What is Functional Fitness, and Why May it be Great for Seniors?

About Brookdale Senior Living

Brookdale Senior Living offers multiple care levels for seniors in more than 600 communities nationwide. Brookdale helps you find the right care plan for yourself or your loved one. With amenities such as transportation services, salons and private dining rooms and activities such as gardening, fitness classes and trivia nights Brookdale caters to a wide range of interests and needs.

Even if you don’t have an exercise routine, your everyday activities still demand a lot of work from your muscles and joints. Actions like walking up a flight of stairs, bending to lift a grandchild and getting up from sitting on the floor all challenge your strength, balance and mobility. And when your body isn’t prepared for a dynamic range of motion, these normal activities may also put you at risk for soreness and injuries.

Reducing this risk is where the idea of functional fitness stems from. Functional fitness is a form of training that is designed to enhance your ability to perform the tasks of daily life more safely, efficiently and with less effort.

The Basics of Functional Fitness

Imagine a weight lifter who can push 450 lbs. on a leg press machine, but he’s unable to regain his balance and pulls a hamstring when he slips on a wet floor. Or envision a marathon runner who can tick through the miles without stopping, but lifting a heavy moving box gives her a lower backache that lasts for days.

At a glance, it would seem like both people in these scenarios are in great shape, but their training could benefit from some exercises to improve strength in everyday movements to help reduce their risk of these injuries. Functional fitness was designed to do just that.

Unlike exercises that focus only on training isolated muscles, functional fitness describes a holistic approach that focuses on strengthening the whole body in a wide range of natural movements. It incorporates compound moves, or the simultaneous use of multiple muscle groups and joint types to more closely mimic motions you perform in daily life, such as squatting, lifting, carrying, balancing, pushing, pulling, twisting, and stepping up and down.

Why it can be Great for Older Adults

Incorporating functional fitness may help seniors to more safely and effectively perform simple movements and may help seniors to stay active, potentially reduce injury, help maintain independence and possibly improve quality of life as well.

Training your whole body with multi-joint, multi-muscle exercises may help to improve coordination and body awareness and is designed to help increase mobility, balance and range of motion — all of which become increasingly important as we age. An exercise plan that incorporates functional fitness may also help reduce the risk of falls.

Another great thing about functional fitness is that the compound moves are very efficient, so you get “more bang for your buck” time-wise. This is great news for seniors who don’t love spending a lot of time in the gym!

A 30-minute workout full of compound movements can deliver the same strength, endurance and cardiovascular benefits as any exercise, but engaging multiple muscle groups in full-body motions challenges more areas at once, generally makes your brain work harder and is likely to give you a better metabolic boost than more isolated forms of exercise.

What Does It Look Like?

The real beauty of functional fitness is that it’s designed to be practical for you. In most cases it doesn’t rely on the use of machines, and successful execution of the moves can look different for each person depending on your goals. You can consider whether to start adding many of the exercises into your routine at home without any equipment at all.

Here are some common functional fitness exercises paired with real-life scenarios that they can help improve:

- Squats: Sitting down and standing up without using your hands

- Step-ups: Climbing stairs or stepping onto a curb

- Stationary split-squats: Kneeling and rising from the ground

- Total core exercises: Getting out of the bed or bathtub

- Overhead press: Reaching to grab something heavy off a high shelf

- Deadlifts: Bending and picking up groceries or laundry baskets

- Farmer’s walk: Gardening chores, like carrying buckets of water

- Pushups: Opening heavy doors

Equipment you can incorporate may include hand weights, resistance bands, kettlebells and medicine balls. Searching YouTube® videos, working with a personal trainer or joining a fitness class are all good ways to learn and start trying out functional exercises, too.

Of course, you should always talk with your doctor before beginning any new exercise program.

It’s Never Too Late to Get Started

Remember: Bodies don’t stop moving just because we age — bodies age when we stop moving. Functional fitness can be a key part of maintaining your active lifestyle and independence well into your golden years!

At Brookdale, we support our residents’ physical goals with on-site fitness centers and signature programs like our B-Fit exercise classes. Check out these articles on fall prevention and falling down more safely for more tips to add to your arsenal of injury prevention techniques.

^{The above content is shared for educational purposes only. You must consult your doctor before beginning any exercise or fitness program or acting on any content on this website, especially if you have a medical condition. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read on our site.}