[Chet]

By Chet Morjaria and Stephen Hollingdale

FK.UK is an umbrella organisation dedicated to advancing functional fitness in the UK. It is a diverse community of people brought together by a passion for functional fitness, each with unique backgrounds and perspectives to offer. This makes for a fantastic breeding ground for the sharing of information and experience; facilitating access to expert knowledge and quality resources on functional fitness is a key tenet on which FK.UK continues to build.

But what is functional fitness and how do you achieve it?


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[Mark]

Chet, on 17 January 2010 - 03:40 PM, said:

By Chet Morjaria and Stephen Hollingdale

FK.UK is an umbrella organisation dedicated to advancing functional fitness in the UK. It is a diverse community of people brought together by a passion for functional fitness, each with unique backgrounds and perspectives to offer. This makes for a fantastic breeding ground for the sharing of information and experience; facilitating access to expert knowledge and quality resources on functional fitness is a key tenet on which FK.UK continues to build.

But what is functional fitness and how do you achieve it?


View this on the website

Now that I like

[Andy]

yup, that's sums it up nicely. Good article

[supercool sarah]

This is a terrible article! I've been happily eating chocolate and lazing around on the sofa for the past year and suddenly I'm having weird urges to run around and do pullups and pick up heavy stuff! Thanks a lot Chet...

[Gubernatrix]

Yo! I was talking about you the other day! Telling someone about your Extreme Knitting on top of that crag in Cornwall.

[FK Pimp]

nice article guys

I'm interested in your comments around balancing and combining the GPP with the SPP - is the purpose of the "sport" in the SPP element to be football in the FK DW or is it more a case of strength based sports?

[Franz29]

FK Pimp, on 19 January 2010 - 12:38 PM, said:

nice article guys

I'm interested in your comments around balancing and combining the GPP with the SPP - is the purpose of the "sport" in the SPP element to be football in the FK DW or is it more a case of strength based sports?

Actually the FK.DW is geared more to the sports generalist; I envision The SSP training to be something done in addition to the DW. What I tend to do is use skills and drills that will benefit the majority of athletes regardless of sport. Balance, speed and agility drills should be a universal constant, and the conditioning routines are designed to address various "time and modal domains" (hmm, catchy, someone should use that phrase a lot.... ).

As for the strength elements, I can't think of a sport where improved basic strength is not a plus to sporting performance. Look at Tennis, not traditionally seen as a strength based sport; Andy Murray added strength elements to his workouts and saw his performance increase tremendously.

The comments were more in line with sacrificing some elements of GPP for sporting performance. For example, I may forego the ability to run a marathon in favour of shorter, sprint based activities if I were a rugby player; a distance runner may let some strength training slip to concentrate on more endurance based efforts, but both athletes will benefit by incorporating these into their training on a regular basis.

[FK Pimp]

I think this is still "just" GPP then, not combining the two. Where I was going with this was to question whether we needed a part of the workout to address more skills development for ones chosen sport. You have answered this by suggesting additional work for SSP on top of the DW, which is cool.

not trying to knock it, just sayin'.

[Gubernatrix]

Franz29, on 19 January 2010 - 10:15 PM, said:

As for the strength elements, I can't think of a sport where improved basic strength is not a plus to sporting performance. Look at Tennis, not traditionally seen as a strength based sport; Andy Murray added strength elements to his workouts and saw his performance increase tremendously.

Just to add to that, the line between GPP and SPP can be blurry. When I was in Ireland over Christmas at Informed Performance gym, I saw Ireland's top tennis player training there. He was doing S&C and pushing the prowler etc like the rest of us, but his prowler-pushing drill was different, designed to enhance his sideways/diagonal leg strength. So it was GPP but also SPP.....

[Franz29]

FK Pimp, on 19 January 2010 - 10:28 PM, said:

I think this is still "just" GPP then, not combining the two. Where I was going with this was to question whether we needed a part of the workout to address more skills development for ones chosen sport. You have answered this by suggesting additional work for SSP on top of the DW, which is cool.

not trying to knock it, just sayin'.

Yes, I agree, anyone participating in a sport should add elements of specificity to training. I use the FK.DW as my general workout, but also train in sport specific stuff (Krav maga and American Football primarily) in separate sessions during the week.

At the end of the day, the FK.DW is still a mostly GPP based workout; any internet based general WOD almost has to be, unless you want individualised drills listed for each and every sport (or type of sport). I think perhaps the confusion lies in the line "The model FK.UK proposes is a combination of the GPP and SPP models: no single area of fitness is to be ignored totally, and yet some measure of specificity is included in training: for example the use of linear progression in the form of specific strength workouts in addition to the metabolic conditioning routines used.". I'm not saying here we are an SPP system, I am saying we are a GPP system with elements of specific programming, emphasising linear strength progressions instead of a truly all-encompassing programme which would perhaps NOT have three strength specific days per week.

It was my contention that any strength work is an asset to almost all sporting endeavours* so would be advantageous to the "normal" populations following the FK.DW to skew the workouts in that direction.

As Sally alluded to, different drills can be adapted for different sports. Many of the agility drills I use (as an example) are progressions for different sports (the last one was actually part of a progression designed for a tennis player), but that doesn't mean they can't be used for other sports, either straight up or with some modification. Nor does it mean that the next set of agility drills will be originally designed for the same sport, in fact I can almost guarantee you they won't, so the participant is getting some sport specific training, just not necessarily the sport they play. Either way, many of the skills will transfer to other sports, but at the same time improve the general physical fitness. Again, I alluded to that in the article here; Those individuals following the posted workout should see measurable gains in all areas of general physical fitness, while at the same time will easily be able to incorporate sport specific skills and exercises to the routine as and when they are required, leading to a fully rounded athlete who can indeed claim to be functionally fit.

Thanks for the feedback BTW. Hopefully it can only make future articles more coherent and relevant to the community.

*with perhaps the exception of swimming where it has been demonstrated that land based strength gains have little to no carry over to swimming - you just swim more to get better at it! Of course I would even question these findings in the realms of an untrained athlete, almost all the studies I read were looking at collegiate level athletes in the US who were already strong and capable.