Functional Fitness exercises are movements to strengthen the body to cope with the physical demands of everyday activities.  Functional strength means being able to move your joints through a full range of motion without pain, stiffness or restriction and train your muscles to ensure you can do ‘normal’ daily activities safely and efficiently.
Movement is really the very best way to maintain your functional fitness but unfortunately not many of us move plentiful on a daily basis. Movements can be limited through work, such as desk based activities as well as the way we may spend our free time.
Even those that religiously go to the gym aren’t necessarily improving their functional fitness. The gym can be great to get your heart rate up and get stronger and fitter and of course it feels great to look amazing, toned and abs ready for summer! Functional exercises however, help you to grow old with minimal aches and pains, to be able to stay active and agile and cope with day to day stressors put on your body. The biggest difference from ‘regular’ weight training is that you don’t isolate muscle groups or joints when performing functional fitness exercises, this means your muscles learn to work together.
Functional fitness exercises can be incredibly helpful to maintain or improve your quality of life through enhanced strength, balance and agility.  However even without specific functional exercises you can still improve your functional fitness through movement. Be playful, join a local team sport, go for a run, a ride or a hike, see if you can get from sitting on the floor to standing up without using your hands, take your kids, grandchildren, nieces or nephews to the park and join in! Your aim is to regularly put your joints through all planes of motion at full range of movement.
Pilates is a great tool for building functional strength as most movements use a multitude of joints and muscles, require them to work together and aim to work in all planes of motion using your own body weight for resistance. Although the focus of Pilates is on mobilising the spine, elongation and core strength, no moves are carried out in isolation. Mobilising the spine is achieved through full body movements, core strength and engagement is a tool to stabilise in these movements.
Pilates will also be helpful for functional fitness through focus, concentration and control which dictates the pace of movements. Functional fitness exercises require you to stay balanced and in control of your movements, this is hard to do when you are pushing to get your reps done, instead we do fewer reps in perfect form. Once your muscles are fatigued you are unlikely to maintain the perfect form so rather than push you to get those last reps, we stop and reset. In order to do functional exercises well you need awareness, learning how to maintain form and how to recruit the right muscles, something that regular Pilates classes should help you achieve.