Functional Fitness Programming: Creating Effective Workouts

Most people over complicate programming workouts. This is understandable because functional fitness encompasses so many movements and possibilities. This leads many athletes down the path of randomly picking workouts, which is of dubious use. This article is going to simplify the workout creation process. You’ll get the benefit of my 11 plus years of fitness experience so you can make your programming much more effective, and avoid the most common pitfalls.

Stressing Over the Minutia

This is by far the most common mistake that I see my athletes and other coaches make when they are creating their own workouts. It’s understandable as there are some definite scientific principles that go into training, and we don’t want to to mess those up do we?

The reality is that as long has you have the basics down, the difference between doing 5×3 vs 6×2 really are fairly inconsequential. Does that matter, sure, but for the average fitness athlete they don’t really make a whole lot of difference.

You need to remember that all we are trying to do is stress the body in a particular way to cause it to adapt to the stressor. If we are lifting, we want increased muscular efficiency, and bigger, stronger muscles and tendons. If it’s monostructural, we are looking for a specific energy system adaptation. Ask yourself this, “Is your body likely to know the difference between these two options I’m considering?”

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Over Estimating Daily Volume and Underestimating Yearly Volume

I see this most often in my competitive athletes. As well as coaching at traditional functional fitness gym, I also provide online coaching to some athletes as well. Often times they are surprised how little I have them do compared to their previous programming.

Some of my more type “A” athletes would sometimes workout six or seven days per week multiple times per day, because that’s what they think games athletes do.

They are drastically overestimating the amount of daily volume they should attempt and are underestimating the amount of yearly volume they need, if they truly want to push their fitness performance.

You can absolutely crush yourself for a day, I know I used to do it, but you find that after a few weeks of that you feel terrible, you skip workouts, and then your whole training plan goes to hell.

Now I hope you’re sitting down because I’m going to blow your mind with this graphic.

Another way of thinking about this is to picture rubbing your hand with sandpaper. If you did this a little bit every day, then you would gradually develop a callus. If you did this all day everyday you wouldn’t have a hand for long.

The key to long term improvement is to gradually increase the amount of work you are doing throughout the year, taking planned deloads when you need to because your body does not get better from working out, it gets better after you workout!

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Falling for the Gold’s Gym Trap

This one is probably the most insidious of the errors. What I mean by this is everyone has a tendency to do the things they like to do in the gym, which is why you see a lot of dudes working bench and bi’s in Golds.

For functional fitness athletes, if you are a good squatter you tend to squat more, if you are good at gymnastics movements then you generally program less barbell work.

This can be difficult to detect because even well put together programs will tend to favor certain movements over time. The only way around this is to setup up a solid outline of your program and then stick to it. Here’s an example.

You can see here that this program is broken up by movement type. I use this kind of system all the time to create programs. It keeps me from favoring certain movements, but still allows creativity within each category.

Three Tips for Creating Your Own Functional Fitness Plan

Now that we’ve covered the most common pitfalls, I’m going to give you a few tips/rules of thumb to simplify your own programming.

Programming Tips

1. Hit each major muscle group with two sessions per week.
2. Try to pair like muscle groups for strength and conditioning.
3. Leave a minimum of two days of rest each week.

Most volume studies on hypertrophy and strength show that the majority of muscles in your body handle stimulation twice per week the best. I have corroborated this with my own programs.

I almost always pair similar strength and conditioning moves together, an example of this would be front squat for strength, and wall balls for the WOD. I do this because it ensures that the muscle group receives enough volume to keep growing.

Leaving two days per week of rest is a minimum number. This is for intermediate and advanced athletes. For newer athletes I find three days is more appropriate.

Now that you have some solid guidelines for creating your own custom program you need to get out there and start training!

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