‘Functional Fitness’ Is Trending. Here’s How—and Why—You Should Start

Big goals make for great workout motivation, whether you’re packing on muscle for summer or training for your first half-marathon. But in the grand scheme of things, those milestone moments are a blip compared with the unremarkable, everyday activities and movements we use our bodies for the most.

I’m not suggesting you stop training for aesthetics. (This is GQ.) But it’s worth considering how your workouts could be doing more for you in daily life. I’m talking about making your training more functional.

“Functional fitness is the capacity to perform activities of daily living,” says David Goldman, MS, RD, CSCS, sports nutritionist and exercise physiologist. “It’s the type of training you would do in the gym or at home that makes it possible for you to do the things you want—and need—to do in other areas of your life,” whether that’s unloading groceries from the car or breaking into a quick sprint to catch your train—without tweaking your back or pulling a hamstring.

“That’s what functional training really helps with,” says Matt Tanneberg, DC, CSCS, owner of Body Check Chiropractic & Sports Rehabilitation in Scottsdale, AZ. “It keeps you stable and strong for all those different moments where you’re not prepared to engage your core or set your feet in the right position.”

While the concept of using exercises in the gym to mimic everyday movements has been around for decades, functional training has been trending recently, helped along by the rise of popular functional workouts like rucking and the explosive growth of Hyrox, the racing series that combines running with functional movements like sled pushes and farmer’s carries. “I’m seeing a lot more people incorporating functional training into their workout routines,” says Dr. Tanneberg.

Here’s why more and more people are turning to functional training, and why you might want to consider doing the same.

Your workout’s blind spots

You may be reading this and thinking, “I already do strength training, so I’m all good. Come at me, bro life.” And it’s true that strength training generally has some practical health benefits outside of the gym, including but not limited to supporting bone density and preventing back pain—important things, no doubt. However, if you’re still relying on the same kinds of standard lifts and mindless, steady-state cardio you’ve been doing since college, there’s a decent chance your workouts aren’t preparing you for real-world situations as well as they could be.

“You can be the strongest person in the gym and still throw your back out once a quarter,” says Dr. Tanneberg, who cites one of his patients who tweaked their back after deadlifting, while removing plates from the bar. “Functional training helps wipe out a lot of those issues that may pop up, like a tweak here, a twinge there,” he says. “Moving your body through multiple planes of motion—moving laterally, moving backwards, versus always doing the same repetitive thing—is where you’re going to strengthen and stabilize yourself.”

What’s the point?

It’s not that an exercise like the barbell bench press isn’t making you big and strong. There just isn’t a ton of real-world application for it, outside of bragging rights and looking swole. “The bench press is a fantastic exercise, but very rarely in life are we laying on our back, needing to press something really heavy up towards the sky. Like, a boulder falling on your chest isn’t super common,” says Goldman. A weighted push-up, meanwhile, can hit all the same muscles while benefiting you miles away from the gym. With a push-up, “you’re moving your body through space—it’s not just your arms moving—and you’re using much more musculature in your core,” says Goldman. “This actually translates to more useful things, like if you wanted to go surfing, where you’ve got to pop up off the board, and you’ve got to do it quickly.”