Its Time for a Vocabulary Upgrade: Ditching “Functional”

If you exist in the health and wellness space, you have likely heard the word functional thrown around by a coach, clinician, or consumer. When you hear the word functional, you likely envision an exercise or intervention that involves multiple joints, maybe a kettlebell, and perhaps maybe a bosu ball, because that’s functional, right?

Well when I hear the word functional, a small piece of me dies inside.

While that might be a bit of an exaggeration, anyone who has had the pleasure being around me (shoutout my PT school peers), knows the absolute visceral reaction I have when I hear someone use the word “functional,” in regard to describing training or rehabilitation; it is a combination of me genuinely trying to not tweak, and trying to better understand what it is they are trying to describe. I have had this discussion with multiple people now, and each time I get progressively frustrated with the word. The goal of this post is to share some of my thoughts on the topic, and maybe make you think twice before you label an exercise as being “functional.”

To start, we must answer the question, what even is “functional” in relation to training and rehabilitation? The National Association of Sports Medicine, defines functional training as “ a type of training that focuses on movements that help you function better in your everyday life.” WebMD (everyone’s favorite site to self diagnose on) defines it as “a type of exercise that looks like movements you make in your daily life. It can be helpful for athletic performance, injury prevention, and other everyday fitness tasks.”

Now these definitions are not bad by any means (except the injury prevention part, that is just wrong). The goal of training and rehabilitation is to improve capacity to meet specific goals, and in some instances (read: every single insurance based physical therapy POC ever) those goals relate to improving an individuals capacity to perform activities of daily living.

And this is where my disdain for how we use the word functional begins; just about every exercise can be related to function in one way-shape or form. The word itself is not-specific, yet we see it used constantly without any context to describe exercise.

Maybe it is just the way I think and my desire for specificity, but it really grinds my gears when I hear the word “functional” just thrown without context (which more often than not is the case) when talking about training and/or physical therapy interventions. Below I have two examples of interactions I have had regarding that, and hopefully they can share some insight and provide some context for my disdain for the word.

In this first example, I was talking with a good friend of mine about our training, and he said something along the lines of “I have recently been trying incorporate more functional movements into my routine.” I paused for a second, pondered how I was going to respond to that, realized I had some time today, and decided I was really going to lean into him on this one. I then hit him with a mean “What do you mean by that?”

He then went on to describe some “athletic” exercises, some single leg work, and other exercises that I honestly don’t remember, but that’s not important to the story. Upon hearing this, I was confused as to how these movements were functional? If we take the original definitions, these exercises should carry over to this persons day to day life. This person, like me, was a physical therapy student, and from what I knew, their day to day life did not consist of needing to quickly change direction, move powerfully, produce a ton of force on a single leg, or whatever else it is that an athlete does.

A quick aside, I am not saying that you need to be an athlete to train these qualities, or that they are not important to train period. As a bodybuilder, I recognize my own bias towards strength training compared to other modes of training.

Like I said, this is a good friend of mine and I knew I could lean into him, and said something along the lines of “What makes those specific exercises functional? What makes those exercises functional and others, compared to something like a deadlift, lunge, or bicep curl?” In my head, those later mentioned exercises are likely going to have greater carry over to the majority of the qualities and movement patterns that most people will encounter in day to day life, at least compared to the former “functional”/athletic exercises.

We went back and forth for a while and ultimately came to the conclusion that all the previously mentioned exercises can be functional, given a certain context. This context is important, but more on that after this next example.

The Single Leg Squat, deemed one of the more “functional exercises”, yet has almost 0 carry over to anything other than the single leg squat!

In this next example, I was talking with a classmate after we had just come back from our last clinical rotations. We were talking about the lack of equipment/ability to load patients in the clinic that we had both experienced in at least one of our clinical sites. They went on to say, “It was okay though, I focus more on functional movements anyway.” So being curious, I asked what they meant by this, and they went on to describe what is too often described in outpatient physical therapy; under-loaded, under-dosed, hyper-specific-and-unnecessarily-complicated-to-make-it-seem-”skilled,” interventions.

This one really got my gears grinding. Not a dig at my peer whatsoever, but this is something seen in outpatient physical therapy all too often; justifying interventions because they are “functional,” when in reality they are likely not doing much at all after a certain point in time. Don’t get me wrong, there can be a time and place for bodyweight and banded exercises. But when your patient can do 3 sets of 1o that looks like one set of 30 without an ounce of strain, you are ultimately doing them a disservice, under the guise that it is functional.

The last piece of this functional puzzle lies in relation to one of my least favorite things; the fitness industry. “Functional Fitness” has become a buzz word that is used more so to sell programs to the masses than actually describe what these programs are. A quick google search of “functional exercises yields the following results:

A quick glance at these results and we see quite a wide array of exercises; a box jump with the arms extended (so functional), a lunge with a rotational aspect (that one is on there twice, it must be twice as functional as the box jump!), and personally my favorite - the DB chest press with the glute bridge, incredibly functional! For your average everyday adult, I would not consider these to be directly related to everyday function (although when you consider that most adults do not even meet the recommended physical activity levels, I will take anything that gets people moving, even if it is misconstrued). That being said, the wide array of exercises that fall within this “functional” umbrella shows the lack of specificity associated with the term.

Across all three of these examples, there is one common theme, being that: every exercise can be functional because functionality requires CONTEXT. When you use the word without context, you are not actually describing anything.

So how can we do better? Well the solution is quite simple. Rather than using the word functional, simply explain what it is you are actually doing/training! It is such a simple solution, yet it allows you to accurately communicate what you are doing, and it saves me from blowing a gasket!

Relating it back to that first example, rather than saying “I am going to incorporate more functional movements into my program,” they could say, “I am going to incorporate some plyometrics and single leg loading into my program.” BOOM, straight to the point, no mention of the big F word.

I realize this is such a remedial thing to be angry about, and there are so many bigger rocks that need to be moved within the health and rehabilitation space. But as one of my stats professors used to say, “words are important!” And as coaches and clinicians in this space, we have a duty to be accurate with our communication; both to our peers and clients/patients alike.

So the next time you hear the word functional in relation to training or rehabilitation, I hope you think back to this blog post and have a discussion with whoever you are speaking with; heck, maybe even send them this post!

I think this just about wraps up all my thoughts on the topic. I hope you enjoyed, and if you didn’t enjoy, at least learned something! I would love to hear your thoughts below!