Functional health is all about, well, functionality — how does your health make your life better? Your health should not just be numbers on a chart but something that makes your life better and easier every day.
The way trainers tell it, our bodies don’t seem suited to much beyond the daily routine—and if at the end of the day all you’ve got is a little pain and stiffness, then you should count yourself lucky.
Frustrated? You might want to reconsider whose rules you’re following. If you followed the popular ideas about calories, soy, carbs, oils, animals fats, dairy, and meat—to name a few—it’s no surprise you didn’t get anywhere.
When muscles are artificially isolated in a gym and then called on in a real-world situation to do something strenuous, you end up with strong muscles pushing weak muscles and joints to do something they haven’t been trained for.
We fear ‘untreated foods,’ and instead opt for something that even single-celled life forms literally can’t touch or else they'll die. Does that sound like a good trade-off?
If someone eats a completely unnatural and unnecessary food, and consistently reacts in a negative way, then that person should remove the food from his diet. You don’t need a laboratory or a degree to figure that one out.
You might learn something from my girlfriend’s dog. Her name is Leila, and she is fat (the dog). She sits around all day, and doesn’t do much of anything except whine for treats when she gets bored. Sound like any people you know?
You could add up the practical value of every balance ball and weight stack in the building, and you still wouldn’t match the utility of that simplest of exercisional doohickeys: the pull-up bar.
