• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Reviews
  • Guides
  • Brands
  • Comparisons
Superwatches - Smartwatches for smart healthy people

SuperWatches

Super Smartwatches and Wearables

  • News
  • About Us

workout

The Benefits of Functional Fitness Explained

Functional fitness

Introduction

Functional training is a bit of a fitness trend at the moment. However, it’s popular for a reason. It’s certainly worth considering if you’re on a mission to improve your health and fitness in the long-term. But, what is it? Is it an effective form of exercise? Are there different ways to do it? You might’ve asked yourself these questions and we’re here to help you in this article.

What is Functional Fitness?

Functional training is focused on strength, for the most part. It features compound moves that utilise more than one muscle group within one movement. For example, when you work your biceps by doing bicep curls, you focus on just that one muscle. You’ll certainly build some strength and endurance that way, assuming you’re using the appropriate weights and number of repetitions, but it’s still an isolated movement. In fact, if you look around a gym, you’ll soon realise the machines tend to focus on one muscle each. Functional fitness argues that this isn’t a) efficient or b) how the body should function. 

Free weights and bodyweight exercises prioritise and improve stability, coordination and strength. This has the overarching aim of improving functionality in how you go about your day-to-day life as well as your athleticism.

Is functional fitness important?

Like other types of exercise, functional fitness is wonderful for your health. You’ll gain strength, mobility and power that extends what you can do in a gym.

What are the benefits of functional fitness?

Everyday activities get easier

If you improve your overall body functionality by increasing the strength of your muscles and endurance, you’ll develop better stability. This will translate into everyday activities and you’ll find they’re a lot easier to complete than before.

Compared to the outcomes of other types of exercise, this benefit outweighs a lot of conventional workouts. Its goal is to make things you would naturally do in your everyday routine easier. You’ll be less tired as a result, which will have a further positive impact on your mental health as you feel better equipped to manage your day.

Low Impact

Functional fitness doesn’t require any high impact on your body. As a result, it’s also accessible for all people of all abilities and fitness levels. There’s a starting point for everyone. There are different sessions you can try from novice to expert; it’s just about knowing your fitness style. It can be tricky at first to figure out your fitness needs and what movements you should work on, but once you do, your muscles and joints will thank you! They’ll repay you by lasting a lot longer as you get older!

You’ll increase your balance, posture flexibility and coordination

The range of motion needed in functional fitness is large. You should be start and end in a position that stretches your muscles. A key goal of a movement is to feel resistance. Boosting your functional strength results in better flexibility and thus better coordination. This is when you’ll see it paying off in your daily activities.

The exercises require you to utilise multiple muscles to improve your overall strength. Again, this leads into better posture. Something we could all use, especially if your job means you’re sat in a chair at a desk all day, potentially slouching. You achieve this because functional training needs you to use the smaller muscle groups that support the larger ones. This also benefits you by reducing your risk of over-training. 

Reduction of joint paint

If you suffer from back, neck or any other joint pain then functional fitness is only going to serve you well. It’s known for being the perfect middleman between a personal trainer and physiotherapist. Because it’s designed to improve your overall body function, back, neck, knee or other joint pain can be reduced significantly. Imagine how you’ll feel if you could walk longer distances without your ‘bad knee’ playing up? The pain of daily tasks that were once hindered can be greatly alleviated.

Reduce your risk of injuries

Practicing functional fitness over conventional training methods reduces your risk of injuries because it puts far less stress on your body. Essentially, it’s mimicking natural everyday movements. This has been evident in runners who reported far less pain having followed a functional fitness routine alongside their other training. Again, this is because of the effort put on the smaller muscle groups to support the larger ones.

You’ll build muscle

You might wonder if this is possible, considering it’s low impact. The concept of working multiple muscle groups means you’re training several areas simultaneously. Your results will be improved strength and muscle gain.

Summary

Hopefully, you’re energised and empowered to get your teeth into your first functional fitness training session. You don’t need any equipment to get started, and there are plenty of novice workouts online to get you going. You’ll be able to create your own bespoke sessions once you know exactly what it is your body needs. 

