We set up this website with the aim of making health and fitness easier to understand, and the main areas that make it up are:
A series of articles covering the practical side of exercise, including how to carry out warm-ups, how to perform exercises correctly and what sort of things you should consider when planning a visit to the gym.
The articles included here are dedicated to helping you to get and stay fit in a way that concentrates on what works for you, in particular by maintaining health in a realistic way, with a focus on mobility and flexibility, with a particular focus on the over-35s as well as helping people who are new to the gym.
It’s fair to say that the topic of nutrition is something of a minefield, so we’ve tried to cut through the influencers and bro-science to produce easy-to-understand articles based on legitimate scientific studies that will help you learn more about nutrition as well as advise you on how much of different things you should aim to eat and suggest some easy ways to improve your diet.
If you want to go to the gym but aren’t sure how to maximise your time there, we can help. Along with some free beginners’ workouts, this part of the site gives you options including buying one-off plans to follow, subscribing to our programmes and getting bespoke plans created.
You need to learn a surprising amount of science and anatomy in order to qualify as a personal trainer, so we’ve taken our extensive experience teaching PT courses to provide a source of accurate and good quality information on all the relevant topics, not just for those qualifying as fitness professionals but for anyone interested in learning more about the science behind what you do in the gym.
The Functional Fitness PTS Philosophy
So now you know what we do, you possibly want to know why we do it. What are our goals and motivation? Well, read on!
Have you ever had a rather strong suspicion that the fitness industry is based on, well, if not outright lies then a rather worrying level of incompetence that frequently borders on deception?
Perhaps you’re tired of influencers with zero scientific knowledge whose only ‘qualifications’ are ones they printed out off the internet and who are more than happy to accept a big fat fee from a corporation in return for flogging you a product using meaningless terms like ‘wellness’ and ‘toxins’ or inane made up words like ‘fitspirational’, assuring you that said product will make you younger/thinner/sexier/immortal/immune from cancer, regardless of whether it actually does anything or is even safe?
Or are you sick of none-too-bright 22-year-old personal trainers who believe everything they see on Instagram and unquestioningly pass on this nonsense to their clients as if it’s scientific fact, regardless of how obviously stupid or dangerous it is?
Could it be that you once had a session with one of those PTs who expect you to do exactly the same workout that they use for all their other clients, never tailoring them to the individual or taking into account differences in size, age, fitness levels or injuries, who just get angry and yell at anyone who struggles to complete the exercises, regardless of how unsuitable, ineffective or even dangerous they are?
Perhaps you’ve become somewhat concerned at the number of people who get all their information from TikTok, a children’s app where children can seek advice on literally everything and anything, except the advice they get is from other children, who obviously don’t know what they’re talking about because, well, they’re children?
How about Z-list celebrities who release a fitness DVD where the cover photo depicts them as super skinny, and who assure you that’s how you’ll look if you follow the programme for six weeks, despite that fact that since that photo was taken they’ve already publicly reverted to their previous size, just to make it glaringly obvious that the programme isn’t remotely sustainable?
Or all those fitness fads that come across like cults, which view you as nothing more than a cog in the machine, and where in exchange for a huge membership fee you’re expected to push your body to its literal breaking point, then when you collapse on the floor with a broken bone or punctured lung the person taking the class yells at you and says you’re letting everyone down and your injuries are all in the mind anyway?!
Perhaps you’ve become cynical about those men’s ‘health’ magazines that have a picture of a super-ripped guy on the front cover accompanied by a slogan saying something like ‘YOU CAN GET A SIX PACK LIKE THIS IN JUST FOUR WEEKS!’, whilst neglecting to mention that the guy in the photo actually spent the last four weeks starving himself to prepare for the shoot and was so hungry and dehydrated during the photoshoot depicting him as a perfect specimen of human health that he fainted at the end of it?!
Or if it’s not that then it’s the same magazines drooling over a Hollywood star who’s suspiciously gone from being shamed for his dad bod two months ago to suddenly being super-ripped just in time to film his latest terrible blockbuster that’s full of plot holes and has terrible CGI. And guess what? Their interview with him assures you that he did it all through hard work and eating three chickens a day with no mention at all of the truckload of steroids that was (presumably) involved…
It could be that you’ve noticed how odd it is to have bodybuilding competitions where people are presented as having the ideal physique yet by the time they’re in their fifties they can’t even stand up unaided because of the damage they’ve done to their bodies as a result of training for them. Oh, and that’s if they didn’t drop dead of a heart attack before they even reached that point.
Our Mission Statement
Are you sensing a pattern here? A pattern that huge swathes of the fitness industry are based on lies, pseudoscience and dangerous nonsense? Have you ever just found the whole thing utterly overwhelming and wished there was some calm amongst all the madness?
Well, that’s where we come in. At Functional Fitness PTS we believe fitness shouldn’t be a competition. Everyone’s different and everyone has different things they can and can’t do. Functional Fitness PTS is all about ageing in a healthy way. Because we’re at a unique point in history: for the first time we’ve got the medical and nutritional science to help us find out just how fit and healthy people can stay as they get older if they treat their bodies the right way.
What Functional Fitness PTS is about:
- Encouraging you to stay fit and healthy in a realistic and achievable way
- Helping you age healthily, in a way that allows you to pick up your kids without getting a hernia
- Engaging with and scrutinising the science around fitness
- Performing workouts that prioritise safety over everything else
What Functional Fitness PTS is not about:
- False promises about how you can get a six pack in a week (or any amount of time, come to think of it)
- Idolising people whose physiques are built on steroids, ie cheating
- Pressurising people to lift weights that are far too heavy until they injure themselves
- Blindly believing every piece of influencer-backed nonsense on the internet, taking up all the baseless fad diets that appear on a weekly basis and unquestioningly following every piece of pseudoscientific bro science doing the rounds on the gym floor
So, if you had to boil our philosophy and mission statement down to one question, it would be this: if you treat your body with the respect it deserves, just how long can you stay fit, healthy and active for?
Well, hopefully, one day we’ll find out…
Functional Fitness PTS 