The growing popularity and benefits of Functional training

With growing concerns for better health and fitness, people today are engaged in various forms of fitness regime such as gyming, running, cycling, yoga etc. for achieving their fitness goals. While these forms of exercise have been around for many years, we hear a lot these days about a relatively newer concept called Functional training. In order to understand the benefits and how exactly Functional training helps with overall strength, flexibility and endurance, we spoke to Dhruv Chaudhuri – Head Trainer, AVP Operations & Customer Experience at MultiFit.

Here are the excerpts from interview:

What are the health benefits of functional training?

Functional training is a classic exercise which involves training the body for the activities one can execute in daily life. This becomes helpful due to the immense work pressure people go through nowadays. Apart from making it easy for people to exercise while completing their daily chores, there are tremendous benefits of functional training:

• It helps improve co-ordination with the help of performing movements in all 3 planes rather than moving just forward or backward
• Functional training helps with having a good posture of the body, leaving behind the hunchback due to working continuously by sitting at one place
• It also increases muscular balance and joint stability
• Another beauty of functional training is that it helps with injury prevention and can be performed by people of all age groups
• It improves balance and core strength from within
• It improves flexibility of the body leaving behind the stiffness which may occur due to other machine exercises

How is functional training different from other forms of exercises such as gyming/running, etc?

Because Functional training involves multi-joint movements or exercises that helps one carry out the day to day tasks with better performance and efficiency. On the other hand, regular gyming involves using machines which restricts movement to one plane only which cannot be applied in our day to day movements and activities.
Running is a form of a functional exercise, separate functional exercises can also be included in order to improve one’s running ability.

How is MultiFit different from other fitness centers? What are the facilities provided at MultiFit?

MultiFit is the first calisthenics based gym in India which involves using one’s body weight with minimum equipment to perform exercises. At MultiFit, the focus is not only on developing muscular strength and muscular tonicity but also on movements which are beneficial for performing better for the day to day activities. We also focus on all the components of fitness like strength, muscular endurance, cardiovascular endurance, flexibility, co-ordination, agility and balance which helps in concentrating better on different sports.

The other activities carried out at MultiFit are:

· Circuit Training
· Spin Classes
· Mixed Martial Arts
· Boxing
· Yoga
· Calisthenics
· Paleolithic workout
· Jeet kune do (Martial Arts invented by Bruce Lee)
· Strength Training
· Multiflex- flexibility, rehabilitation and posture correction class
· Sports specific training

At MultiFit, we aim to build a community of fitness enthusiasts, by offering the best of the best trainers to fulfill the need of functional fitness. We believe fitness is a long term goal and should be adopted as a lifestyle.