Episode 24: Functional Training to Improve Your Posture
Want to improve your posture and move better? Taking a functional approach to your fitness routine can help!
Any exercise or training style can be considered "functional" as long as it serves the end goal of helping you move better.
Learn more about the functional exercises I use with my personal training clients in this episode.
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Jayd (00:00):
Any exercise can be functional because it depends on what your goals are and what you're working towards. You should always be selecting exercises for your personal exercise program that are functional toward your goals.
(00:23):
Hey there. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA, Jaydigains. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I've created this podcast so that I can share the information that I share with my clients during my one-on-one personal training sessions, this is a place where you can learn how to build a body that you love and eat better for fitness and fat loss. If you have spent any time on the fitness side of social media, you probably will have heard the term functional fitness, and today I'm going to be talking exactly about what we mean in terms of what kinds of exercises are functional and what makes a workout functional. Don't forget that I do actually go live on my Twitch channel a couple times every week. That's twitch.tv/jaydigains, and if you join me on Tuesdays, you can ask your fitness questions and if you subscribe, you can actually submit your exercises. If you want me to do a technique review for more information on my training programs, make sure to visit my website, which is jaydigains.com or jaydharrisonfitness.com. Without further ado, let's get into the episode.
(01:30):
Now, what does it mean for a workout or an exercise to be functional? Functional honestly is mostly a buzzword in the fitness industry. I've been in the fitness industry for 10 years as a personal trainer and as a group fitness instructor, but I also grew up in the fitness industry as well. So over the last 30 or so years, I've seen a lot of different trends that have come through. So in the nineties, we saw a lot of this with aerobics, right? There was a lot of aerobics, especially with the advent of the VHS at home videos that you can watch and follow along with Jane Fonda. My mom had a ton of the firm videos. Pilates was really, really big about 10 years ago. I don't know if you remember Jazzer size. So we go through these different cycles in the fitness industry where certain types of training or certain programs peak in popularity, and I would say right now is definitely one of those periods for what's called functional training, functional strength.
(02:38):
Now, functional training programs or people who teach functional exercises or functional training programs usually position themselves and opposition to styles of training like bodybuilding. So functional training is usually presented as a type of training that focuses on movement and helping you to improve your movement, your mobility, and your strength for everyday life activities. I've also seen functional used in the context of sports or athletics training. So functional exercises, functional workouts to help athletes to perform their sport better. But in actuality, there's no clear cut definition of what makes a movement or a workout functional. So it's largely up to opinion and it's largely subjective to the trainer. It's largely subjective to the person who's doing the program and what makes it functional for them. But overall, what we tend to see with functional programs is an emphasis on movement and that there has to be some kind of practical application of the exercise to whatever the goal is of the person who's doing it.
(03:57):
From my perspective as a personal trainer, any exercise can be functional because it depends on what your goals are and what you're working towards. You should always be selecting exercises for your personal exercise program that are functional toward your goals, but more often than not, functional training is seen as a departure from the focus on aesthetics, but that doesn't mean that training functional won't necessarily improve your aesthetics, and also training aesthetically isn't necessarily not going to be functional. It's kind of more of an approach and a theme towards program design and exercise selection versus a clear cut category of training. It was actually a really good discussion on functional training on Reddit. This was a discussion from about a year ago, but I think it's a good representation of the debate that I have had with other trainers and other athletes in the industry about the definition of functional training, and I will link that discussion in the show notes so you can take a look at it for yourself.
(05:07):
Now, with Reddit, there's no guarantee that the people who are posting are actually certified personal trainers, but I do think that the discussion is pretty comprehensive to the debate within the industry about what functional training is and how you can define it and how it applies to different people's programs. So in that discussion, one poster fast, Sasha says, being functionally strong means that you are strong in many different movement and conditions. If you're strong in one area and weak in another, then you didn't develop the full spectrum of functionality. So we can think of functional fitness as a program that is designed towards helping you to be strong overall in a variety of movement patterns, which I think is a pretty good perspective to have because one criticism of traditional strength is that a lot of traditional strength training happens in a singular plane where you are standing closed chain facing forward, and you're moving up and down like in a squat or a deadlift or bench press, right?
