Functional anatomy is a beneficial tool that can help you track your progress and performance for functional training programs. You can use a journal, an app, or a spreadsheet to record and review workouts, tracking variables such as exercises, modalities, parameters, feedback, or outcomes. Additionally, you can use a rating of perceived exertion (RPE) scale to measure how hard you feel you are working. Reassessing your fitness, mobility, and function periodically with the same tests and tools from the beginning is also important. Other indicators such as body composition, energy levels, mood, or pain levels should be taken into consideration. Lastly, adjusting and modifying your functional training programs according to feedback, outcomes, and goals is key for keeping them challenging, effective, and enjoyable. With functional anatomy you can design functional training programs in a smart and personalized way.