Hey there! 👋 I'm Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains), personal trainer and host of the Coaching Corner podcast. In this episode, we're talking all about functional training.

"Functional fitness" is one of the most popular terms in the gym world right now — but what does it actually mean? In this episode, we trace the concept back to its roots in physical therapy and rehabilitation, where the original question was simple: can this person do the things daily life requires of them? From there, we unpack how the term got co-opted by fitness marketing and gym culture, and how it quietly became an ideology that pits "real" training against bodybuilding-style work.

Along the way, we challenge the idea that training for aesthetics and training for health are somehow in conflict. Spoiler: they're not. Building muscle is functional — it improves metabolic health, joint stability, bone density, and longevity. The research doesn't support the idea that isolation exercises are less legitimate than compound movements for healthy people. What matters far more is whether your program is well-designed, progressive, and built around your specific body and goals.

If you've ever felt like your workouts weren't "real" training, or wondered whether what you're doing in the gym actually translates to real life, this episode is for you. We close out with a look at what a program actually built on these principles looks like — and how having a clear, structured plan changes everything.

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If you've been hanging out in fitness spaces, either online, on social media, or maybe you have a public gym that you go to and you've heard people talking about functional training and you found yourself wondering what the heck is functional training anyway? What does that mean? Well, your confusion is definitely well granted because this is a term that gets thrown around a lot, but very few people actually define what it means to train functionally. So in today's episode of The Coaching Corner Podcast, I'm going to be breaking down what exactly functional training means. I'm also going to be talking about the ways that you can incorporate functional training into your workout routine to make sure that you're building functional strength. So if you've heard this term and it's been confusing to you, this episode is for you.

Welcome to the Coaching Corner Podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I've been a personal trainer for over 10 years and I've created this podcast to share with you tips and strategies to help you to build strength and build a body that you love without shame and without burnout. In today's episode, we're talking all about functional training, how to do functional training, what makes a workout functional. And we're also going to be dispelling some myths around functional training. Now, before we get into the episode, make sure to like this video if you're watching on YouTube and subscribe to my channel so that you never miss a new episode. And if you are listening to this podcast, make sure to follow the show so that you always get notified whenever new episodes drop. If you are looking for an online personal trainer, I am now welcoming new clients into my online personal training program.

You can apply for that by clicking on the link that's in the show notes or in the video description below. I help busy people to build a body that they love and burn fat without shame and without burnout. So if that sounds like something you want to do, make sure to apply for personal training today. And without further ado, let's get into the episode.

The concept of functional training is something that comes mainly from the realm of physical therapy and rehabilitation training in the context of like a physical therapy or a rehabilitation setting. The main question that the trainer, the coach or the physical therapist asks is, can this person do the activities that they need to do in their everyday life? Because if you end up getting an injury like you have knee surgery for an ACL tear or you break a hip or maybe you throw your back out, physical therapy and rehabilitation training are one of the most important things that you can do to get yourself back to a place where you're healthy and able to exercise and do your day-to-day activities of life like normal. And so physical therapists will often place an emphasis on movement pattern focused training. That is they design the workout plan and the exercise plan with the goal of helping their client to move better.

So designing a workout program that is functional will include exercises that help people to practice doing movements like squats, hip hinging, torso rotation, pulling, pushing and pressing, because these are the kinds of movements that you generally have to do in your everyday life. Like when you go to pick something up from the floor, that's usually going to be a deadlift or a squat. When you're carrying in groceries, that's a pulling type movement, pushing a door closed or pushing it open, that's a push-based exercise. And so within a physical therapy setting, if someone has an injury that's preventing them from being able to do one or more of these types of movements, then they're going to be tasked to do exercises that build up their strength and their coordination so that they can perform these exercises without pain and with a reduced risk of injury. Now this is often positioned in opposition to an aesthetic focus of training.

Aesthetics is basically what your body looks like. So someone who's training toward aesthetics has the mindset of, I'm going to the gym and I'm going to do certain exercises to make my body look a certain way. So someone who's focused on aesthetics, for example, typically women love to build up their legs. They want to have nice sculpted looking legs. They want a nice booty, they want nice thighs. And so someone who's really interested in the aesthetics of having nice legs will do a lot of leg-based exercises. And then we'll also include a lot of isolation exercises that hit one muscle group, on joint in motion at a time to really focus on developing that muscle. This is the type of training that bodybuilders will often do. So this includes exercises like leg extensions to hit the quadriceps, leg curls to hit the hamstrings in isolation.

