5 Worst Exercises for Functional Fitness

I’ve spent over 20 years in the gym, 15 of which I’ve specialized in performing and coaching functional fitness. Needless to say, I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly, and I’ve come up with a list of the 5 worst exercises for functional fitness. In this article I’m going to detail some popular exercises and weight lifting movements, that just aren’t worth your time. Some of them are ineffective, and some of them are downright dangerous. Keep reading for more.

There’s no way around it. This article is going to hurt some feelings, and I fully expect that. I do want to point out that my intent isn’t to validate any certain type of training methodology, or fitness type. I am a certified CrossFit level two trainer, and I’ve passed my Tactical Strength and Conditioning Practitioner exam from the NSCA. I have both informal, and formal education in various aspects of fitness.

I don’t say that to brag, I bring that up to point out that I’m not a personal trainer who got a weekend certification 2 months ago. I certainly don’t have all the answers, and I’ve seen a wide variety of training methods in my decades of training.

My goal is to impart some empirical information from research studies, and experiential information that I’ve gleaned from personal experiences. Ideally you will use this information to improve your fitness and avoid wasting time with injuries. Before we go any further, let’s discuss what criteria I’m using to base this article on.

How I Determined the 5 Worst Exercises for Functional Fitness

First off, I’m picking the 5 worst exercises for functional fitness, specifically. I am NOT saying that the exercises on this list have no merit whatsoever. I’m saying that they are the least beneficial for someone who wants to build muscle mass, be strong, and be well conditioned across different time domains. I will also point out that many of my programs use these movements, and exercises appropriately.

The best way to figure out if someone knows what they’re talking about, is to pay attention to the types of answers they give to complex questions. There are many people I respect in the fitness industry like: Stan Efferding, Greg Nuckols, Brad Schoenfeld, and others. These experts have one thing in common.

When you ask them a question like, “How do I add muscle mass,” they give you an answer that covers some of the best ways to accomplish your goal, but they never give you a one size fits all answer. No expert in their field ever gives that type of answer to a complex question. It doesn’t matter if they’re a strength coach, physical therapist, or doctor.

While I don’t consider myself anywhere near as knowledgeable as those coaches, I do have some experience in functional training. Plus, I won’t just be giving you my opinion, I’ll be backing it up with research studies as well. I’ve yammered on long enough. Let’s get to the list of the 5 worst exercises for functional fitness.

The 5 Worst Exercises for Functional Fitness

Try to keep an open mind here, and listen to the reasons behind them. Recall, that I’m not telling you that you should never do these exercises. I’m simply pointing out that there are other movements that are a better bang for your training buck. Here are the 5 worst exercises for functional fitness, in no particular order.

The Kettlebell Swing

I know half of you are getting ready to send me some hate mail, but here me out. The kettlebell is a hip hinge movement. Most athletes use this movement in higher rep ranges, without much weight. When done this way, you accomplish two things poorly. You have very low strength and power requirements for each rep, and you don’t really increase your heart rate significantly. The worst of both worlds!

You aren’t increasing your strength, muscle mass, or power output with this movement. At best you’re working on some grip endurance, and maybe muscular endurance in your lower back. But those gains are likely to plateau very quickly, as you aren’t increasing load or difficulty enough to stave off your bodies acclimatization response. You need to move heavy weights if you want to get strong. There are no shortcuts!

I don’t want to be too hard on the kettlebell swing. There are some good uses for it, and one easy method to make it a great movement. Let’s cover that next.

How Should You Use Kettlebells for Functional Fitness?

As a functional fitness coach, I regularly use kettlebells for new athletes. Novices will improve from any movement, and it does teach them to open their hips powerfully. It will provide a cardiovascular, and muscular strength stimulus for those new athletes. If you read my article on combining cardio and strength training, you’ll know that new athletes can benefit from programming that will do nothing for experienced athletes.

I often use kettlebell swings in WODs as a scale for olympic lifting. Those are complex movements, that can take months to achieve basic proficiency for some folks. I can teach you a kettlebell swing in minutes, and you can do a very similar WOD as the other athletes.

Moreover, I often use kettlebells combined with resistance bands. This increases work output and allows you to put much more force into the kettlebell. This simple trick, turns this blah movement into a great movement, for intermediate and advanced lifters, by increasing the amount of felt weight at the top of the movement. Here’s a video of how to do it. Just be careful not to lose your grip!

