This week’s topic hits the heart of every gym rat since we all started as wannabe bodybuilders. We had our “chest” and our “arm” days, before any of us knew any better— but it was how most of us learned in the first place. We called ourselves “bodybuilders” and for many of us the gym shaped our fragile self-esteem. Mind you, I don’t mean those professionals who have a needle in their butts.

Bodybuilding is simply categorized as building up your body with muscles simply by splitting up each muscle daily.

Bodybuilding can also mean lifting weights by any means necessary just to make small improvements jeopardizing form to do so— or that’s my own personal definition. Bodybuilding is often careless to how the body responds to stimuli and is all about training heavy and hard. Not caring about the potential damage done to your own body’s mechanics and heightening the risk of injury. To those faithful few, bodybuilding and split style training regiments is how we all started and I hope it is something we’ve outgrown.

If you are still considering yourself a bodybuilder and have Monday as a mandatory “chest day,” this article probably will offend you to a good amount.

We are long, long past the days of Arnold and his videos with him lifting hundreds of pounds while botching form and sticking needles in his ass.

Working out has transformed from aged old bodybuilding to functional training designed to cater to one’s needs. Again, when I say bodybuilder, I’m talking about that guy in the gym who we've all seen that looks like any gust of wind from outside will topple him over— where his veins pop out of his skin in the inhuman ways, and he can hardly scratch his own back… literally.

Why is this still a thing?

Functional training is the new brand type of training designed to help athletes or the general population in reshaping their bodies, by listening to their bodies rather than bodybuilding which is often all about lifting weights just to do it with no real goal in mind besides “having a bicep to flex”. Functional training enlists biomechanics to help you maximize your workouts in safe aspect by emphasizing form and technique as key aspects of training; much safer and now an accepted alternative to old-school bodybuilding. If you want to lift heavy, do so, but do so correctly.

Teaching how to move correctly is not necessary a trait you’ll learn if you just body build. You'll develop horrendous movement patterns and set yourself up for injury. Most bodybuilders don’t know how to properly brace when lifting which is one of, if not the most important concept to learn. Bracing is important for deadlifting, squatting, and even bicep curls.

With functional training, it isn’t about getting the weight up— but getting the weight up with keeping the rest of your body engaged and tight in order to protect yourself from injury. Training that literally has your best interests in mind, functional training is about your overall health. With bodybuilding or that mentality of “just lift it."

I’ve seen people lift weights they have no reason to because their form was THAT bad, yet they think they are stronger for it and often injury plaques them.

Functional training, for them, might mean a little ego shot by decreasing the weight, at first, but will have them perform the exercise safer and one day, they will be able to lift those heavy weights again without snapping their backs in half.

Lifting weights just because you want to “be big” is one of the dumbest things I’ve heard.

Whenever you lift anything, you’re putting stress on your body; it would make sense to do this in the safest way possible, and I know bodybuilders don’t try to intentionally hurt themselves. However, sometimes their egos can be a powerful factor. Why? Try lifting a little lower weight with correct form and go for more reps which might save your joints from the pain it endures by bodybuilding.

This isn’t geared towards men exclusively. Women body build too and make the same mistakes that men do. When you squat, how is your back, core, chest, arms, legs, and even your head aligned because all of those are a factor to performing the exercise correctly. You literally need your entire body to be flexible and mobile to properly perform a squat. It isn’t all about just going under the bar and seeing what happens— that’s a great recipe to land the ER.

The aged old method of bodybuilding which means lifting heavy weights not realizing how important your form and mechanics are needs to fade away forever.

Functional training considers your entire body and how the body operates in order to lift anything. Functional training is just about you carefully thinking, “how is the rest of my body operating when I perform this type of movement?” The human body always has something else helping it along whether it is your core or shoulders or back assisting in a squat, deadlift, or bench press. When you understand that, maybe you’ll realize it is not the weight you do but how you do it— which matters in seeing any real progress.