It’s advisable to have a fitness tracker to monitor your progress. For functional fitness fans, we think a multisport watch is a great companion, The likes of the Forerunner 945 is a perfect device, in particular. We reviewed it against the Garmin Fenix 6, and you can read that article here.

Follow Us

facebook instagram twitter download on pinterest
Maygen
Maygen

Maygen is a multifaceted writer, proofreader and an experienced smartwatch industry writing and editing professional.

July 13, 2020 By Maygen Leave a Comment Filed Under: Fitness & Sports Watches, Health and Fitness Tagged With: exercise, fitness, fitness tracker reviews, fitness trackers, fitness tracking, functional fitness, goals, gym, health, superwatches, training, workout

Exercises to Try to Keep Fit

exercise

You might wonder how much and what exercises you, your kids or even your parents need to stay healthy?

Essentially, everyone would benefit from doing two kinds of exercise a week. Aerobic exercise and strength training. 

For those aged 5 – 65, we should aim for 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise a week. Undergoing a variety of activities over the week will help develop and maintain a healthy heart, muscles, bones and mind.

Ideally, we should be reducing the amount of time we spend sitting down. We do this in long periods despite overwhelming scientific evidence pointing to a downward spiral in our health. 

If we aimed to spread our activity out throughout the day, we would achieve 150 over the week. The activity itself, as a rule of thumb, should leave us breathing faster and feeling warmer.

What is moderate activity?

An activity that is moderately intensive will make your heart rate and temperature rise and your breath faster.

If you’re still able to talk, but not sing, this is the sweet spot.

We’ve come up with some suggestions to help you get this activity into your week, without needing a gym membership.

You’ll start seeing the health benefits, have some fun and even see a lift in your mood. Plus, it doesn’t have to cost the earth.

Once you start getting your 150 minutes a week, you’ll start to love how you feel. We recommend pairing any activity with a smartwatch or fitness tracker so you know you’re on target.

We hope you find something here that’s enjoyable and therefore you can work it into your routine as part of a healthy lifestyle

Let’s begin.

Walking

Did you know walking is one of the best types of exercise? It’s available to almost everyone. Also, it’s cheap because you don’t really need much other than some comfortable shoes!

It’s easier than you might think to increase how much you walk. You can get friends and family involved by walking with them or even joining a walking group.

Walking triggers your cardiovascular system. Meaning, your lungs and heart start working hard to provide you with good circulation. Your muscle endurance improves, too, especially in your legs and hips.

Smartwatches like the Apple Watch Series 5 or more the budget-friendly Fitbit Versa 2 will send you reminders not just to get up and walk. They also have GPS, allowing you to map where you’ve been, count your steps, know the distance you walked as well as count how many calories you burned! 

Working out at home

You can burn some calories, lose some pounds and boost your mood using just ten minutes a day to exercise at home. Sound good?

There is no end to the number of workouts you can access from your smart TV, smartphone, laptop, desktop or tablet. Simply go to YouTube and try searching for any of the following workouts, starting your search with “ten minute” that you can do in the comfort of your living room, garage, garden or home gym, if you have one:

  • Cardio 
  • Toning workout
  • Bums and tums
  • Hips and thighs
  • Upper arms or upper body
  • HIIT 

There’s nothing stopping you from doing more than one of these workouts if you want to to 20 minutes, half an hour or up to an hour of exercise. You’ll be getting a great full body workout this way. 

The Coros Apex would be a fantastic workout buddy for this. It has all the features of a premium smartwatch at a fraction of the price. Additionally, it has a great 35 hour battery life so you can focus on recording your workout and not worry if it’ll need charging.

Jogging or running

Going for a run is demanding on the body, more so than walking. If you’re new, you must take your time to build your speed and endurance and therefore your duration of runs. If you like the idea of starting up but you’ve been fairly sedentary for a while, you’ll find running programmes like C25K really helpful.

