Our Trip to Colorado and Functional Training

By: fitfactor September 28, 2021 1:35 am

Hello my friends,

I am back from a wonderful week in Colorado. We started our trip with two days in Denver with our awesome friends from the Functional Aging Institute Mastermind Program, learning how to grow our businesses as well as how to continue to train the active older adult with the latest researches and techniques.

Then, Mike and I drove to Aspen for a four-day well deserved vacation. If you have never been, I highly recommend it. Aspen is absolutely beautiful. The mountains are incredibly imposing with their absolute beauty, especially this time of the year with the foliage changing colors to a dramatic golden yellow.

While we were there, we ate a lot of great food, drank Old Fashioned and good wine. But we also stayed very active. We went hiking, horseback riding, and fly fishing. We walked a lot and we worked out too.

Now, besides the walks and the workouts at the hotel gym, all the other activities were not things we do on a regular basis, but let me tell you how our “functional training” workouts paid off BIG TIME!

All those “new” activities required tons of balance, core strength, and stamina. So, today I want to talk about the type of fitness to support our lives outside of the gym, so we can enjoy our lives to the fullest.

We already know lots of reasons why we should exercise regularly. Or maybe there is someone reading this, shaking his/her head and saying: “Nope, not for me.”

We know that exercise can help us not only to look, but feel, and move better; manage our blood pressure; prevent Type 2 diabetes, yadda, yadda, yadda. But have you thought about being able to stand up from a chair or the toilet? About carrying in your groceries? Climbing stairs? How about gardening? Swinging a golf club or a tennis racquet? Hiking? Horseback riding? Fly fishing? About countless other activities of everyday life that rely on strength, power, speed, balance, coordination? Most people don’t. Many still think that going to the gym is to get big muscles. And some do, of course, and that’s great.​ I did it for many years. But everybody should also think about being able to care for themselves and maintain independence at the highest quality of life for as long as possible. So consider an idea called functional fitness. It keeps us prepared for activities of everyday life, sports, and hobbies, including stamina to run errands and getting down to the floor to play with the grandkids without losing our breath. Functional fitness has been around for years. It is increasingly popular with all kinds of people, including athletes and all of us over 40 or 50 who want to maintain independence and quality of life, so we can continue to enjoy our lives to the fullest. Functional fitness is about training our body to handle real-life situations. That means exercises focused on building a body capable of handling real-life activities in real-life positions, depending on each unique lifestyle, needs, likes, and wants. Simply lifting a certain amount of weight up and down, in an idealized posture, with a fixed range of motion, created by an exercise machine is not how we move in real life.

Functional training is also a lot of fun.

Does functional fitness sound like a good idea for you? We are here to help you with safe, functional programs to boost your fitness, confidence, and enjoyment of daily life.

Let’s do this together.

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