It also includes bicep curls for hitting the biceps, lateral raises for hitting the deltoids. All of these are exercises that generally train one muscle group at a time, one joint moving at a time versus compound exercises where you're usually hitting multiple joints in motion at the same time in order to train multiple muscle groups and also to help train the coordination of movement patterns or combination exercises where you perform a Romanian deadlift and then row and then stand back up. These types of exercises require a lot of coordination and they're often really fun to practice. Now at some point in the early 2000s with the rise of CrossFit and its popularity and the explosion of wellness content online, functional training kind of took on a life of its own. So functional training became positioned as kind of an antidote to bodybuilding and bodybuilding, which is training for the goal of making your body look a certain way, kind of got cast as the bad guy and I think it has something to do with how a lot of times, particularly women really are very adverse to doing bodybuilding style training when they don't know anything about fitness because they're afraid that if they start training in a bodybuilding style, they're going to blow up and look like a man, like they're going to touch a dumbbell and become Arnold Schwarzenegger.

And that's the very real anxiety that a lot of women and some men have about doing muscle building training. And so in order to sell fitness programs and in order to sell gym memberships to these people, at some point the people who were doing the sales and the marketing realized that they could capitalize on that pain point and say, "Oh, you don't have to do that bodybuilding style of training. We're going to teach you functional training. You can do functional training here and build functional strength in order to get them to think, okay, well, I'm not going to blow up and look like a bodybuilder." Here's the reality. It is very, very, very, very hard to build big muscle. It is very, very hard to blow up and look really, really big. You have to train for a really long time because building muscle is a very, very slow process and you have to train a very specific way and you have to eat a lot of food and for a lot of people, you're still not going to get very big without the help of steroids.

But this anxiety about getting big and looking like a bodybuilder is something that gyms and trainers and people who wanted to sell gym programs marketed to get people to buy into their programs. But the reality is that bodybuilding style training is just as functional as doing whatever the program is that they're trying to sell you, whether it's CrossFit or powerlifting or kettlebell training. Any type of training that you do with resistance is functional in that you're building muscle, which is improving your lean muscle tissue mass, your bone strength, the strength of your connective tissues, and improving your mind muscle connection, which improves your coordination, your movement patterns, and all of that. So regardless of whether you're doing isolation based training or compound exercises, it has a function. It serves a purpose and it helps you to be healthier and it helps you to move better and get stronger.

And here's why I get annoyed because as someone who helps people to get strong, I have to sometimes fight people, not really, but like I have to really work to convince my clients to try to do exercises that are traditionally associated with bodybuilding because they are so afraid that it's going to make them look like a man or it's going to make them look really big and bulky. And this is just simply not true. And so people end up avoiding certain types of exercises or avoiding certain types of training that have very important benefits. For example, doing bicep curls is a great way to build up your biceps and make your arms look sculpted, but they're also a really important exercise to include if you want to be strong in your bench presses. Bicep tendonitis is a really common problem for people and bicep tendon tears are one of the most common types of injuries that often lead to people having to get surgery, regardless of whether you work out or not.

The same is true with external shoulder rotation. Training the back of your shoulders is great for helping you to develop well-rounded death star adults, but it's also really important for helping your shoulders to stay safe so that when you go to put your seatbelt on when you get in the car, you don't accidentally tear your rotator cuff, which is an injury that happens for a lot of people. So I don't want you to feel any pressure to not train in bodybuilding style training or doing exercises that are typically associated with bodybuilding, because one, you're not going to blow up and look like a bodybuilder. You have to try really, really hard for a really, really long time in order to do that. So it's just not going to happen, okay? Two, these kinds of exercises are really important for helping to lay the groundwork of keeping your body safe and stable when you're doing your compound exercises.

And three, I don't want you to get sucked into this toxic culture of this like in group out group way of thinking because the people who look down their noses at other people for training in one way versus another way, when you have this attitude of like, "Well, my style of training is better." This is not rooted in self-love. And my approach as a personal trainer and as just a fitness enthusiast is that your exercise and your healthy eating should be rooted in self-love. These should be acts of self-care and self-nurturing. I am really not a fan of mindsets that use the motivation of trying to be better than other people because it's essentially a shame-based motivation, right where you're shaming other people for training a way that you're not training or a way that you don't want to train. And the thing about shame is that it always turns back inward, right?

If you shame other people, you are going to shame yourself and shame is one of the worst motivators that you can use if you want to stay consistent and have a long-term sustainable success in your fitness journey. People who have a shame-based mindset, they almost always fall off the wagon and they have this on again, off-again relationship with fitness. They don't make consistent gains because shame is not a consistent motivator. It's better to have a positive mindset that is rooted in self-love and self-care. And I want to take care of my body. That's why I do this. I do this because I want to be able to do the activities that I love to do and I want to keep my body strong and healthy for as long as possible. The people who have that kind of mindset are the people who more or less stay consistent for years in their fitness journey.

