Why Advanced Functional Strength Is Bodybuilding

Yesterday when I shared my story about Tai Chi, it wasn’t JUST to share with you another training method that I believe is extremely valuable. It was also to help people understand and see how fitness and health as we typically see it in magazines, online, and so forth, isn’t what training has been like for most of our history. The type of fitness training we think is pretty common place now is really only a byproduct from the 1960’s. When you think about how long we have been on this planet, that is nothing right?!

Then why do we continue to train the body in such a segmented and linear way? Even in ancient times we seemed to have a better appreciation of how everything about the body (including the mind) played such an integral part in our health, fitness, and well being.

Without getting too deep right now (maybe for another post;) what we can see in our training is how we have tried to divide the body up into very unnatural parts. I know, it looks like it all makes sense, but then we see how far we get when we try to justify how integrated movements train individual muscles like the image below tried to demonstrate.

Most of those exercises I would have no problems with, unfortunately our mentality is that we are going to be able to isolate not just the hamstrings, but individual hamstring muscles that is more of an issue. As DaVinci once said…

While DaVinci wasn’t speaking to just the body, we see in nature and life everything is connected. So, why do we think the body would be any different? Why train the body in such a way where we could start saying it is going against nature? Is it because we are afraid to admit we don’t believe training the body as it is designed and building functional strength will help us LOOK the way we want?

I would say that is something that does greatly impact how we see how to build great training and functional strength. Our lack of belief in functional training delivering not just functional strength, stability, and mobility, but also helping with our cosmetic goals is at the center at why we still don’t see functional training as the dominant form of fitness and health training.

Nothing could be further from the truth though! I can’t tell you how many times I have seen the opposite be the case. Where we not only build better functional strength, mobility, stability and even power, but we help people with those cosmetic goals as well!

Why though speak about advanced functional strength training? Because it is where we see the true differences in how we approach training the body and building better workout programs. For example…

 

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A post shared by Ben Beeler (@pain.solutions.sf)

What muscles do we see Ben Beeler here training? Too many to really describe, but if we think in bigger terms we can see…

-Shoulder stability training

-Core strength in all three planes of motion

-More effective glute training

-Hip mobility being developed

In other words, we are hitting so many muscles, but we are also training so many different aspects of functional strength at once.

 

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A post shared by Cory M. Cripe (@corymcripe)

People often don’t know what to make out of our DVRT exercises like this combo Cory Cripe shows of a MAX rear step deadlift to power clean to front loaded MAX lunge (need a better abbreviation right?). It looks scary to people because it is unfamiliar, but it actually is one of the best ways to build functional strength that we could imagine. How?!

-Working from a less stable position requires the entire lower body kinetic chain to work at an optimal level, from feet to lats

-The Ultimate Sandbag moving in different directions than our movement requires MORE muscles to be used and combines strength and stability training at the same time.

-We have to be very “movement accurate” which means we can find holes in our functional strength and movement training in drills like this if we struggle to perform them well.

-Power training is important but so is force absorption training. Such DVRT drills do a great job of each!

I could keep going, but you see these aren’t the type of qualities you would hear people typically discuss in fitness programs or building a healthier and better body. However, when we understand our body and movement better, they tend to become the major points of emphasis!

That leads me to discussing our DVRT flows too! A lot of people look at our flows (exercises that flow into one another) and think they are great for conditioning (which they are!), but not so much for functional strength and muscle. That isn’t the case at all! In fact, when you train with the qualities we are discussing you couldn’t even begin to name all the muscles trained and using our DVRT principles we balance our flows to where no one exercise is under trained or another is loaded too much as Coach Cari Satre shows below.

Functional strength IS fat loss training, it IS corrective exercise, it IS mobility training, it IS muscle building, the key is that it is just a way more efficient way to train all these qualities at once!

Don’t miss this week saving 20% ALL throughout DVRT (excluded live events) with code “save20” HERE

 

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A post shared by Cari Satre (@coachcariii)