Functional Strength: Training Your Body for Life
by Danelle weller
Lifting weights to get stronger has been around forever. It’s not as easy as wearing a weighted vest to walk to the coffee shop in… you may be seeing tons of friends in weighted vests marching around like navy seals! But if your goal is to build muscle, strengthen your bones, and improve hormonal health, strength training is the method that delivers these results most effectively — based on decades of research.
Lifting weights can also feel intimidating and complicated when you’re new to it, and it needs a level of care and understanding that can be hard to come by. The intimidation and confusion can start with just trying to define what strength training is. As Metta’s Functional Strength and Alignment Coach and resident Personal Trainer — let me start to break that down for you.
I teach Functional Strength, which means training your body through the fundamental movement patterns you use every single day, whether you realize it or not. There are five basic movement patterns critical for daily life: the squat, lunge, push, pull, and hinge. These aren’t arbitrary gym exercises — they’re the cornerstone of human biomechanics. Every time you sit down in a chair and stand back up, you’re doing a squat. When you step forward to pet a dog or tie your shoe, you’re lunging. Pushing a heavy door open, getting yourself up off the ground, pulling something out from the back of a shelf, vacuuming… all use your push and pull pattern.
As you start to think about the athleticism of your daily activities, you’ll recognize how lifting weights stabilizes and strengthens your body so it feels stronger and keeps working for you for many years to come.
The goal isn’t to make you look like a bodybuilder or a Barbie doll. It’s to train your muscles and joints to work the way they’re supposed to, so you don’t injure yourself carrying groceries, playing with your kids, or just moving through your day. You want to feel confident and capable in your own body, not worried that bending over to pick up a pen is going to throw your back out!
How heavy is “heavy”
I know it’s tempting to grab the 3 or 5 pound weights when you’re starting out. I want you to remember that the bags you carry out of the grocery store typically weigh more than 5 pounds. A car seat with a baby in it is easily 20-25 pounds, so is your suitcase when packed for a week long vacation.
When we’re in the business of building strength, we need to be working with weights that challenge your muscles beyond what they encounter in daily life. I typically tell my students to aim for about 25-30% over what you’re comfortable moving around everyday. So if your grocery bags usually weigh 10 pounds, we can start you with 12 pound dumbbells. If you’re used to lifting your 15 pound dog into the back seat for a long drive, you could absolutely do some rows with a 20-25 pound weight.
The key is that these weights should feel challenging but manageable. We want to complete 8-12 repetitions with good form, but the last few reps should require real effort. If you can easily bang out 20+ reps, the weight is too light to create the strength adaptations we’re after. Using lighter weights with higher repetitions for upper body doesn’t “tone” arm muscles or make them “long and lean.” It can actually overtrain the trapezius and neck muscles and contribute to neck pain, frozen shoulder issues, and postural problems.
Frequency and Consistency
You’ve probably read articles in health magazines or seen things in your google news feed about working out 2 times a week being enough. I want to challenge that. Remember the college class you took on Tuesdays and Thursdays for 50 minutes, and the class you took that was 3 days a week and also had a lab? We learn better through frequency and repetition. This applies to strength training too.
Research from the National Strength and Conditioning Association shows that while beginners can maintain their current strength with 2 sessions per week, people who are already accustomed to resistance training cannot increase their strength levels with only one or two days per week. Meta-analyses comparing training frequencies found that strength gains increased progressively: 2 days per week showed moderate improvement, but 3 days per week produced significantly better results, with 4+ days per week showing the highest strength gains.
This has to do with how your brain learns movement patterns. Strength training isn’t just about building bigger muscles, it’s about training your nervous system to activate muscles more efficiently and coordinate complex movement patterns. This neuromuscular adaptation requires frequent practice, just like learning to play piano or speak a new language.
A weight lifting program should be simple enough to understand and recreate at home because ideally women would lift weights 4-5 times a week. I know that sounds like a lot at first but if you’re okay with walking to the coffee shop in a weighted vest 3-4 times a week to “build strength” you should be okay with picking up a weight and getting a workout in for the same frequency and duration. We know for a fact that lifting weights contributes to increased strength, endurance, bone density and improved mental health — there have been no formal studies about walking around in a weight vest. Spend your time wisely.
In my Functional Strength + Align class I teach a 30-40 minute strength set that I break down and explain with the intention of making it easy to recreate at home. I’d love to see you there Mondays and Fridays at 1:30pm in Corte Madera and I'm starting a new class on Sundays at 8am in San Rafael.
Danelle Weller has been helping people discover the mind-body connection in their own bodies for over 20 years as a personal trainer, Physical Therapy Assistant and Pilates instructor at Metta. Her approach comes from two decades of working with physical therapists, chiropractors, osteopaths, and movement coaches to understand how the body works in various modalities of movement.
Rather than following strict Pilates methods, she focuses on the original purpose of this work—strengthening the mind-body connection to your deep internal core and discovering how it supports your joints and movement in everything you do.
If you’re curious to explore this work more deeply, Danelle teaches in Corte Madera on Mondays and Fridays at 1.30pm and in San Rafael on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12.15pm and on Sundays at 8am.
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