The NHS scheme was designed to help total novice runners to run 5k within 9 weeks. You might find investing in a fitness tracker can help you exponentially We wrote about the best running watches in an article, here, which will help your decision making on what to buy

Cycling

Cycling is a great cardio exercise that gets your lower body working hard. If you want to devise a regular cycling routine for yourself, ensure your bike is the correct size and your handlebars and saddle are also correctly positioned to support your height. 

Cycling isn’t necessarily a solo activity. For example, you could get the family together on a Sunday morning for an hour’s ride and enjoy seeing your local area. There will also likely be some local cycling groups you could join. Most of these cater to people of every ability so you don’t have to be intimidated by pro cyclists going at a speed you can’t keep up with.

We recommend you head to our article that tells you everything you need to know about buying a cycling-specific smartwatch, after which you’ll be ready to read our review of the best beginner and semi-pro cycling watches.

Swimming

After walking and running, swimming is the third most popular sport, for the people of the UK, at least. Most swimming pools offer beginner lessons if you’re not totally confident or just want to improve.

Swimming is a wonderful full-body workout. It’s widely used by people whose goal is to lose weight and tone up.

Putting in just a few laps will work most of your muscle groups as well as being a great aerobic exercise.

If you have a regular swimming session and put in a consistent pace, you might start to notice a few pounds dropping off.

Again, you don’t have to do this solo. There will be groups you can join to suit your ability, classes for more novel workouts that require a bit of splashing around or you can bring your kids and watch them have a whale of a time whilst you patrol the lengths.

We’ve taken the liberty of writing a buyer’s guide for swimming watches and then helped you on the journey even further by reviewing the best swimming watches for 2020, check it out here.

Summary

There are five ways to get you thinking about how you can increase your exercise to stay fit. Every one of them can be enjoyable, and you don’t have to go at it alone. Find a workout buddy and make it a social event. Grab a fitness tracker that will work with you to help you achieve your goals and you’ll be there in no time.

Follow us

facebook instagram twitter download on pinterest

Maygen
Maygen

Maygen is a multifaceted writer, proofreader and an experienced smartwatch industry writing and editing professional.

July 3, 2020 By Maygen Leave a Comment Filed Under: Fitness & Sports Watches, Health and Fitness Tagged With: active wear, activity tracker, exercise, exercising, fitness, fitness trackers, goals, health, smartwatches, superwatches, training, workout

The Benefits of Staying Fit

Here is the article you’ve been waiting for. It contains the miracle answer to staying fit and living a long life!

The solution will halve your risk of developing a major illness like Type 2 Diabetes, heart disease, cancer and stroke.

Best of all, it’s free. You don’t have to pay a penny for this solution. It works instantly, too. You don’t even need to see a doctor to get your hands on it and yet it’s totally legal.

What is this miracle life-extending solution? Exercise.

We’ve always been able to exercise in some way. So why do we neglect it? Or not do enough? It has such a damaging effect on our health if we don’t.

There is no magic cure. Regardless of your age, there is a wealth of scientific fact supporting the notion that staying active leads to a happier, healthier life.

Those who regularly exercise reduce their risk of suffering from chronic illness like those we’ve mentioned. 

More research indicates that mental wellness improves with regular activity, too. Mood, sleep quality, self-esteem and more serious conditions like depression, anxiety, Alzheimer’s and dementia can be better managed. 

What are the benefits of staying fit?

The evidence is overwhelming. It’s painfully obvious that we should exercise regularly. Therefore, it’s simple; if you want a life of happiness and health, get exercising and stick with it even into your wrinkly years.

Medical data backs up the fact that those who are regularly active experience:

  • > 50% less risk of Type II Diabetes and colon cancer
  • > 35% less risk of heart disease and stroke
  • > 20% less risk of breast cancer
  • Up to a whopping 85% less risk of osteoarthritis
  • > 68% less risk of a fractured hip
  • A third less chance of having a severe fall
  • > 30% less risk of depression and dementia
  • > 30% less risk of early death 

How to stay fit

To get fit and stay there, you should be active every single day. Aim to complete 150 minutes of exercise in the period of one week. This can be done in immeasurable ways.

