Certain
buzz words and phrases exist in the fitness world and us cyberspace fitness
experts will pontificate what we know or don’t know about them. Take “functional strength” for example. What does it mean? It depends on who you ask. Simple and not-to-simple answers abound.
For
a simple explanation, I found one written by Katie Chasey of RXBound.com. She identifies herself as a 2-time CrossFit
Games Coach for those of us who don’t know who she is. Ms. Chasey defines functional strength as the
strength that gets us through life and daily survival.
Well
you can never go wrong with a simple explanation like that but fitness
meatheads, like me, with a thirst for complex explanations may want more.
Later
in her article, she offers more by adding that “Functional strength is the
ability to run your load-joints (shoulders, hips, knees and ankles) through a
full range of motion without pain, stiffness, or restriction. This is also known as load-joint
articulation.”
Wow! I don’t know about you but that’s more than I
need. I never took a human anatomy
course in either high school or college and I don’t know a thing about textbook
exercise physiology because all that I know has been acquired from my own
school of hard knocks. But that won’t
prevent me from giving you my own take on this functional strength term.
For
me, functional strength is strength efficiently applied to get the job done
whatever that job may be. So the
functional strength needed by an Olympic weightlifter is different than an
average Joe Blow stacking a just-delivered cord of seasoned oak firewood in the
woodshed in preparation for an upcoming cold winter wood-burning season.
And
the functional strength needed by a super-heavyweight power-lifter attempting
to set a new personal record in the dead lift is different than the functional
strength needed by a skilled karateka intending on breaking a stack of bricks
in a demonstration of his tameshiwari skills.
A
final comparison would be that of the functional strength needed to lift a very
heavy object off the ground versus the functional strength of a construction
manual laborer who makes, perhaps, a hundred or more trips a day moving a
wheelbarrow full of cement.
Just
as there are “different strokes for different folks”, so too is the case with
functional strength and its efficient application to the life and daily survival
tasks at hand.
Visit
any internet fitness forum in which its members are engaged in a discussion
about functional strength and eventually, more likely than not, you’ll read
about how someone once knew someone who was a muscle-head bodybuilder who got a
construction job and even though this person could bench press 300 lbs. and
squat 400 lbs. he almost dropped from exhaustion unloading a truckload of
100-lb. cement bags.
I’m
sure these accounts are true stories and they certainly drive home a point that
strength is only functional if it gets the job done.
Further
visits to other internet fitness forums will find discussions about strength
where a distinction is made between power and strength. I read several explanations from different
people and eventually decided that I best liked this one: “Strength is what someone is capable of and
power is how that strength is utilized.
Seen in this way, you can talk about strength and power in any context.”
Still
another explanation I read elsewhere is that power is similar to strength but
it adds speed as a dimension so power = strength x speed.
It’s
all making sense to me.
A
couple points, from me, deserve mention.
The first is how cardiovascular conditioning is needed to make one’s
strength lasting and therefore functional.
Take the muscle-head bodybuilder in the above example. Undoubtedly he had the strength to get the
job done if the job lasted ten minutes but not the strength to get a job done
that takes all day to complete.
That’s
why this middle-aged man devotes a lot of time to cardiovascular
conditioning. And while I’m an expert at
avoiding hard manual labor requiring rigorous effort thanks to my ability to
afford paying someone else, I know I could do it if I had to thanks to a good
level of cardiovascular conditioning.
But
so long as I can use my brain to get through most of my life and daily survival
tasks and can afford it, I’ll hire a functionally strong laborer, when needed,
to help me get through life and daily survival tasks requiring physical labor
functional strength. It’s why I have a
gardener to keep my landscape groomed, why I hire a roofer when my house needs
a new roof, and why I’ll hire a grave digger to dig my grave when my time
comes.
My
second and final point on this discussion that functional strength is strength
efficiently applied is that we need to only use our strength at the generally
brief moment required and then with decisiveness. I’ll borrow the term “kime” from my martial
arts training days and use the following explanation I found on a Wikipedia
webpage that best aligns with my understanding of it.
Kime
is a Japanese word and the noun of the verb “kimeru” which means “to decide”. In karate, it can mean power and or focus
realized by the instantaneous tensing at the correct moment during a technique. In some cases, this moment is but a
nanosecond after which a return to a relaxed state of being is how strength
efficiency is realized. The speed to
translate strength to power can only be had from a ready yet relaxed state of
being.
So
in some respects, power is what is created when kime is applied to strength
that is decisively executed with perfect technique.
Blah,
blah, blah – this could go on forever so I better stop while I’m ahead or to be
no further behind than I am already.
So
what is functional strength? Call it
what you want.
Pax
Domini sit semper vobiscum
