Functional Circuit Training and Organic Farming

I just saw a guy on the street with a shirt that said, “Functional Circuit Training” on it. He clearly worked out and may have even been a trainer. For some reason this really peaked my curiosity. Enough that I thought about running after him to talk about it. Though I wouldn’t hold someone to something that is on their t-shirt especially if they may work in an industry like the fitness world where you get a lot of free promotional stuff. When you take multiple showers and change clothes multiple times a day, you need clean t-shirts. If you catch me at the right moment you might be able to get me to put on an I *heart* Britany t-shirt.

Regardless, more important than the man wearing the shirt is the message, or lack there of. What does that even mean? Does Functional Circuit Training involve Kettlebells? If so, maybe I am down.

So I did a little research, turns out that you can become NESTA certified to be a Circuit Training Instructor. Through this certification you become certified to teach Hydraulic Circuit Training (riiiiight...), Traditional Weight Circuit Training, Functional Circuit Training, and Sports Specific, you guessed it Circuit Training all for the bargain price of $160.00. However, though I can pay for the home study course which includes no actual “function” except answering some multiple choice questions, I cannot find a good definition on their website of what it is exactly that makes this special. To me trying to sell functional training is like trying to sell someone on eating an apple after you have told them for a decade that an orange was an apple. They will probably miss the point completely and focus on the semantics.

My issue with this t-shirt slogan is that it is some man or woman’s attempt at reinventing the wheel to impress and bewilder you.

So let me break it down for you. At some point there was just exercise, mostly in the form of manual labor. This was indeed “functional” exercise. Improving your function at this particular task of life. At some point someone came along and decided that they wanted to make a ton of money off of busy people and invented the machine in the gym, or even the free weights. Refer to these persons as Cybex, Nautilus, Hammer Strength, ICarian, or my personal favorite Precor, whoever you want it doesn’t matter. Just as GE did for dinner, they made workouts easy, and much much less “functional” in its original sense.

But as time went on we all lost touch with our bodies, due to busy work schedules or some never being in touch in the first place. We just listen to these manufactures, joined a gym, and got down a routine. For many people this routine was a circuit. In traditional circuit training as I know it, you work every body part to exhaustion and then go again for a second set, or you alternate body parts with different exercises, in a circuit, always coming full circle. Unless if you live in the film short Tango, this will not be very functional for your life. (Hopefully at least one person in the world besides me gets that reference) That is not to say that it cannot be helpful in absence of anything else. It is certainly time efficient.

Sidebar - Did you know babies don’t really crawl anymore? They often just skip that phase and go right to walking. Crawling is an exercise essential to developing proper integration. If you didn’t crawl as a baby get down on all fours right now. I’m serious, it will do you good.

Back to what I was saying, as we lost touch, there was great financial opportunity for so called experts to jump into the field. People listened to these experts many of whom glistened with their steely six packs and fake tans, bloated on whey protein and weight gainers. Most of whom had nothing productive to offer but being eye candy. While in my eyes, as eye candy these people hold very valuable places in society, they should not be directing your workouts.

So they sold you on all of this and now they are trying to sell you on functional training. They are trying to sell you on what you once knew, what we once all knew as a culture. Sound confusing? It should, that is what these people are going for. The more bewildered you are, the more you will buy, the richer they get and the more people praise them for it. It is not necessarily malicious either, I believe that they believe what they are doing is helpful and in the interest of the people they are selling to, with one exception, the people that made those pulsing abdominal belts that allow you to sit on the couch and eat fritos while loosing weight. I believe those people knew they were full of sh*t.

So the title of this post was Functional Circuit Training and Organic Farming, seems that I have not established a connection between the two, but here it is... In the same way you are being sold the word functional with exercise, you are being sold the word organic with food. A hundred years ago everything was organic until someone came along and decided to profit large scale off of agriculture, make it more efficient, spray crops with chemicals, growth hormones, human sewage, you name it to increase yields and at the same time confuse the hell out of you and bully your local farmer. One thing is sure hasn’t done is improve taste. The declining taste of food in America is hard for anyone to dispute.

With the mechanical takeover of agriculture, came a subsequent decline in laborious jobs from which the workers derived significant exercise. This decline in exercise left the door open for inventions that made exercise fit back into our lives. Now we are fitting exercise back into our lives instead of our lives revolving around exercise, in the same way that we now fit meals into our lives as opposed to the rest of the things we have to do being secondary to meals.

My point is that organic is not a new invention and neither is functional exercise, in fact they are older than anything we know. So instead of getting involved in all of the rhetoric of these people, take a step back and look at what you can learn from history, see if you can learn anything from something your grandmother said to you as a child. and maybe, just maybe, if you are not too scared, take a look at what your instincts have to tell you. We, in America, spend less time in search of food and more time trying to avoid food than any animal on earth. We are in the middle of a major food crisis right now and maybe only generously 2% of Americans could even fathom that that is possible gauging on what Americans waste and consume every day.

There are ways to not participate in this giant mess of rhetoric, one of the best is to shop local as much as possible, this dramatically cuts out the supply chain that helps to perpetuate these activities. As far as exercise, get out of the gym and give yourself some more time! Trying to squeeze in that 30 minute workout, functional or not, is not the best way to go about it. Find something that you enjoy doing, that doesn’t involve a fixed machine. If you have kids play with them, if you like to garden get outside, go for a hike, go for a walk, buy some snowshoes, there are endless possibilities here. All, you guessed it... functional.