Most people enjoy a brisk walk. Maybe you have a bike? If you live within 5 miles of where you work, ditch the car and get your feet moving. If you’re keen on monitoring your activity and making sure you get the time and distance in, we recommend looking at our article on the Nike+ sportwatch which will be the perfect companion for you, with activity monitoring and a handy GPS feature.

The rule of thumb is that for any activity you do, you should be doing it fast enough that it raises your heart rate and you need to breathe a little harder. This is called moderate intensity. If you’re at this level, you can still comfortably talk, but you wouldn’t be able to sing. 

You can step it up to the next level, which is known as vigorous intensity. There is overwhelming evidence pointing to vigorous intensity benefiting your body significantly more than moderate intensity. Your breathing should become harder and faster. Your heart rate should go up more. To test it, you shouldn’t be able to say a full sentence aloud without struggling.

If you need some help to know if you’re at the right level, a Garmin fitness watch is your best friend. Check out our comparison of Garmin to Fitbit here to learn about the ability to monitor your heart rate zones.

Amazfit GTS

Physical activity is redundant 

Getting in enough exercise is a modern-day problem. Technology is largely to blame because it makes our lives so convenient. We drive our cars to work where we sit in front of screens for most of the day, we go home and machines wash our clothes and then we sit in front of another screen to be entertained.

Tech is taking out the physical labour of everyday tasks. We don’t even need to leave the house to fetch our food, which means we don’t have to walk, pack and put it away. Life is physically less demanding than it was for our elders.

This means we’re using less energy. The average adult spends 7 hours a day sat on their bottom. Those in the 65+ bracket spend around 10 hours of every day lying down.

The good news is, not all tech is bad for us. In fact, plenty of devices are created to combat this sedentary lifestyle we’re accustomed to. Your watch can be your personal trainer who lives on your wrist.

A lot of fitness trackers and smartwatches come with built-in fitness coach apps that motivate you to reach your goals. We’ve written about some of them in our review of the best smartwatches for 2020, and you can access that here.

Sitting down works against your fitness

You should be mindful of how much time you spend sitting down throughout the day. Making a proactive effort to be more active will naturally reduce the number of hours spent in a chair. 

Watching TV, being on a computer, driving or even catching up with your friends and family all mean sitting down. Here’s where those health risks start creeping in.

All ages benefit from moving often. Even limiting the total time a baby spends sat in a buggy can contribute to healthy development. We can all benefit from saying no to sedentary behaviour.

How to get active and enjoy the benefits of staying fit

The 150 minutes a week target might sound daunting, but there are a lot of ways you can incorporate exercise into your existing routine. You don’t need a gym membership, equipment, money, or even additional hours in the day. 

Head to our article about how to utilise being at home where we give you some ideas you’ve probably not considered, including a workout you can do on the sofa!

If you’re someone who spends a lot of time in the office and you think you couldn’t possibly fit in a workout, you’re wrong. Here we give you a number of ways you can easily get active during your day, even when you have a diary full of meetings.

Fitness at Work

We haven’t forgotten the parents. We know kids love to watch videos on your tablet or smartphone, but we’ve come up with a few novel ways to get your little ones excited about exercise, without them realising it. Read our article on fitness for kids, here.

Follow Us

facebook instagram twitter download on pinterest
Maygen
Maygen

Maygen is a multifaceted writer, proofreader and an experienced smartwatch industry writing and editing professional.

November 3, 2020 By Maygen Leave a Comment Filed Under: Buying Guides, Fitness & Sports Watches, Health and Fitness Tagged With: cardio, fitness, fitness tracker reviews, fitness trackers, goals, health, health and fitness, smartwatches, staying fit, superwatches, training, workout

Affiliate Disclosure: Superwatches.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchase.
Our participation in affiliate programs is at no extra cost to you.

Copyright © 2021 · Superwatches.com · Privacy · FAQ · Terms · Contact us[rank_math_breadcrumb]

We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience for repeat visits. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of cookies.
Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled

Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.

Non-necessary

Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.

SAVE & ACCEPT