It’s time we take back function, and not just in terms of the bastardized word everyone loves to hate. When it comes to the word “function” and “functional training,” most intelligent trainers roll their eyes and imagine someone standing on a BOSU ball shaking some heavy ropes. They know that just because it’s difficult to remain stable while doing something ridiculous doesn’t mean it’s developing core strength, stability, balance, upper body strength, etc. To the uninitiated it may seem like a good idea but in reality, it doesn’t do any of those things. Many of my peers have spilled words (1, 2, 3, 4) on this topic, so I’m not going to rehash them here.

The impetus behind functional training — the idea that you should train movements that make you more able to complete tasks in sport and life — is sound and commendable, even if it may have risen in popularity only in response to the weight-machine-driven bodybuilding trends of the 70s. The devil is, as they say, in the details.

I’m not going to speculate as to what went wrong with functional training — it’s water under the bridge, as far as I’m concerned. What I’d like to do is take back the word function and tell you why it’s the single most important word as it relates to your training.

If you’ll forgive me for dragging out the old dictionary definition trope, I think it will be instructive:

 

 

 

 

 

A function is essentially an ability or  capability to do something. You are a collection of cooperative functions at any level of magnification from which you care to look. Starting at a high level with a few examples: You are able to integrate socially at work or in school, you’re able to procure sustenance and necessities like food, water, and shelter to keep you alive, you’re (hopefully) able to provide some sort of value to the rest of the world with the work you do, and you are able to maintain yourself physically with exercise. Within each one of these enormous categories, you have functions that make up the higher-level function. Socially, you may have functions for meeting new people and functions for maintaining existing relationships. In terms of physical maintenance, you have this whole subset of functions we spend so much time talking about.

Knowing how and being able to lift weights in general is a function. The ability to deadlift is a function. The ability to extend the hips (hip extension) is a function, as is the ability to maintain spinal alignment against resistance. Along with the function of knee extension, shoulder retraction, finger flexion, thumb flexion and adduction. And further to that the ability to produce muscular force is a function consisting of a series of chemical reactions and processes inside the muscle.

Guess what happens when you lack a function? Let’s say, for example, you lack the function of insulin secretion to moderate an influx of sugar. That’s a disease called diabetes, and it causes lots of problems.

Sometimes a lack or failure of a function causes serious repercussions and a cascade of failures or hyperactivity in other systems that rely on the missing function. In other cases, a lack of function can go completely unnoticed.

As I said earlier, you are a collection of cooperative functions. Some of them are incomprehensibly specific (operating at a cellular level, for example) and others are so high-level and obvious that they don’t seem to even bear mentioning, such as breathing.

Everything you do or need to do is a function.

There are two general directions you can take this perspective on function. The first is perhaps the most obvious and that is to acquire new but not necessary functions. For example, strength or the ability to accomplish a particular strength feat. In these cases, it can help to think in terms of the functions that are required. For example, if one wanted to successfully lift the famed Thomas Inch dumbbell, he or she would need all of the associated functions to a 175-pound one-arm deadlift, and in addition they would be wise to train the adduction function of the thumb, given that it is a primary limiting factor when it comes to picking up the ol’ Inch.

It’s not critical to your survival to acquire or gain these functions, but it might make you a more capable or useful human. Personally, I’m a fan of collecting more useful and cooperative functions and I enjoy being a sort of Renaissance man rather than being incredibly specialized in one specific thing. I’m happy to be a jack of all trades, but I digress.

The other, and I believe more interesting and more important path is the resolution of missing functions that are causing problems.

If you think it would be a good idea to deadlift, but you lack the function of hip extension (hypofunction in hip extension) it may not mean you lack the function to perform a deadlift but that you’re going to find some other way to perform the deadlift, probably to your detriment when your spinal muscles (hyperfunction) do all of the heavy lifting instead (pun intended.) If that sounds like a compensation to you, well, sure. I’d refer to it as hypo (under) or hyper (over) function.

Pain, especially chronic pain, is a hot topic and while I won’t claim to have definitive answers, I will tell you this: In my experience, there is no clearer association to pain than loss of function. And, in the vast majority of cases I have worked with, a restoration of missing function comes with a concomitant reduction in pain. Could it be that otherwise unexplained pain is an action signal to restore lost function?

When there is a problem, the first place to start looking is what functions you’re lacking. When looking for missing function it’s important to look no smaller than necessary. For example, if someone is missing hip extension I am not going to go looking for problems impeding myosin and actin at the muscular level until I have ruled out getting the numerous moving parts levels above that moving first.

On some level, you are missing functions. Whether or not they’re critical to your daily pursuits varies, but it’s not a question of whether or not you have hypo-functions. Oftentimes the things you do the most often result in hypofunctions in the things you conversely don’t do often enough. This isn’t a problem until it’s a problem. When it is a problem, I believe you’ve now got the paradigm to fix it.

Let’s take back function. Both the dirty word, and the functions we’re missing in the pursuit of better.

