Finding Your Fitness Motivation

Exploring the trend of functional fitness as a new transformative approach to personal wellness. I clarify my view of the relationship between functional fitness and physical therapy (and if there is one) while encouraging listeners to ask the right questions in their health journey.

• Insights on the upcoming trend of functional fitness in 2025
• The critical role of understanding 'why' in workouts 
• Differences between functional fitness and physical therapy 
• The significance of nutritional support during recovery 
• Importance of asking questions when seeking healthcare options

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Hello and welcome to In the Rising a health and wellness podcast for those going through and those supporting those going through cancer. My name is Bettina Brown and I'm board certified in physical therapy, wound care and lymphedema, and you know, for me cancer is very personal. It's affected my friends, my immediate and my not so immediate family, and therefore I created this podcast and fitafterbreastcancercom to address the multiple dimensions of our lives during and after recovery. Hello, hello and welcome to the first episode of 2025. This is really exciting for me and I am ready for this season and ready for seasons after.

Speaker 1: 0:54

Perhaps, like some of you, 2024 may have just been hit after hit, after hit, and a lot of them health hits hit and a lot of them health hits. But there's nothing like having health hits to have you reevaluate the purpose of your life and the purpose of what every single day needs to be. And that's where I feel right now super excited, super pumped to move into the next season and to welcome you into In the Rising podcast. So my name is Bettina Brown, physical therapist, and I am excited to talk about one of the top trends for 2025. So I like to see what's going on and, especially as a physical therapist. I've been doing this just shy of 19 years, trying to stay invigorated, excited about this profession, that I've been doing this just shy of 19 years, trying to stay invigorated, excited about this profession that I've dedicated years to and seen hundreds of thousands of patients at this point. So one of the things that caught my eye on the list of 2025 trends was something called functional fitness, and so I stopped there. I was like functional fitness and so I stopped there as like functional fitness. What exactly does that mean? So I googled, I googled some more and I read some more. I looked at what some people believe functional fitness is compared to physical or occupational therapy, and this episode is really about giving my perspective, which is personal and professional, about this new trend.

Speaker 1: 2:30

So one of the biggest things that I've read about functional fitness is it discusses and reviews the why behind what you're doing. For example, the why behind a squat Because we all know that we love our squats. Or the why behind a squat because we all know that we love our squats. Or the why behind a horizontal pull because pushups are wonderful. Well, one of the things with a squat is we know we're going to have to bend our knees and we're going to have to be able to stand basically partially stand and partially sit and repeat, and partially stand and partially sit and repeat. We also know to do a squat. We have to hinge forward. So we do deadlifts, we do step ups, because that hinge movement allows us to have a better posture and it allows us to have better pot, to better have a strength for certain muscle groups.

Speaker 1: 3:32

Functional fitness really turns it back to if you do these deadlifts and you do these lunges, well, this is what's going to help you stand up from a chair and if we do upper body work, you're going to be able to hold your groceries while you get up in the chair. So isn't this why so important? And we're going to dedicate an entire process and an entire program and entire websites to the why behind it and thinking about healthcare, how we can help people, help our clients, help our people that we encounter achieve their own goals. What are my thoughts? Well, I like one part in that the why is focused on greatly, because why do you want to do this, why do you want to do this, why do you want to upgrade to functional fitness? And I think that why is what drives us, just like that Hallmark commercial I saw over Christmas. That was really cool and I'm not big on the Hallmark commercials but I loved it and it was about this grandfather who had a picture and you didn't see what it was till the end of the commercial and he continued to work out and work out and the goal was so that when he sees his granddaughter he'd be able to lift her up. That was his goal. He had his why in front of him.

Speaker 1: 5:05

Now physical therapy and I've seen it described interestingly in some of these websites as it's all about recovery from surgery. It's recovery after an injury to progress to functional fitness, which to me is interesting because that's what physical therapy is all about. You know, having to have a bachelor degree, typically in biology and kinesiology or something like that degree, typically in biology and kinesiology or something like that. It could even be art, as long as you have the prerequisites chemistry and physics, because the body is all about physics and human anatomy and nutrition. To then go to a three-year program, all about how the body moves, and then graduate, just so that you can only help someone recovery from an injury, but then you need to pass them on for functional fitness. That's a little mind-blowing to me. I find it interesting that seven years of education is so you can pass it on to someone who's a personal trainer.