Lastly, the kettlebell is a great piece of equipment if you don’t have a full gym. It’s like a Leatherman tool. It can be used in a wide variety of ways, but you wouldn’t use it if you had a full mechanics shop! If you live in an apartment, or just want some easy equipment to do some home WODs, then get a kettlebell. If you have access to a gym, then you can skip it.

If you want to learn how to put together your own amazing program, then check out this ebook.

We’ve covered the kettlebell, now let’s move onto one of the more dangerous functional fitness movements, the handstand push up.

Handstand Push Ups

This movement is dangerous, and it doesn’t allow you to improve your shoulder strength effectively. This research study entitled, “Shoulder Injuries in Individuals Who Participate in CrossFit Training,” highlights that most shoulder injuries that Crossfitters experience are actually pre-existing. However, those that do occur during CrossFit commonly occur because of improper form, and lack of supervision. Handstand push ups are complex and are not best used by unsupervised athletes.

The other serious issue with this movement is that it violates a basic strength training principle. For best results, you need to be able to move through the largest range of motion you can safely. This is why a full squat is better than a half squat, provided you have the mobility to squat that low safely.

Unless you’re doing a deficit handstand push up, you have to stop when your head touches the ground. Your neck is halving the range of motion you could achieve with a strict press, or a seated dumbbell shoulder press. Those movements allow you to move heavy loads from the front of your shoulder, all the way to lockout.

You also cannot scale the load for handstand push ups. You’re stuck with your own body weight. You can kip, to make it easier, but that still requires significant strength, and a huge coordination demand. If you want to build shoulder strength, then you’re better off with more bodybuilding movements, using barbells, and dumbbells. Trust me, your shoulder joint and rotator cuff health will thank you, as bodybuilding has one of the lowest injury rates for all weight lifting sports.

How Should You Do Handstand Push Ups for Functional Fitness?

The only population of people that should be doing this movement are people that are competitive functional fitness athletes. Handstand push ups show up in many WODs, and you have to be able to do them. There’s no way around this.

I always recommend that my competitive athletes build strength with free weights, specifically barbells and dumbbells, and only practice the movement to build their technique and efficiency. You don’t need to do hundreds of reps, pounding on your skull, to get good at this movement. Get strong, and practice from time to time!

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Ski Erg

For a group of people that specialize in not specializing in one type of fitness, I don’t know why we’ve started to use a piece of cardio equipment that is specifically designed for cross country skiing. For the record, I’m not saying that there isn’t any use for the ski erg, I’m saying that it’s too narrowly tailored.

This movement taxes the lats, chest, and abs. It misses a lot of larger muscle groups, and as a result, it doesn’t tax your cardiovascular system as well as something as simple as running or using the assault bike. Remember, we want to use as much muscle mass as we can to do as much work as possible. This will create a large training affect.

How Should You Use the Ski Erg

To be perfectly honest, if you’re a ski enthusiast, then this is the piece of equipment for you. If you’re a very well trained athlete, putting in a lot of work in the gym, then this might be ok to use occasionally. It can provide a novel stimulus for your workout routine, and would allow you to get some cardio benefit without taxing muscles that might be sorely used in the rest of your program. Otherwise, I don’t see why you wouldn’t just run, or assault bike.

The other caveat is for my competitive functional fitness athletes. If you want to go to local or sanctional competitions, then you need to be familiar with this piece of equipment. Just like the handstand push up, I would build aerobic capacity with other movements, and simply use the ski erg enough to familiarize yourself, and no more.

Double Unders

I almost didn’t include this one, because I know that boxers like to jump rope, and I don’t need rando’s trying to Rock Balboa my head! Let me tell you why this one made the list. For the first five years I did CrossFit style weight training, I didn’t do a single double under, or jump rope WOD. I didn’t see the need.

Once I left the Marine Corps, and decided I’d do a few local competitions, I learned how to do them. Do you know what happened to my fitness? Nothing at all! It didn’t improve my fitness, or detract from it. It just gave me another thing I could do.

This is the reason why I’ve put this on the list. It’s a pretty good low level plyometric movement, that requires some coordination. It can build cardiovascular fitness. However, let me ask you this. Would you rather do 60 seconds on the assault bike, as hard as possible, or 60 seconds of double unders?

