Strength Training Today

We've seen exercise trends come, and we've seen them go. We've even seen some come back into vogue. Yesterday's ideas have come full circle, freshened up with today's research and knowledge. Today's strength training involves functional, metabolic, and weight training. Once you've learned about these methods, you can incorporate them into your own program suited specifically to your goals.

Functional training is definitely the newest buzzword for strengthening the body. We first heard of functional training when athletes began to incorporate sports movements into their exercise programs, rather than just training individual body parts as a bodybuilder does. Strength coaches and trainers developed exercises that mimicked the movement patterns required for a particular sport and added weights, elastic bands, and other devices. Because athletes were training for the ultimate function in their sports, the term functional training was coined. Now functional training has come to mean function not only in sports, but also in activities of daily living. If you need balance and strength to reach down and pick up a heavy bag of groceries while holding a child in one arm, you can functionally train for that by holding a medicine ball in one arm while doing a lunge to reach for a dumbbell with the other hand. Functional training now runs the gamut from specific exercises that mimic sports movements to exercises that mimic life movements. You'll find out more about about functional training in chapter 4 and about why it is really just your specific exercise program with a specific goal.

Metabolic training in a strict scientific sense means training an athlete's body at particular work and rest intervals that closely mimic those the athlete encounters during her sport. The word metabolism is usually found in the dictionary of women's dirty words. Some of us say we have a fast metabolism and can't put on weight, but most of us say our metabolism is so slow that if we even look at a cookie, we put on weight. The truth of the matter is that metabolism is really what you make of it. Your body's metabolism is the amount of energy your body requires to live ' whether you sit on the couch or climb a mountain.

Most sports include high-intensity, high-effort periods that are followed by low-intensity intervals or even total rest periods. For example, in tennis the work interval occurs during actual movement of the ball, when players are serving or volleying. In between such actions, when a player is walking back to the service line and preparing for the next volley, he is in a rest interval. The player is also in a rest interval between games and sets. When athletes are trained with the work-to-rest intervals that mirror their sport, their sport performance is maximized. Scientists discovered that such training came at a huge metabolic cost to the body. In other words, it burned a ton of calories! They also discovered that metabolic training actually put on muscle, which increased the body's metabolic rate. Thus, we now have a form of metabolic training called interval training that is becoming popular in our gyms. An athlete follows a bout of high-intensity exercise with a period of lower-intensity exercise, and the pairing is repeated for a certain amount of time in order to increase metabolism.

Weight training is one area that used to be labeled men only, but that women are now venturing into. Weight training creates buffed bodies. Men have known this for years, but women are just starting to get the message. And whereas women had previously gravitated only to the selectorized type of weight machines, they are now exploring the world of lifting free weights for strength training. Weight training is fun; you can do it with or without a partner, and it produces benefits that more women are discovering. Depending on your goals, you can weight train for muscular hypertrophy, endurance, strength, or power. You can certainly augment functional and metabolic training programs with weights, but using weights is not the focus in these programs as it is in dedicated weight-training programs.