What is Functional Exercise Training & a Kinesis System?

Series Summary

Functional fitness training is a popular new type of exercising that is designed to strengthen and condition us to to do normal everyday activities. You may be able to bench press 100 pounds but can you lift a flat tire and put it in your car? The conditions at a gym are favorable for doing exercises in a certain manner with few variables. However, there are many circumstances outside the gym that call for us to use our strength in a way that is unlike workouts on machines. Functional fitness is designed to prepare you for situations you may encounter in a real life scenario. Functional fitness is not only good for adults, but it is great for kids as well.

In this free video series, our expert Wallie Reul will teach you how to get a functional training workout using the kinesis system. Wallie will show you all the starting position, the dynamic starting positions, and lots of exercises including a chest press, push pull exercises, reverse lunge, upper body row, ball & balance exercises, core training, bicep curls, and tricep extensions. Wallie will also teach you how to keep your elbows in, make each exercise more difficult, and how to increase and decrease weight. Wallie will also teach you how to do decline chest presses, the wood chop and hop & chop exercises, cross body bicep curls, the big bird & crane exercises, and how to exercise your hips, abs, chest, legs and upper body.

Video Transcript

"WALLY REULE: Hi. My name is Wally Reule. I'm a personal trainer, owner of SedonaFit, and I'm here on behalf of Expert Village. Now, the way we do the functional training is to put ourselves, put our bodies into situations that more, again, accurately reflect the activities that we're going to be pursuing. The type of equipment that I have here that we use is the Kinesis System from Technogym, and it allows freedom of movement. It allows me to define the movement so that I can create exercises that will prepare people for particular activities. One--some of the things that it helps with are better balance, more flexibility, muscular endurance, strength, and just general coordination, because it integrates muscle groups rather than isolating them, as I was talking about before. It makes the muscle groups work together as they do in everyday life. Balance is one--is of critical importance for us all and it's difficult to train for balance unless you put yourself in a situation where you're out of balance and your body learns how to compensate for it. If I tell you to exercise the muscles that are going to keep you from tipping over this way, what are you going to do? What you're going to do is you're going to put yourself in a position where there is some reason for you perhaps to do that and you make your body adjust to keep that from happening, and you exercise those muscles and become much more aware of how your body works and where it is in space. This equipment, the Technogym equipment, the Kinesis line, will do that automatically in addition to many of the other things. I'm going to go through a series of exercises with the system so that you can see how it works. Now, each one of these stations, there four stations in this unit: the Alpha, the Beta, the Gamma, and the Delta station. We'll be demonstrating some exercises with each of those stations. Each one, each exercise has an upper body and a lower body component. The lower body components are consistent, and there are a series of them. The upper body will vary depending on what station we're using and each of the stations have movements in different planes, so that you can create different exercises to cover all possible movements that we can make."