Assuming you can do the movement well enough, you’d almost always pick the double unders, because 60 seconds on the assault bike, is equivalent to first degree murder. The answer would be much the same if I said sprint for a minute. That’s extremely difficult, and it delivers a huge training stimulus. Double unders have a much smaller impact on your fitness.

If double unders were low impact, then I think there would be a place for them in most training programs. However I can tell you that the impact is only slightly reduced from that of running. Now let’s talk about how you should be doing double unders.

How Should You Do Double Unders?

This movement is very similar to the kettlebell. If you only have limited space, and equipment, then a jump rope for double unders, is a very good investment. Similarly, jump roping has been shown to increase foot stiffness for very advanced runners, and increase their running speed. If you’re an endurance specialist, then this might be a good training tool.

Double unders also show up in many benchmark WODs, and you should be able to do them well. For the vast majority of functional fitness athletes, I like to use double unders as a good warm up for the WOD, or as a little extra conditioning if they can’t make it to the gym.

There’s nothing wrong with doing jump rope work, but there are other movements that will give you a larger impact on your overall fitness level. Now let’s get to our final movement, the pistol.

Pistols

This movement is very difficult for many athletes, and it doesn’t challenge the legs particularly well. I also tend to think it’s dangerous for the knees, as you have very little stabilization on the knee joint. It also requires a very high degree of ankle flexibility. In my mind this movement is more of a trick rather than something useful to include in a functional fitness workout.

I absolutely think that most athletes should do more unilateral (one leg or one arm at a time) work. However, a reverse barbell lunge would be much more useful than a pistol. You can generate a lot more force with this movement, and you can scale the load appropriately.

Reverse barbell lunges also have the benefit of adding some instability, but not a dangerous amount of weight. It also works well for athletes that have some minor low back pain. You can really challenge your legs with a relatively light load, like 95 pounds, and that keeps you from exacerbating injuries with hundreds of pounds on your back.

Who should be doing pistols?

Pistols are best for competitive athletes. They will show up in competition, especially regional or national level competition. At that level you will probably have to do them with some external load like a dumbbell, or a weight vest.

Just like our other competition style movements, I would recommend building leg strength with squats, and lunges, and only practicing pistols enough to build efficiency with the movement. Otherwise, you’re going to be putting a lot of unnecessary wear and tear on your knee joint, for not much pay off.

Now that we’ve covered the 5 worst exercises for functional fitness, let’s move on to some program recommendations. I’ll include several different types of programs, from general functional fitness programs, to muscle mass, and endurance programs.

Different Functional Fitness Programs

These programs were all designed to provide the most training efficiency for your time. They will include the best functional exercises for your upper body and lower body. These programs will hammer your fitness, and you’ll only find the best exercises in them. Here’s a quick overview of the programs I recommend.

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• The 8 Week Functional Bodybuilding Hybrid Program (for those that want to build muscle)
• 9 Week Functional Fitness Strength Program (for those that need to build full body functional strength)
• 12 Week Muscular Growth Program (for those that want to build fitness and muscle)
• 72 Week Functional Fitness Program Series (how to sequence my best programs in order)
• 5 Week Strength and Conditioning Program (for intermediate athletes)

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These are just a small sampling of programs that I’ve written over the years. I recommend checking out each link to see more details on the program. If you want specific coaching advice, including percentages, and coaches notes, then you can pick up the premium version of the programs.

The vast majority of my programs are all completely free, but I found that many of my athletes were wanting more coaching advice than I could provide in one article, so I created the premium programs. They’re revised versions of my best programs with all the details I normally give to my athletes one on one. So far over two thousand athletes have finished my premium programs, with great success. Check out my most popular program below.

Final Thoughts

This has been a lengthy article, but I want to leave you with a few final thoughts before I go. I was talking to a very good athlete the other day about the differences between functional fitness as a training program, and as a sport. You’ll find that many of the movements on this list are here because they only benefit athletes who are doing functional fitness as a sport. This makes them much less useful for those that just want to get jacked, and be fit for everyday life.

I can tell you that I’d rather be able to move some serious weight in the squat, deadlift, bench press, and olympic lifts, than be awesome at handstand push ups. Ultimately, you need to find movements that you receive the most benefit from, and allow you to keep progressing on your fitness journey.

If you have any questions, or just want to start an argument, leave your comments in the comments section below. Now pick a program that sounds good, and get your ass to the gym!

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