It is important that the health and fitness professional view the kinetic chain as an integrated functional unit. The kinetic chain is made up of the soft tissue system (muscle, ligament, tendon, and fascia), neural system, and articular system. Each of these systems work interdependently to allow structural and functional efficiency. If any of the systems does not work efficiently, compensations and adaptations occur in the other systems. These compensations and adaptations lead to tissue overload, decreased performance, and predictable patterns of injury. Health and fitness professionals must understand the integration and synergy of the kinetic chain in order to develop an effective training program.
Traditional training were you sit or lay down on a bench does not take into consideration how your kinetic chain is utilized. Traditional training isolate specific muscles to strengthen them while in functional training we train a movement instead. The human body coordinates a chain of muscles together to move from point A to point B. If their is a weak link in this chain your performance falls off and over time injury occurs. Walking, running, jumping, and squating are basic movements that we do in our daily routines. If a client come to us and say I want to run faster, in traditional training you would probably strengthen the legs on a leg press, leg extension machine, leg curl, all while sitting on a machine and have the client do running routines. Each exercise is to strengthen a specific muscle in the leg. This creates strength but the strength will have imbalances and doesn't take into consideration the neural and stabilizing effect the body has to endure when running because this program is done sitting. Traditional training takes one of the muscles in this chain to strengthen at a time. Functional training will train the entire kinetic chain as an unit to evenly strengthen all of the muscles and all will be done not sitting. Optimal health is attain when you take into consideration the neural and stabilization factors while you balance the bodies strength and flexibility systems. We have focused on functional training because we wish to apply the kinetic chain training as the base to reach optimum health and not to just build muscle mass.
