Kai Fusser, M.S., has been Annika’s personal trainer for over 7 years and now also directs the fitness program at the Annika Academy at Ginn Reunion Resort. His fitness tips will appear here each month.

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF EXERCISING

We have all heard about "functional exercises" by now, what does that really mean?

Playing golf, just like every other sport, requires the whole body to move all at the same time. Do you know of any sport where only part of the body is in action?

A good movement, or a golf swing in our case, is the sum of all muscles in our body working together. Not only do they need to work together, but also at the right time. This ensures great efficiency as the loads on the body are distributed throughout the whole system, every muscle does its part, and they all help each other. This requires the nervous system to be trained to give the command to each muscle to work at the right time. This can be learned and practiced.

Knowing this fact, it is hard to understand that anyone would want to work out on a machine. Most gyms are now stuffed with all those high tech, futuristic looking, color coordinated machines, some even come with a belt to buckle up. Seated or strapped in you immediately isolate part of your body, therefore that isolated part cannot help the part that has to perform the movement. This teaches the nervous system the wrong pattern. Not only that, the guided motion allowed in machines are mostly “one size fits all.” Our joints all move in slightly different angles but the machine will keep them from moving freely so they are pressed into a motion different of your individual movement pattern. This will result in extra stress on the joints, the surrounding ligaments and tendons. It will also neglect to strengthen the surrounding tissue and stabilizing muscles as the guided motion will not require your body to stabilize that joint, which later will result in injury as the “machine strengthened” muscle will pull against the still weak surrounding tissue.

So in order to get a functional body for our sport (or even yard work, etc., for that matter) we need to exercise functionally. This means we need to be standing up and performing movements where our whole body is involved, using our own body weight, dumbbells, barbells, cables and balls. There are literally thousands of ways we can move our body functionally and as we go along in the upcoming issues I will teach you the right principles.

By the way, our body was designed to move freely since the beginning of time, who ever came up with the idea of restricting our movement?

See you soon,
Kai