 

 

If there is one monumentally important thing you can do for your health and wellness it’s to get better sleep. That’s right, not eat better or exercise but simply get adequate sleep. Not a minimum of sleep, but adequate sleep. Here is something that will hopefully put into perspective the physiological need for sleep:

It’s certainly a false dilemma to say that just one of diet, exercise, or sleep is more important for your health but it is a reality that people will often trade sleep for one or both of the other. To the best of my knowledge none of my clients have ever skipped a workout so that they could prepare a healthy meal, but I recently turned away a new client because he told me he would “sacrifice sleep to make it in to class.” Nope, nope, nope. Not going to happen.

Problems with sleep generally fall into two categories. There are people who don’t prioritize sleep, treating it as something they can do when they’re dead. Which they will be able to do sooner than later as the cumulative cost of  chronic sleep debt is a shorter lifespan in addition to poor quality of life. The other category is someone who dedicates adequate time to sleep but has problems getting good quality sleep. Allow me to first address the former.

Sleep is such a critical and auto-regulated function of the human body that to the best of our knowledge it is actually impossible to die from sleep depravation. The reason for this is not that it couldn’t kill you if you could actually achieve it, but that the body will begin a process of micro-sleeping within the gaps between whatever stimulus is keeping you from actually sleeping. In other words, you can try to stay awake by any means and you’ll still fall asleep.

If you are:

1. Going to sleep by 10pm, preferably around the time of sunset.
2. Allowing adequate time to sleep, about 8-9 hours.
3. Sleeping in a completely dark and quiet (not necessarily silent, white noise can help) room.
4. Turning off electronics and minimizing light use by 2-hours before sleeping or around sunset.
5. Not more than 50 pounds overweight.
6. Exercising regularly.
7. Avoiding caffeine in the afternoon if you are a slow-metabolizer. You probably know. If you’re a fast-metabolizer, it probably doesn’t matter.
8. Use an app like Sleep Cycle. The accuracy of these apps is debatable, but the fact that it brings focused attention to your sleep is not. They help.

And you still can’t sleep you have a problem akin to not being able to swallow water or breathe air. That is how serious it is and how much attention you should divert to addressing it.

The above 8 keys are by no means an exhaustive list, but a damn fine start and will be comprehensive for the vast majority of people. In fact, doing just 5 or 6 of these seven things will probably remarkably improve your sleep. 

If you’re not covering all of the above bases, start there. If you have a problem with starting there because there just aren’t enough hours in the day and sleeping isn’t a high priority I’m here to tell you that you’re doing it wrong. I couldn’t possibly do a better job than former Navy SEAL Dr. Kirk Parsley has done in the following video. After leaving the SEALs (BUD/s class 164), Kirk went to med school and later became the team doctor for the west coast teams.  If you can’t take it from someone who has suffered through orders of magnitude worse sleep deprivation than you will ever even think about enduring then you’re not going to listen to anyone so you can stop here.

TL;DR? While you think you’re pushing forward and trading productivity for sleep you’re actually selling yourself short and operating at a low level of function compared to what you’re capable of. You might as well be drunk all the time.

Either way it’s time to do the work and fix it. Working too hard to just scrape by barely paying your bills? Go read some Ramit Sethi and make more money with less effort. Making plenty of money and still think whatever you’re doing is more important than sleep? It’s not.

I was flying through the sky at 140 miles per hour, looking over my left shoulder at my coach just a few feet away from me. He had just given a big nod. That signal meant I was in the right spot and it was time for me to leave the comfort of flying belly-facing-earth, do a half barrel-roll onto my back, and continue flying in that new back-facing-earth position – a position that just two days before I had never even attempted and wasn’t capable of flying in.

I wanted to take the next step in improving my skill, but doubt was rearing its head. I could just keep flying for the rest of the jump, telling him later I just didn’t feel like I was in the right position to make the transition.

Doubt keeps you comfortable. It keeps you in the safe zone where you know everything is going to be Starbucks-consistent and predictable. There’s no chance of being embarrassed or taking a hit to your ego when you let doubt control your decision.

Doubt also keeps you stuck, however. You don’t get better, you don’t move forward, and you don’t learn something new. You do get to experience regret, wishing you had gone for it when you had the chance.

Doubt is the thief of novelty.

Here’s the test: If you really want to do something, then you go for it. Push that doubt deep down inside so far and so hard you make a diamond out of it. If you don’t want to do it and you also happen to have doubts, don’t do it.

Don’t talk about it, don’t ruminate on it, don’t ask for people’s opinions on what you should do. No one else can do this for you.

Look, this isn’t an encouragement to recklessly go out and do things far beyond your capability — skills that you haven’t put in the work to earn, or that are just plain stupid and dangerous. You should be pursuing goals that are logical next steps or progressions from where you are now to where you can go next.

But when it’s that bullshit nagging self-doubt that’s paired with desire, you owe it to yourself to go for it.

I paused for a moment, and then dropped my left arm by my side to initiate the roll. It wasn’t perfect, but I stuck the transition and was rewarded with a new skill and a big smile on my coach’s face.