Speaker 1: 6:13

I kind of struggle with that thought and I don't even think it's completely accurate. I don't, and I would love someone to challenge me on that, because I don't follow that line of thinking at all. What I love is the idea that functional fitness talks about the why when physical therapy. I think we could do a better job of it. But when you come in, one of the things we have to write is what is your goal? What is your why? And particularly when you are going through or have gone through a health event, it is not necessarily an injury or a surgery but a recovery from an entire global body fatigue, particularly when I have seen those going through cancer treatment at that moment or post-cancer treatment.

Speaker 1: 7:04

Just daily activities were our goals the ability to vacuum on a consistent basis. You know, extending the arm and bending the arm. We had exercises that were extending the arm and bending the arm. We had activity to build endurance. We had to make sure that your heart rate was able to tolerate everything. We had to measure your oxygenation. It was not just here's a recovery from it. It was not. Just here's a recovery from it.

Speaker 1: 7:39

So when I did Google some functional fitness versus physical therapy, even some articles by physical therapists, I was left more confused, because I feel functional fitness is a really so much more interesting and sexy term than physical therapy, because as a physical therapist, I don't get a lot of people who are like, yes, I'm going to PT, but I do. In the world where we're moving into a different terminology of more holistic things, you know, this is for my function, this is fitness for my why that sounds just so much more interesting than physical therapy, right? So I think it is a little bit more about marketing to help someone as opposed to actually being any different. What is the point of this episode? I also looked as a physical therapist and, working with my partners of occupational therapy, I could not find anything about functional fitness and occupational therapy. Because standing and sitting from a chair is the same action of standing and sitting from a toilet. To functionally be able to grab anything from the cabinets, any of your dishes, or to grab any of your clothes. That is usually, by our occupational therapy, counterparts your activities of daily living and not to say that a physical therapist can't work with someone to get anything out of the cabinets and not to say an occupational therapist can't work on any walking with someone, because usually you walk to the bathroom from your bed.

Speaker 1: 9:15

I kind of lost what this entire field is because it already exists. It already exists and I'm really in support of anyone who is looking for a provider, looking for help, to ask appropriate questions. If you're a functional fitness person, it's an occupational which I haven't found, but it's possible or a physical therapist, great. But really we're highlighting what this profession is already doing and this profession has done very well for close to, and if not over, 100 years. Again, we're continuously improving. This already exists.

Speaker 1: 10:05

But if you're going through healthcare recovery and particularly cancer recovery, whether it's a functional fitness that you would like to practitioner, that you want to work with, or a physical therapist, it might even be the same person is really go back to asking the questions. Those who work with those going through cancer have a different understanding of exercise tolerance. They have a different understanding of that. Raising the arms overhead and doing some of these activities overhead may not be the first things we want to do after a surgery If you've had lymph nodes removed. There are certain activities and endurance activities that can be brought on at a much slower pace while being monitored to not activate any lymphedema for which there is no cure.

Speaker 1: 10:55

So more and go and do and stretch and be able to stand and sit and push and pull, just because that is important and it is important to me every single day. But negating the fact that there are other components that are part of health care and part of nutrition, just to have a better way of framing something, is something I take issue with. So functional fitness I think that sounds great. I think it sounds so great. I have a degree in it and there are people with doctors. I have a master's in it and I've been doing it for 19 years. So I'm so glad that we have a way to describe physical therapy in a way that may not always correctly describe the work of physical therapists, which is to help you be functional and to help you be fit.

Speaker 1: 11:52

So I welcome any comments to this. I thank you so much for your time and I really hope that you have the best questions to ask your provider, which I listed below Ask questions. We do so many investigations of who's going to come lay down our floor and what kind of builder do we want and what kind of car do we want. But we don't often do that with healthcare practitioners. We should be able to have answers for you when you ask them. So thank you so much for your time. I'm so excited that you've been with me today. Be sure to check out my website, fitafterbreastcancercom. Or. Rising Within Life Coaching, looking at what is next from an emotional, from a physical, from a spiritual component. And until next time, let's keep building one another up.