Functional Movement & Your Daily Life
The Empowered Health Team

In recent years, the phrase “Sitting is the new smoking” has become a common expression to communicate that a sedentary lifestyle is very damaging to a person’s long-term health. This comparison highlights the health dangers associated with too much physical inactivity.

 

An American Cancer Society study examined 14 years' worth of data on over 90,000 people, who were considered "active" and "inactive". The study asked participants who were very inactive – that is to say, they did less than 17 minutes a day of light physical activity – to perform 30 minutes of light activity each day. The results? Their risk of premature death decreased by 14 percent.

 

These same very inactive participants who gave more energy – 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity each day over being sedentary – actually reduced their risk of early death by 45 percent.

 

This evidence supports what we always say at Empowered Health, “All movement is GOOD movement!”

 

Let’s quickly define what we mean by the word movement. You may be thinking it means a formal exercise or workout routine, maybe an expensive gym membership and a closet full of leggings. Leggings being optional, you would be partially right with this definition. But even simpler than an intense session of lifting weights or running Badger Mountain, movement is simply the act of putting your body in motion. The more you can move, the better.

 

Okay, so then what is “functional movement” and how does it affect your daily life?

Functional movements are movements based on real-world situational biomechanics. They usually involve multi-joint movements across multiple planes that allow your body to move fluidly throughout your daily activities.

 

Other types of movements like sports movement are designed to help a person perfect a particular move or skill, ie: a backhanded tennis swing or pitching a baseball. Muscle-specific movements target a particular muscle group (ie: biceps) with the intent to grow and strengthen that particular muscle.

 

Functional movement exercises, on the other hand, attempt to incorporate as many variables as possible (balance, multiple joints, multiple planes of movement), thus decreasing the load on the muscle but increasing the complexity of motor coordination and flexibility.

 

Functional fitness exercises train your muscles to work together and prepare them for daily tasks by simulating common movements you might do at home, at work or in sports. While using various muscles in the upper and lower body at the same time, functional fitness exercises also emphasize core stability. As in functional medicine, the whole body is one unit, working together.

 

Functional movement training patterns may not look a whole lot different than other exercises, the difference is training for the way our bodies need to move throughout our day. A professional athlete and a stay-at-home parent need to do different things (run, jump, kick, slide vs. carrying children, loading groceries, playing at the park). Whatever the needed outcome is, the training should allow each individual person to move through their daily activities without pain or limitations.

 

Functional movement patterns often involve the whole body, moving various ways that stimulate our bodies for dynamic movement that is atypical of the standing workday movement of sitting down and standing up.

 

In the end, all movement is good movement, and the more you can move each day, the better your overall health will be, the stronger you will feel and the happier you will be.