Functional movements are helpful for developing strength and power, but they also offer many other benefits, including injury prevention, improved performance, better balance, and heightened mental clarity.
Functional movements are simply everyday movements that most people don’t do in the gym, such as squatting to pick up something off the floor or lunging forward to touch your toes.
These exercises are often done with great weight in order to increase the intensity of the workout.
This form of functional training is known as “compound” exercise because it involves multiple muscles working together to perform one move.
One nice thing about functional movements, like pushups and pullups, and squats, is that they are easy to remember. They don’t take up much space in your brain; you can do them with almost no instruction, and most people find them satisfying because the rules are clear.
Functional exercises are good for your body, but they are also good for your head. They give you an efficient way to exercise many different muscles. This makes it easy to strengthen the connections between your brain and your body.
It’s easier to make yourself stronger than it is to make yourself smarter, but the two processes go together. The more you use a muscle, the more efficiently you can control it–the more easily you can make it do what you want.
As a result, functional exercises train not just physical strength but mental strength as well: discipline, patience, accuracy, focus, attention to detail. All these qualities allow you to do a better job of whatever it is that you want to do.