Functional Fitness and Massage
What is Functional Fitness ?
Functional fitness is a workout program designed for your individual needs. It is to help strengthen your muscles that you use on a daily basis to prevent injuries. By strengthening your muscles and using the muscles for their specific functions helps to maintain good posture throughout the day.
Twist functional exercise.
What is Therapeutic Massage?
Therapeutic massage aims to loosen tight muscles which cause us to do everyday movements in the wrong posture. Through massage the tight muscles are released and your body can be reset. The earlier you seek help the more effective the prevention of injury is.
Loosening tight muscles.
How does functional fitness and massage interlink?
Functional fitness is not a new idea; it has just been made more accessible to everyone and not only used for professional athletes. Functional fitness focuses on the everyday movements we do. According to dailyburn, there are 7 movement patterns that can be classified as everyday movements. They are:
squat
lunge
push
pull
hinge
twist
walk
These movements are in our DNA and were what kept us alive when we needed to hunt and forage for food in the wild.
Our bodies have not been able to evolve to our fast-changing environment. We do not have to hunt for our food and therefore do not necessarily need to be as fit as our ancestors needed to be. However, our brains now associate our inability to do the 7 basic movements as a danger to our ability to survive. This causes subconscious stress which in turn causes the body to become inflamed. And so, by incorporating functional fitness into our exercising regimes we’d be decreasing our body’s stress on our ability to survive the day. A decrease in the inflammation will help keep our little aches and pains far away too.
We are built to move, to catch our food, travel long distances according to the seasons. Our natural instinct when we have tight or sore muscle is to press on the spot to feel relief. Massage has been around throughout the ages. There is evidence that massage therapy took place in China from about 2700 BCE, Egypt depicts massage and reflexology on tomb paintings. According to the Allied health schools the first written massage traditions were found in India around 1500 and 500 BCE. Hippocrates also administered massage as a treatment and would advise exercise along with massage to help tone muscles that were dysfunctional. Massage as a separate career started out in the 1700s when surgeons would hire young women to massage their patients’ muscles to help them recover from their surgeries. From here the “rubbers” as they were called then progressed into working as a separate entity to surgeons. The terms used evolved from “rubbers” to “masseurs” to the now regulated therapeutic massage therapists.
