Unconventional Functional Fitness

I was building a garden for my wife in our backyard and I had to haul about 20 tons of stones each ranging from 2lbs-100lbs at time from the woods in our backyard, up a 30 degree incline at distances of 50m-300m. To make matters more fun, I was also creating a stone walkway between the house and the garden beds which required large flat stones to use as steps down the steep slope of our backyard. The best stones I found for this task weighed from 100lbs-220lbs and I had to carry them from distances ranging from 400m-1000m PER STONE! As all married men understand, when it comes to tasks for the wife you just gotta hike up your pants, roll up your shirt sleeves and get to it! In this case I was deadlifting and farmer walking stones until my shoulders fell off!

Unconventional functional fitness just means utilizing your skills inside the gym in clever and productive ways outside the gym. After all, how we move inside the gym is how we move outside the gym, right!?

Another great example: After a year of owning our first house and neglecting our front yard landscaping, it became painfully obvious to me that I would have to weed it by hand. So one afternoon I squatted down into the lowest most comfortable squat I could hold and pulled weeds for 3 hours. I just looked at it as a test of how stable I could remain in the low portion of a squat. It was highly successful on both the landscaping and my squat skill!

My wife and I have been gifted by the Universe to be caretakers for an incredible black german shepherd dog named Suki. A highly intelligent and sensitive puppy, Suki also has a high prey drive and needs to be in the woods on a regular basis to exercise her inner wolf. Let me tell you, sporting with this dog in her younger years through wooded acres is a relentless test of metabolic conditioning when she tears off after a deer. If you’ve never ran in a full sprint, over, under, through, and between bushes, fallen trees, brambles and swamps for 12 straight minutes in an effort to keep Suki in line of sight while she’s drooling at top speed over the scent of some wooded animal, then you haven’t tested your max sprint abilities yet!

Thankfully we developed a wonderful way to get her friskies out without the worry of losing her or having to skin a deer she drags home; tie her leash to my belt and go for a nice long jog!

Twice a year the bubble is removed and then put back up over the pool at the Little Rock Athletic Club and the Racquet Club. These are both excellent chances to work on deadlift as 25 people pull and position a 5 ton tarp that acts as the ceiling cover for the pool area. At the LRAC we then move onto agility training along a narrow catwalk as you have to maneuver about 57 30lb iron blocks with one hand and drill the bolts around them with the other. Sure we have scafolding, but we look at those as landing shelves for when we might fall! When that’s all said and done, it’s time to haul the deck furniture back into place again!

I work at a gym where I have to mop about 4500 sq/ft of rubber flooring once a week. My target goal time for this is 30 minutes from start to finish. This means perfecting my mop strokes and footwork, honing my stepping and sliding skills as I wave the mop back and forth along an 8 foot lateral pathway, over and over and over again! I have to keep my core braced, my legs externally rotated and my thoracic spine as mobile as possible to maneuver the bottom heavy mop across the porous rubber flooring. It takes roughly 500 repetitions and the movements resemble something akin to a janitor’s version of a martial art mixed with a cleverly choreographed Gene Kelly dance. What a biomechanical challenge it is!

Hauling boxes, lifting couches, crawling under desks to handle wiring, pulling yourself into the attic crawlspace, carrying boxes of laminate flooring, mopping, mowing, PvPing in World of Warcraft, carrying your ever heavier Kroger basket when you wished you got a shopping cart, climbing trees, running through the woods, gardening and even reading this blog. It’s all functional fitness! Every single moment of every single day is another chance to practice good biomechanics and turn your task into a test of movement skill. Don’t shut your brain off to your body; get kinected! Movement is the key to the moment, and awareness is the key to good movement. Start enjoying your chores by coming alive in them as you do them. Life is too short for crappy movement.