Functional Strength
anthony bruni
One of my goals doing massage is to bring about more awareness of functional strength. I've seen ( and personally endured) so many injuries that occurred doing routine tasks. Despite most of us having an exercise routine of some kind, these sort of injuries are too common. I would like to do my part to help shift the idea of exercise from some something that concerned with some external metric like how much weight we can lift to something more intuitive, and natural. Something that aids in our overall health. I plan on releasing some new content that will focus on this soon. For now, though I will opine a bit on the philosophical substrate of the idea of functional strength.
What does functional strength mean? I would say it is possessing the neuromuscular coordination and kinetic force that allows us to traverse a wide spectrum of physiological demands with relative ease. In other words the more functionally strength we cultivate the less physically demanding ours day to day life becomes. Can we run up a couple of flights of stairs without becoming winded? Can we lift a heavy and/or awkward piece of furniture without strain? These are the type of questions we should ask ourselves to estimate our level of functional strength. We should be exact and honest with how we answer these questions. We shouldn't harbor negativity or emotional judgment. Rather we need to take inventory as to where precisely we are weak, or inflexible, to intelligently inject health into those areas. Without our health, our fitness, all our other problems become that much more significant at least relative to our frailty. We should want to be fit, and fitness without functionality is only cosmetic fitness.
So how do we nourish functional strength? Well, let's look at our primate cousins pan troglodytes. Chimpanzees are thought to be at least, when adjusted for size, twice as strong as humans. Throw the biggest baddest fighter into a cage with the average chimp having a bad day and things won’t look good for our fellow sapien.
So why are chimps so much stronger than humans. Part of it may be on average chimps have more fast twitch muscles whereas most humans have an even balance of fast and slow twitch muscles. This means chimps are generally predisposed to have more muscle fibers that are explosive and powerful whereas more of our muscle fibers tend to be weaker but have more endurance. This makes sense as humans regularly stand or even sit for hours at a time requiring the sustain efforts of postural muscles.
As of now, it is thought that the ratio of fast to slow twitch muscles is something we are born with and does not change with environmental pressures. I would not be surprised in the least if thinking on this changes but if current scientific consensus is correct in this observation there is another component as to why chimps are so much stronger. One that completely in our power to work on. Coordination.
The way we coordinate our muscles, which muscles are engaged and which ones are relaxed, is often inefficient compared to a chimp. While we can perform fine motor movements, such as fixing a watch, playing video games, or playing an instrument better than any other primates when it comes to activities requiring raw strength rather than precise dexterity chimps are our superiors. Don’t believe me, try grappling across monkey bars at a playground.
Most of the activity all chimps naturally do humans can do with practice. After watching endless hours of parkour videos I would argue human actually have more untapped potential for movement than chimps. We have a better ability to separate what muscle fibers are engaged making our fine motor skills more precise. With this precision, we have more options and control over our movements. But because we have to spend more time learning to cultivate our more complicated neuromuscular system we tend to neglect gross motor coordination.
Most people use their muscles in an atomistic way engaging one part of the body while ignoring the rest. Chimps ( as well any other non-domesticated animals ) exist in constant state coordination. Muscles learn to fire together in unison, distributing the force needed to complete an action throughout the body. They will maneuver their legs in such a way to best support their upper body when climbing a tree for example. Like chimp, every action we perform can be made more functional, by incorporating our whole body into it. This is not to say we engage every muscle, rather we know what to engage and what to relax. We know how exactly how much engage a muscle, and we know exactly when to relax one muscle and let another muscle take over the wave of force going through our body when we are moving.
The more we coordinate our body the more our body will be able to do. I worked circus performers, trapeze artist, dancers, and many other people who could do amazing things with their bodies. They were all strong but not overly so. I certainly worked on people who would be able to out bench press, or out curl them, who lacked the functional strength needed to do even a slightly irregular task. In many ways building, functional strength is easier than conventional strength, that isolates muscles and forces them into repetitive tasks. It certainly more fun and playful as functional strength training challenge us to constantly modify how we are doing something. Much like playing jazz we should be constantly trying to move in a new way while observing ourselves to find the most optimal way to control our bodies as to make ever more challenging movement possible.
Anthony Bruni