Muscle Building and Functional Strength

The type of exercise you want to add to your workout depends on your goals, of course. At least, to a certain extent. In this hub, I want to briefly make a case for:

• Compound Exercises
• Functional Strength Training
• Strength Training vs. Bodybuilding

I'll explain each of these concepts and write about why I believe that you can implement them in your training almost completely independently of what your individual goals are.

Quite frankly, I think fitness advice has been over-complicated in many ways and often, trying to go for a super-customized solution might not be the best choice.

What are compound exercises? Quite simply, any exercise that involves the movements of several joints and therefore stresses several differen muscles/muscle-groups is a compound exercise.

This is incontrast to isolation exercises, that only target one specific muscle.

A typical isolation exercise would be the biceps curl, which, if executed properly, only involves movement in your elbow joint and only stresses the biceps.

The video below features a nice, quick rundown of the most common compound exercises that you can use for a full-body workout (takes a minute or so to really get started with the exercises, but once it does, it's good).

What is functional strength? Functional strength is when you can actually apply your strength in "real life" in some way or another.

If you're doing biceps curls, the progress you make has very little real life application because in all kinds of manual labour and in (almost) all kinds of sports, you need to use most or all of your muscles in unison. Whether you're hitting a golf-ball or lifting a heavy crate, there are alway many muscles and many joints involved simultaneously and intermuscular coordination becomes just as important as the strength of individual muscles.

As you can tell, the concept of functional strength ties in quite nicely with compound exercises, as those help strengthen muscles individually and improve your intermuscular coordination at the same time.

Bodybuilding has only one goal: Increase the size of your muscles in order to make your body more aesthetically pleasing (although with extreme bodybuilding that can be a point of debate). For a bodybuilder, it doesn't matter whether his muscles are functional, they only need to be big and nice looking.

Being a bodybuilder doesn't mean that you need to be a juiced-up monster, it simply means that you're in the gym because you want to look good naked.

Strength training is about improving your strength in order to be better at something else . A fighter trains so that he can punch and kick harder, a runner trains his legs so that he can run faster etc.

I estimate that more than 50% of people you see in an average gym are bodybuilders, according to this definition. They are working the weights and the treadmills because they want to improve their looks.

Despite that, I think most of us are better off doing compound exercises and focusing on strength gains.

Why?

Because taking the advice of hardcore bodybuilders can rarely work out well for us mortals. We don't have their genes, we don't have their capacity to eat tons of food and we don't have their supply of hormones and powders.

Using compound exercises, you can quickly put together a quick and effective full-body workout and as long as you make sure you keep improving your strength, you will also be growing.

Nothing agains complex and intricate workout plans, but sometimes, simplified muscle building just works best.