They achieve their goals and they keep their gains for the long haul. So here's the key takeaway. All resistance training is functional regardless of whether you're using machines and doing isolation based training or if you are doing movement pattern and balance training. Whenever you increase your muscle mass, that improves your overall health and coordination by default and doing isolation-based training and machine-based training can often be a really great enhancement to help you to build even more strength in your compound movements. In the programs that I design for my clients, I always include both compound functional movement pattern focused exercises and also isolation exercises. And in many cases, the isolation work is the foundation that you have to lay before you can safely properly do compound exercises. Many of my beginning level clients, I have to do isolation training exercises in the beginning because they are just not aware of their bodies.

They have to learn what it feels like to flex and extend their biceps and then also what it feels like to contract and extend their lats in order to be able to do exercises like pull-ups or pull downs and rows with good technique. So they have to learn what it feels like for one group of muscles to be working versus another and that's where isolation exercises can be very, very helpful. Also, a lot of people tend to have muscular imbalances, which come from our movement patterns, from our whole lives, how we sit, how we sleep, how we stand and walk and these muscle imbalances can impact your functional or compound training exercises and taking the time to do isolation-based exercises to develop those smaller supporting muscle groups can actually make you much stronger in the compound exercises. Perfect example of this is I have a client who recently I had her switch into a hypertrophy block of training where we're doing a lot of isolation-based exercises for the muscles in her legs and in her hips.

So she's doing a lot of abduction exercises as well as abduction exercises to hit her abductor muscles and her glute max because I want her to be able to feel these muscles working when she's doing her compound exercises like squats and deadlifts as well as lunges. So another thing that I also did for this client, I recently had her return back to heavy leg presses as one of her compound exercises and she recently left a comment in one of her workouts and she said, "Just wanted to throw a quick note while doing this, the leg presses feel so much stronger than the last time I did them. My form feels better. I can tell my supporting muscles are working and I can really feel my mind linking up with my glutes." Good stuff. And then at the end of the workout, she left another comment saying, "This workout felt awesome." Really felt the mind muscle connection and my supporting muscles feel stronger.

So this is just one example of how taking the time to do the isolation-based exercises can make your compound exercises stronger and can actually improve your coordination. So all in all, in my professional opinion, I think that the distinction between functional training versus what it's usually positioning itself as oposed to, which is bodybuilding or aesthetics focused training, I think it's a very silly distinction and it kind of gives me the ick to be honest because like I said, the attitude that usually comes with it is looking down our noses at people who are working for aesthetics or people who are trying to build muscle. I don't think that we need to put other people down in order to feel motivated and good about our own fitness journeys. And in fact, I would prefer that we celebrate all fitness journeys, especially because whatever gets you in the gym, dude, I just want people taking good care of themselves.

That's what's important. And if what motivates you to take good care of yourself is you want to look a certain way, you want to build a big booty, you want to build nice abs, then that's great. That keeps you consistent. I'm happy, but the exercises that you choose really should be particular to the movements that you want to be able to perform well in and your unique muscular imbalances or movement pattern issues. And that's something that a good personal trainer or coach can help identify and program around. So with that said, if you'd like for me to design a workout program for you that hits all of these things, please apply for my online coaching program, which is linked in the show notes or in the description of the video below. You can sign up for my 90 day or six month body scaled program where I will give you a comprehensive phased program that's unique for your body and functional to your goals, whether you want to be able to move better, perform sport better, or if you want to develop your aesthetics and make your body look more toned, I can help you with that.

So you can apply to work with me below and schedule a consultation where we'll talk about your fitness routine and I'll give my recommendations for what you need to do to make your routine more functional and serve your needs. Let me know if you have any questions. You can leave them in the comments below this video on YouTube.

Thanks so much for watching this episode or listening. Once again, I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. If you'd like to follow me on social media, I'm at @Jaydigains everywhere. That's J-A-Y-D-I-G-A-I-N-S. You can find me on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Threads. I also go live several times a week on my Twitch channel. That's twitch.tv/jaydigains where I do live workouts and answer fitness questions and also play video games and hang out with my community. So make sure to follow that channel if that's something you're interested in as well. I will see you in the next episode. In the meantime, take good care of yourself. Make sure that you are staying hydrated, drink plenty of water, eat your protein, eat your veggies, and I will see you soon.