By Leigh Belanger

My gym is staffed with certified fitness experts who follow the trends in their field. When I worked with my trainer last year, a good part of our work always included exercises involving standing on one leg, standing on an unstable surface or narrowing my range of motion to achieve ideal form.

Besides free weights, we used balls, bands, and plenty of my own body weight.

Since weight training can often be dull enough to make you lose your motivation, these new toys and tricks worked wonders to keep me engaged. But they did something else, too.

After running regularly for seven or eight years, I've been developing mild lower back pain after long runs, and moderate pain in one knee after every run. After a few months of planned strength training, I felt much less pain.

I asked my trainer why, and she said two things. One, the overall strength training was improving my muscles' endurance. And since a lot of the balancing and other work we'd done had strengthened my core muscles (back, abdomen, and pelvis), my improved core strength was doing a better job of supporting the rest of my body during running.

I could run longer distances with less pain-a big bonus.

A growing fitness trend

As 2007 kicks off, functional fitness is a big buzzword in the field. It's the type of work my trainer introduced to me - the type that focuses on strengthening muscles as groups, as opposed to isolating them, as in standard strength training.

By working muscles as a group and mimicking your body's daily movements, you prepare your body to better face the physical demands of daily life. Whether climbing stairs, making love or weeding a garden, functional fitness makes your body better equipped for physical activity.

Many functional fitness exercises involve resistance bands, fitness balls of all sizes, and free weight exercises with multiple components-like combining a bicep curl with a shoulder press in one two-part exercise. Integrating different body parts into exercises allows you to train them to work together.  

Other functional strength training focuses on using body weight for resistance. We're all familiar with push-ups, sit-ups, lunges, and squats-some basic movements that work an assortment of muscles at a time in your body. These moves are effective and require no equipment, which means you can do them on your living room floor while watching television.

Still other movements are drawn from yoga and Pilates. These also strengthen multiple body parts at a time: like plank, side plank and bridge, along with slow and controlled abdominal work.

Many of these movements strengthen the core area of your abdominals, back and pelvic muscles-a major goal of functional fitness.

Core and more

Yoga falls into the category of functional fitness because of its emphasis on stretching, strengthening, balancing, and using the practice to strengthen a mind-body connection. A regular yoga practice can extend to other parts of your life as you maintain a regular awareness of your body.

A dedicated yoga practice will improve posture, alignment, strength, and balance in many settings, especially during the work day, when good posture eludes many of us and chronic neck and back pain arises in its place.

Yoga also promotes better balance and coordination, which can reduce people's risk of falling and is a major goal of functional fitness training. Better balance not only keeps you from falling, it allows you to adapt to any number of daily situations, whether balancing a child on one hip while doing the laundry or using public transportation while lugging a purse, a briefcase, your gym clothes and your lunch. 

Fitness for life

Functional fitness is great for people of all ages and fitness abilities, but can be especially important as people grow older. As we age, we lose muscle mass, balance, and flexibility-three key elements of physical well-being.

My lower back pain is likely to increase as I age, and I'd like to be prepared for it. And as the risk of falling increases over time, functional fitness also can help diminish those chances.

A New Zealand study cited by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that women over 80 participating in strength and balance training exercises had a 40-percent reduction in falls. When an 80-year-old woman has spent her adult life strength training, she has an even lower chance of falling.

Resistance and weight training also increases bone density, which makes bones more brittle and susceptible to breaking as the result of a fall.

2007 seems like a good time to be trendy. Functional fitness is fun, practical, and has the potential to improve your life. Make it a new habit in the New Year!