Making Training More Functional and Analyzing the Demands of the Sport

The term functional training originated from the sports medicine world when the physicians discovered that the exercise used to ensure the athlete recovers can also be used to make sure that the athlete maintains and improves his/her health. The functional training program is used to prepare an athlete to play his/her sport. The functional training uses various concepts developed by proficient coaches to train strength, speed, and power to ensure the player improves sports performance and decrease the incidences of injury. Functional training enables the athlete to know how to handle their body weight at all levels of movement. This practice involves simple techniques of bending forward, squatting, pushing, lunging, and pulling. In todays world, the concept of functional training has gradually been adopted by both personal trainers and conditioning coaches. The reason why functional training will continue to increase its dominance is that big manufacturers have started producing machines that ease this training such as weight benches and basic squat racks. Recently, due to the popularity of functional training items such as kettlebells, foam rollers, and resistance band are available in sporting goods stores.

The coaches need to analyze and apprehend the demands of the sport to be able to design an potent functional training program. The coach has to know the amount of power needed to last the game to the end and keep performing as required. For example, in a soccer match, the trainer has to select the best method that will enable the players to keep on for two hours with stamina to sprints, walk and jog. In most case, a player has to run an average of five miles within those two hours. Since power and speed are vital in almost all sports, the coaches should consider taking a program that helps in improving the ability to generate power and speed.

The functional training selected should provide adequate exercise to enhance response to stimulus and make sure the player attains optimal adaptation to the sport about efficiency and functionality criteria. Purposeful training should enable the coach to select a given exercise after considering various variables that arise depending on the game. The aspects to be considered include the volume of each session, density, sufficient intensity, the adequate frequency of training stimuli, and methodological organization of the task. The functional training will help in coming up with functional exercise that will be performed to the athlete to improve his/her performance and maintain his stamina for a longer period. For example, untrained individuals need to be given inadequate exercise or activities with a high level of external stabilization to be able to keep stamina for an extended period and keep performing as usual. But giving amateur person motor tasks that demand much active internal stabilization would be damaging to an amateur athlete.

Functional training programs should be sufficient enough to maintain the player or athlete achieves physical fitness. It means that training entails a process that should be structured before the selection and prescription of the exercises. The functionality component of exercise should be taken into account because the operating capacity is restricted or limited. This means that selection is guided by the objective to be attained after training. In this sense, all functional exercises are essential as long as they provide safety and efficacy required to train and adapt to the game.