5 Functional Fitness Exercises to Prepare You for Everyday Life

You bend down to pick up your kiddo for a shoulder ride and you feel a twinge in your low back. Or you walk home with two heavy grocery bags and find your arms are sore for days. Or maybe getting your suitcase up and down from the plane’s overhead compartment is more challenging than it used to be.  

All of us, at one point or another, struggle with everyday tasks, whether it’s yard work, playing with kids, lifting and carrying heavy things or maintaining balance on uneven or icy surfaces.  

Enter functional fitness, a category of exercises that prepare your body for doing movements required in real-life situations with ease.

What is functional fitness?

When you think of strength training, a bench press or bicep curl might come to mind. These kinds of classic resistance exercises involve reps that work one muscle group at a time.  

“Functional fitness exercises usually activate multiple muscle groups in a complex, multidirectional action versus targeting a single muscle in a unidirectional motion,” says Christopher McMullen, MD, a UW Medicine physiatrist who specializes in sports medicine. 

According to McMullen, the concept has been around for a while in rehabilitation medicine. It’s used in physical therapy during recovery from a major injury or surgery when your body is ready to get back to doing its normal movements.  

“In sports medicine, functional fitness is one of the final phases of rehabilitation from an injury prior to returning to a sport,” says McMullen.  

But you don’t need to wait until after an injury to start functional training — you can incorporate it into your exercise routine to prevent injury in the first place.

How do you start functional training?

You might have heard of a popular fitness race called Hyrox that’s built around functional fitness. It involves eight functional training exercises — including sled pushes, rowing, farmer’s carries and sandbag lunges — interspersed with 0.6-mile runs.  

But functional fitness is not, in fact, a set exercise regimen, like CrossFit or Pilates, and you don’t need to be in peak physical shape to jump in. Just the opposite.  

“Functional fitness does not necessarily need to be overly complicated,” says McMullen. “Exercises such as a single-leg balance, planks or lunges are all examples of strengthening exercises that engage multiple muscle groups and may help improve function with tasks.”

While you can devise a whole regimen of functional fitness exercises, you could also add a couple of them to your existing strength-training routine. 

5 functional fitness exercises to try

Ready to get started? Here are five exercises to try. Remember, as with any strength exercise, to ease into it.

“When lifting, you should always start with low weights and increase exertion or force as tolerated by no more than about 10% per week,” says McMullen.

If you have a preexisting heart condition or musculoskeletal injury, check with your doctor before you try any new exercises.  

Single leg lift 

Easy:

Hard: 

Yes, functional fitness can be as simple as standing on one leg. If you’re having balance issues while walking or standing, this exercise can improve neuromuscular control and lead to more stability. If you want to make it harder, try a single-leg squat where you move your body down toward the floor. 

Farmer’s carry 

Are you struggling to bring groceries to the car or to carry your luggage through the airport? Try a farmer’s carry, which is simply walking forward with a dumbbell or kettlebell in each hand for a set duration of time. Start with a weight that feels manageable and work up slowly from there.  

Dumbbell row 

If you have those dumbbells out, try this exercise, too. It involves bending over until your torso is parallel with the ground while holding weights dangling in front of you, then pulling the weights back toward your torso. This will help you with lifting things from the ground, whether pets, children or boxes.  

Squat 

The squat is one of the best body-weight exercises you can do and qualifies as functional fitness. Start doing them if you want to improve your ability to get in and out of a chair or up and down from the ground while gardening or doing yard work. 

Lunge 

Another classic exercise is the lunge, which can help you improve at everything from walking up stairs to hiking mountains. If you want to make your lunges even harder, try carrying dumbbells or kettlebells like in a farmer’s carry. 

Functional fitness is meant to make things easier in your unique day-to-day, so think about what you want to be able to do more easily and confidently and find some functional training exercises that will help you get there.  

Videos by Zach Garcia; exercises demonstrated by Bernard Bansil, DPT, an orthopedic physical therapist at the Sports Medicine Center at Husky Stadium.