Benefits of a Functional Trainer

We’ve all seen those sit down style home gyms that have been around forever. They provide homeowners a great option for strength training in a safe manner. However, the amount of exercises on traditional sit-down home gym is limited. There are some exercises that are very difficult to perform.

That’s where Functional Trainers come in. These units are designed to give the user an endless amount of options for functional/strength training. They generally will either incorporate one or two weight stacks. For the purpose of this article, the benefits described below will correlate to functional trainers with two weight stacks (which is more common than those with only one).

Multitude of Exercises

A functional trainer allows someone’s creativity to take over. The versatility of this type of machine allows someone to hit every muscle group in a variety of exercises. For example to build up one’s chest, you can do standing chest press, incline press, decline press and chest flies. Those can all be done with standard handles. For legs, you can do squats, lunges and calf raises. With different attachments you can do even more (this will be discussed later so keep reading).

With a functional trainer one can do all these exercises standing, which engages one’s core, lower back and legs. So even though an exercise is targeting a specific muscle group, doing it with a functional trainer actually works several others. There are endless methods to working each body part with a functional trainer compared to the standard sit down home gym.

Abundance of Attachments

Not only are there limitless options of exercises, but there is a large array of attachments that can be used with a functional trainer as well. Curl bars, straight bars, tricep ropes, sport specific handles and lat pulldown bars are just some of the options for attachments on functional trainers. Each individual attachment allows the user to complete an exercise in a different way, working the targeted muscle groups in various ways.

Safety

When putting any piece of fitness equipment in a home, safety should always be a factor. In that regard, functional trainers have an advantage of traditional free weights. There is no need for a spotter with a functional trainer because the weights cannot fall on the user. The carriages that carry the handles act as safety bars/spotters as well. So if the user was doing a squat with a straight bar attachment, the bar could never fall on the user because of the carriages not allowing the bar to drop beyond a specific point.

Space Efficient

Space is another concern when it comes to buying fitness equipment. Most pieces of strength equipment take up a good amount of space. In terms of functional trainers, there are some very large ones, but the majority of them do not take up a lot of space. Some are even designed to fit into the corner of a room. This allows someone to get all of their strength training without a piece/pieces of equipment that take up an entire room.

Come check out a couple functional trainers at one of our five locations!