Functional Fitness

Working out on weight machines? Some experts say that staying home from the gym may be better for your health.

“Life isn’t like climbing a ladder. Life is actually more like climbing a rock wall because every time you rock climb, you go up a different way,” says certified personal trainer Tony Horton, creator of P90X Extreme Home Fitness.

Horton, who has trained clients at every level, including celebrities such as Sean Connery, Rob Lowe, Tom Petty, and Shirley MacLaine, says his approach to optimal fitness has changed dramatically in recent years. His regimen includes “synergistic” movements that employ stepping, squatting, pushing, pulling, and jumping. It’s more like how you experienced activity as a kid when you ran, kicked a ball, and swung from the monkey bars.

The Way You Move

“Weight machines work isolated parts,” says Horton. “For example, when you sit on a leg extension machine, you extend your leg from the floor to out in front of you, lifting a weight and working the quadriceps.”

But that isn’t how muscles work in real life. “If you’re using weight machines, you’re not using all of those small stabilizing muscles that are so important,” says Timothy E. Hewett, PhD, director of the Sports Medicine Biodynamics Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. “Developing that musculature and functional posture is critical to true fitness and avoiding injury.”

In addition to the underdevelopment of stabilizer muscles, overtraining one side of the body and undertraining the opposing muscle groups is a classic problem associated with weight machine use. The result is an unbalanced body, and unbalanced muscles don’t help you accomplish everyday tasks.

“I was at the airport watching people with their luggage,” says Horton. “Most of them were grunting and groaning, obviously compromised and setting themselves up for injury, and they really didn’t have the strength to move their bags.”

Exercise that empowers you in real life is real fitness. Being able to get on a weight machine and leg press like Pat Robertson isn’t true strength. But being able to get through the airport, play games with children, and have enough stamina to clean your house is. Many researchers, trainers, and surgeons have concluded that weight machines don’t strengthen the body properly and can lead to serious injuries. That’s why most professional athletes no longer use nautilus machines. Horton was recently invited to visit the Philadelphia Eagles. The NFL team can certainly afford the sleekest, newest machines, but its conditioning coach had the guys doing Horton’s functional fitness program instead.

Functional workouts bring faster results. “One functional move can work the entire body from the rib cage down your glutes, your hamstrings, your calves, and your quadriceps, instead of one or two muscle groups on a machine,” says Horton.

Machines offer limited flexibility in the way you use them. Switching things up reenergizes people who are bored with walking on the treadmill and then working a room of machines. “Variety is the spice of fitness,” says Horton. “This takes you away from the boredom of machines. Functional exercise allows for muscle confusion (when you keep your body guessing by varying your workout), preventing your body from adapting, which builds stronger muscles that are less vulnerable to injury.”

Stand Up to Make Exercise Count

“Any benefit that you’re going to get is going to be much greater in a closed chain situation (muscle groups working together), where your feet are on the ground,” says Hewett.

Essentially, effective exercise is creating force through your upper or lower extremity while stiffening your core. You generate maximum force with the shoulder, elbow, hip, knee, or ankle in a natural way when you stand.

“Sitting down on a weight machine doesn’t stiffen that trunk in any way; it actually relaxes the core and leads to poor breathing patterns,” says Hewett, adding that cardio exercise benefits and calorie burning is also superior when you exercise on your feet. Functionally, working out on weight machines doesn’t prepare you for anything in real life, “except perhaps sitting in the car and pushing the gas pedal,” he adds.

Weight machines dictate that joints move in unnatural ways. “Co-contraction is so important for joint stability and joint health, and that’s not what you get out of a weight machine. Body weight exercise, dumbbells, and free weights are so much superior,” says Hewett, who cautions that forcing joints in artificial ways puts exercisers at risk for osteoarthritis.

So is there any benefit to exercise machines? Hewett says they help bodybuilders achieve their goals—“for looks, not functionality”—and can be of use in some rehabilitation situations.

Bring It

Functional exercise also differs from exercise machines in that you have to be mentally present. At a gym, it’s easy to sit down, pump a few reps, check out the TV screen while you wipe off the machine, and stroll to the next station where you stand in line. It’s nearly impossible to catch your favorite show when you’re doing push-ups with chest-to-knee raises in between or plyometric lunges.

“Bring It” is the tag line on Horton’s workouts. “‘Bring It’ is about bringing intensity,” says Horton, who has conducted fitness camps for the past five years at which participants do four workouts in two days and learn concepts about fitness. “We have a questionnaire to learn what participants thought was the greatest thing they learned. About 75% of them say, ‘I am a lot tougher than I thought I was.’ They discover, ‘Wow, I can work out twice as hard and I didn’t hurt my back, I didn’t hurt my knees, and I feel like I accomplished something.’ They go home and their results accelerate tenfold postcamp. It’s because they have more information. But it’s also because they are mentally focused, dedicated and, most of all, committed to real-life exercise, and that is finally going to give them the results they’ve wanted,” says Horton.

Mature exercisers who are serious about sipping from the fountain of youth have migrated to functional fitness. Perhaps it’s hindsight: They’ve tried other fads through the years and paid the price in injuries. And with the increased responsibilities of middle-aged adulthood, they don’t have time to mess around.

Horton says, “I’ve discovered as I’ve gotten older—and many of my clients are in their 30s, 40s, or 50s—that it’s about working out to maximize your time and get really top-notch results. And it’s definitely not about injuring yourself to accomplish those goals.”

— Michele Deppe

Functional Fitness Trio

Here are three functional fitness moves from Tony Horton’s P90X workout that use muscles synergistically.

Lunge & Reach: Reach down beside your left foot and lift a 3- or 5-pound weight up with both hands. Extend arms fully over opposite (right) shoulder and pause for a few seconds. Bring weight back down to floor and pause.

Repeat eight reps on left side. Then do the opposite side by beginning with weight at right foot and bringing the weight above left shoulder for eight reps.
Prison Cell Push-Up: From a standing position, bend forward, placing your hands on the floor, then step or jump back into plank position. (Plank position is when you hold your core firm, your body is parallel to the floor, and your weight is supported on hands and toes.) Perform a push-up and then bring right knee to the chest and then put it back. Perform another push-up and, at the top, bring your left knee to the chest and then put it back. Do third push-up and then jump or step up to a standing position. Entire sequence is one rep; do eight reps.
Squat X-Press: Holding light weights, start with feet wider than shoulder width and toes slightly pointed out. Go into a squat with chest and head up and forearms on thighs. As you stand up, raise weights overhead into a wide shoulder press so your body forms an “X.” Do 30 reps.