(06:10):
In this sense, functional movement patterns would be exercises that include lateral movement where you're moving side to side, which a lot of traditional strength training exercises don't really do, and also twisting, twisting type exercises, torso twisting, things like Russian twists, torso twisting is super, super important, and not a whole lot of traditional strength training exercises include twisting. So a functional program or making a program more functional would include these kinds of movements or exercises that allow you to practice these kinds of movements. We can also view functional training as whatever allows you to do and practice real world movements, things that you do every day, like sitting down and standing up from a chair, which is a squat, picking things up from the floor, which would be the deadlift movement. So practicing these kinds of movements under resistance would be a functional way to train.
(07:10):
It really has to do with the approach of why you're doing it. Blue Lightning 4, 3 7 says, grip and compounds are most functional for me, I think it depends on the person. I totally agree on this. It depends on the person. It depends on your goals. It depends on what you're trying to do. So functional really is up to the eye of the beholder. As a personal trainer, what I'm going to share today are the types of movements and exercises that I have found to be the most functional in dealing with general population. People off the street who have normal everyday lives. They're not athletes who just want to move better in their everyday life. So first, let's talk about the types of movement patterns and postures that cause problems for normal everyday people in the us, most of us spend the majority of our day seated and sedentary.
(08:01):
We also have this habit of sitting with our shoulders rounded forward and hunched forward, and kind of like a C curve or that cashew spine. A lot of us don't have enough core strength. A lot of us don't have a lot of strength in the back of our shoulders. Another common problem that I see is that a lot of people don't know how to pick things up from the floor safely. How many people do you know who throw their backs out or strain their backs from doing everyday activities, just bending down to pick up a small item from the floor? A lot of people also really struggle with getting up out of a chair by themselves. This is especially true as you get older and your knees get weaker. So when I'm working with a new person, a new client, one of the first things that I'm going to do is work on their posture and their ability to do these types of movements.
(08:52):
I'm going to work on pulling their shoulders back. I'm going to work on getting external shoulder rotation, opening up their chest. I'm going to work on building up their core and their back strength so that they can sit with good posture. I'm also going to teach them how to hip hinge so that they can bend over correctly in a way that's not going to throw their backs out. I'm also going to teach them how to squat properly so that they don't hurt their knees getting up off the toilet. I'm also going to have them work on lateral movement because working on lateral movement is a great way to develop your stability and your balance, which is another thing that tends to go downhill pretty fast the older that you get. So let's talk about external shoulder rotation First. External shoulder rotation is when you are standing with your shoulders externally rotated from the side.
(09:43):
It looks like this. So this type of movement is often really difficult for people who spend the majority of their day seated because we're tending to be like this right in front of our computers or over our phones. So one of the first things that I'm going to do with somebody who's just started training with me is exercises that open up their shoulders, stretch out the front of the shoulders, stretch out the chest, and start to strengthen the back of the shoulders. So you can do this with no equipment by just practicing external shoulder rotation by keeping your upper arm close to your torso, elbows bent, and you're just kind of driving your thumbs back towards the wall behind you. Just doing this with no equipment is a great way to fire up your posterior deltoids, your infraspinatus, your terrace miner, which are your external shoulder rotator muscles.
(10:32):
You probably will also feel good stretch in the front of your shoulders here. You can add resistance to this by using a band, right? A mini band that you can grab around your hands. You can hold onto any kind of resistance band, a Thera Band or one of the tube bands with handles. Just add a little bit of resistance to pull apart to give your muscles a little bit more of a challenge. You can also do this with a cable machine. If you have a cable machine, you add some resistance. You can only usually do this with one side at a time, but you grab onto the cable and drive your thumb the same exact motion. You can also do this with dumbbells. That's one of my favorite exercises. That combines a little bit of a challenge in your biceps while you're holding two weights and rotating outward.
(11:17):
So these are all really good exercises to start training external shoulder rotation. I like to incorporate them in all of my new clients and all of my intermediate and advanced clients programs because it's a movement pattern that we constantly need to focus on because our everyday lives will have us like this rounded forward if we are not careful. We can also do face poles, which is another of my favorite exercises for developing external shoulder rotation. You can do this with a band or with a cable machine. This type of external shoulder rotation brings the resistance from the front of the body, so you're pulling back towards you with your elbows out wide. Another great way to get those back of the shoulder muscles stronger. If you practice these types of exercises frequently, you're going to find it a lot easier to stand with good posture and to sit with good posture throughout the day, which can help alleviate a lot of neck pain and back pain or shoulder pain if you tend to have that.
