What is Functional Bodybuilding?

Have you ever asked yourself why you work out?

Is it because you want to have an aesthetically pleasing body? Or because it makes your body feel strong? Or maybe it’s your way of calming your mind and relieving stress. Ask most people this question, and you’ll probably get an answer that’s a mixture of these three options. 

But now ask yourself this: how many times do you leave the gym with a lingering injury, or push through pain during a workout? How often do you look in the mirror, and wonder why you’re not seeing progress even though you’re burning calories and doing everything right? 

It makes no sense that so many of us use exercise as a way to feel and look good, but are too often faced with pain, stress, burn out and frustration when it comes to our workouts. 

It kind of makes you wonder if there’s a better way to train, right? 

Well that belief is how functional bodybuilding came to be. 

What is Functional Bodybuilding? 

As a former Crossfit competitor and coach, I fell in love with training for the sport. Training became a passion of mine, and those ideas, concepts and methods that I learned while involved in Crossfit were something that I carried with me for a long time. 

But the pursuit of Crossfit at a higher level and the way it was being promoted at the time was grueling, and it didn’t really leave a lot of room for training that helped me beyond the next competition. So after I retired from competing, I searched for a new approach – one that would help my body instead of hurting it more.

Functional Bodybuilding is my evolved style of training since leaving the world of Crossfit. It’s a hybrid of the methods I learned in the functional fitness world combined with my past decade or traditional bodybuilding and strength training.  It’s simple, strong, controlled movements like planks, pull-ups and presses combined with the dynamic and fun movements of functional fitness. Functional Bodybuilding is designed to build muscle and heal, instead of leaving your body a mess. 

Training to Feel AND Look Good 

Functional Bodybuilding was initially born out of my desire to create a training program that allowed my body to feel good for decades to come. But feeling good physically is only half of the equation. 

The next layer of Functional Bodybuilding is that people really want to get into training to look good. They love the idea of “let me reshape my body,” but they don’t love sacrificing how they feel and how they move to achieve this goal. 

Therein lies the problem: people want to look good, but they also want to move well. In the absence of one, they lose interest in the other, and understandably so. Training cannot just be a pure aesthetic pursuit that leaves your body looking good but feeling broken and battered, nor can it just offer you a way to get stronger, but leave you with a physique you’re not proud of. Sacrificing one for the other eventually just leads to giving up on training all together. 

Functional Bodybuilding removes the need to choose between one or the other, offering an ideal balance between feeling good and moving well. With custom programs designed specifically for each individual’s needs, Functional Bodybuilding gives you the ability to chisel your body without ending up injured, drained and frustrated. 

Designed for Real Life 

Now feeling good and looking good are both great, but those two things alone still aren’t enough. For a training program to actually succeed, and for people to stay consistent, it needs to work for real life. 

I came from training three to four hours a day, so when my workouts condensed to 90 minutes, I felt wonderful. But for most people with families, careers and better things to do than spend half a day in the gym, 90 minutes is still way too much time to train.

But Functional Bodybuilding is truly designed to accommodate every body, so whether you need 60 minutes, 45 minutes or a half hour, efficient and effective workouts can be created to fit within any lifestyle. Even if you have limited time or equipment, we always strive to bring our customer base the ability to be more efficient and still build a very functionally and aesthetically pleasing body. 

What it really boils down to is that most people don’t need the perfect training plan. What they do need is to give themselves permission to go to the gym again, and to take the time to prioritize themselves for a change. If your training program easily fits into your already established life, this becomes easy. 

Whether you’re struggling with injuries, crushing yourself with intense workouts to no avail, or are just unsure of how to get back to prioritizing yourself, functional bodybuilding is an excellent avenue to explore, and we have some fantastic free training resources to get you started. 

If you’re interested in learning more about functional bodybuilding, you can also check out the Look Good Move Well podcast, our ebooks, and dozens of other free resources across Instagram and YouTube.