(12:15):
Another type of movement that I'm going to have a lot of my new clients and my intermediate and advanced clients practice for functioning is spinal extension and flexion. Spinal flexion is going to be things like crunches, reverse crunches, where we are proving the spine forward and engaging the abdominals in front of the body. This is going to stretch out your back, but it's also going to strengthen your abdominals. And then we practice the opposite movement with things like Superman's swimmers. If you have a Roman chair, you can use that as well. Band good mornings is another exercise that I use for this to teach that spinal extension as well as the hip hinge, which we'll get to in a moment. I'm also going to include a lot of torso twisting exercises to help strengthen the obliques and stretch out the back and strengthen the lower back.
(13:06):
And you can do this with very simple exercises. Just standing and doing torso twists or doing wood chops using a cable machine or a band. Russian twists are also a good one. My favorite version of the Russian twist is the seated Russian twist, because it doesn't put you in the type of position that might hurt your lower back bicycle crunches are also good twist and reach twist crunches. All of these are great exercises that you can practice torso twisting to help improve your posture and to stretch out your back. It's also super important to learn how to hinge at the hips. A lot of people lose this ability, especially from sitting all day with your tailbone tucked under. Sitting like this over time is going to put a lot of pressure on your spine and put you at risk of developing a bulging ruptured disc.
(13:57):
And if you carry this movement pattern or this posture with you into the gym and you try to lift weights, you're going to have a really hard time doing it safely. So you want to develop some awareness of your hips and the ability to keep them in alignment. Some of my favorite exercises for mastering the hip hinge are things like the bench hip thrust where you are focusing on bending the hips and straightening them out. The standing hip thrust where you do this from a standing position and you can use a band attached at the hips to pull your hips back and cue that. And I also really love the banded good mornings for teaching this because that helps you to engage your upper back as well. The hip hinge is the basic movement that is foundational to things like deadlifts and squats. Now, learning how to squat is also incredibly important because if you have working legs, you probably spend a lot of the day sitting down and standing up and sitting down and standing up.
(14:53):
It's really important to learn how to do this, keeping your body in proper alignment so that you can avoid hurting your knees or hurting your back. One of the easiest ways to practice good squat technique is to learn the hip hinge, to strengthen your back with the exercises that we talked about earlier for externally rotating the shoulders, strengthening the core, but for the legs part of things to get your hips and your knees and your ankles moving the way that they need to. You can practice box squat hovers where you start in a seated position and you practice lifting your hips up and then coming back down. This is a great way for you to learn where your weight needs to be distributed for a proper squat. Once you have mastered box squat hovers, you can graduate up to box squats where you sit down and stand up from something.
(15:39):
And then once you are good at the box squats, you can do basic squats or even add on more resistance to that using dumbbells, like holding a single dumbbell for goblet squats or doing dumbbell front squats, or even adding a barbell for a back squat. And last, another really functional style of training is any kind of exercise that gets you to practice lateral movement where you're stepping side to side. You can do this kind of exercise by practicing monster walks, stepping side to side with a resistance band tied around either your ankles or your knees strengthening these muscles. Your abductors and your abductors is going to make your squats more stable. It's going to make your hip hinge more stable, and it's just going to give you better balance all around. Functional just means that you're focusing on incorporating exercises that improve your ability to move in a certain way. For me, as a personal trainer, I try to design all of my programs with an idea of functionality towards some goal, usually to help my clients move better in their everyday life. But once they get to a certain level of mobility and fitness, then we begin to train with functionality towards other things like a specific sport or activity that they enjoy, and let me know what functional exercises you use in your programming or what your goals are. I would love to hear about it.
(17:00):
Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode of The Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. You can find me on social media. I'm Jaydigains everywhere. That's J-A-Y-D-I-G-A-I-N-S. You can also join me when I'm live on my Twitch channel. That's twitch.tv/jaydigains. I go live usually on Tuesdays and a couple more times a week. I do both gaming streams and fitness streams, but you're free to ask your fitness questions at any time. Make sure to subscribe wherever it is that you are listening to or watching this podcast and leave a comment in the comments section if you have any questions. I hope that you have a great rest of your day. I will see you in the next episode. In the meantime, make sure that you eat your veggies, eat your protein, drink your water, and prioritize your self-care. I'll see you soon.
ABOUT ME
Hey there! š Iām Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains), and Iām a personal trainer and health coach. I help people build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with my online coaching programs. Check out some of my coaching videos on Youtube, or join me live on Twitch and follow on social media:
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