Customer Reviews

Functional Training for Sports

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a good basis for functional training for anyone who is attemtping to make the switch from traditional training philosophies to more sport specific functional training philosophies. Although it lacks a tremendous amount of scientific backing, the concepts as a whole make sense and can be a valuable tool to make the transition to functional training. This book is not for the person who already has incorporated functional training into their own program design or the program design of their athletes. If you are already using functional training methods, this book will seem basic and simple with little or no new information from what you are already applying in your workouts, but if you want to understand why the deadlift is superior to prone hamstring/leg curl for speed development and why push-ups are better than traditional bench press then this book may be right for you.

Let's start out with the good: there are lots of exercises, many of them creative, to give the athlete or coach new tools to use in their program. Michael Boyle brings lots of experience to the table through his involvement at his training facility.

But I was also very dissappointed with this book as it has no research backing and is opinionated. The entire book has only has 7 references, none of them being research articles.

Boyle states that functional training is based on the "latest scientific research" yet there is no research presented in the book at all. He states that he wanted it to be simple and to be able to be read and used by diverse people. I am not sure if he purposely left out research or not but it is research that truly tells me if something works or not. My conclusion with his findings are that he derived them from his experiences and from the books he cites in his references.

Boyle also seems to hold a grudge against exercise physiologists and is in love with physical therapists. He concludes that problems with top amateur and professional athletes' training regimens in the 80's were due to the dumbfounded exercise physiologists that teams employed. Not only is it harsh to generalize to all exercise physiologists, it's also just not right. On the contrary, all throughout the book though he quotes numerous physical therapists about how revolutionary their ideas are.

The book has plenty of pictures of exercises which is great. Unfortunately, photos showing action or movement have this ghost figure overtop of the regular figure that make the whole picture hard to decipher. I have no idea what some of the exercises are because the motion picture obscures the regular photo leaving it useless to me.

On pg. 86, Boyle addresses the problem of when to train abs. He states that some people argue for training abs at the end of the workout because otherwise you would be fatiguing muscles important in stability. He disagrees with this but gives no reason why but continues on with what he believes is the best progression.

Another opinion that is brought up is how athletes focus on "mirror muscles." I guess you can't both look good and perform well.

Overall, I think the book could have been better. I think Boyle pretty much just wrote about his experiences throughout his career without thinking about any backing for his thoughts. Many thoughts are incomplete and opinioned with not much backing. The exercises are great for incorporating into a program for diversity but I was not sold on how great the performance enhancing aspects of functional training are from this book.

If you're a sports athlete, don't train like a bodybuilder. Michael Boyle does an excellent job of explaining the difference and why it's so important. He gives easy to follow instructions to assess your current functional strength and identify your weaknesses. He then describes how to evaluate your sport and consider your strengths and weaknesses so you can develop an individualized training program to improve your sports performance. He gives instructions on how to begin and how to advance, with lots of pictures and detailed instructions on how to do each exercise. Really an excellent book.

I have never written a review before but this book was so good I wanted to make others aware. Finally someone has written a book about functional training that makes sense and shows practical progressions.
I could never understand why I was always pulling my hamstrings on the court in spite of doing tons of machine leg curls. This book does a great job of explaining why using machines make you good at lifting a lot of weight on that machine, but doesn't help your athletic performance. Excellent explanations without bogging you down with technical jargon. The exercise progressions are clearly explained. The only small deficiency in my mind is that I would like to see a healthy shoulders section (although he does touch on this in various places).
I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the most current techniques in athletic training. Far, far better than Rosemarie Gionta Alfieri's mess of a book and much more accesible and practical than Gambetta's Guide to Functional Training. So far I haven't seen anything else like it on the market. I hope there will be more books like this.

I am currentley a high school strength coach who has been in the field for 17 years. I have integrated many of the exercises in this book into our program. This has been one of the most useful books I have come across in many years. It does not matter what your training style is, there is something in this book for everybody. My athletes love the new exercises that I have added to our program from this book.

This is the guy to read when you are ready to give up the bodybuilder- based mythology most of us have built our conditioning programs on since the 60's.

Boyle's site is the #1 source to research topics like functional movement, core training, plyometrics and the like. I bought his book after reading every page on the site and in my opinion it represents the cutting edge of athletic performance programs.

Check out sites for Boyle, Verstegen and Gray Cook if you're interested in changing your program to one that will last your lifetime and give you a more stable, functional body. If I'd been reading these guys when I was an active athlete instead of the memoirs of various "physical culturists," I'd have saved myself a lifetime of back pain and been a much better athlete into the bargain.

Still, there's no short cuts, and I guess you have to make the mistakes you're going to make along the way so you'll appreciate the truth when you finally stumble onto it. If you'd like to save yourself a few of those mistakes, though, and you're flailing around the gym listening to bad advice, take it upon yourself to do a little research with Boyle and his peers. You'll save yourself years of wasted effort, and develop a much more useful body in the bargain.

Training has changed over the decades as the science of the body progresses. Each successive emphasis in training has been an improvement over earlier ones, with athletes today in all team and Olympic sports simply better than their predecessors. If you want a sound and up-to-date way to improve your training, Michael Boyle's "Functional Training for Sports" is an indispensible book, whether you are a coach, athlete, parent or "do-it-yourself" amateur. As a professor in a program that deals with dancers and a coach who deals with winter athletes, I recommend Boyle's work if you want to be fit, quick, strong, agile and healthy. This is the latest wisdom on training now available to anyone who can read and follow excellent photographs.

I have been reading and working out with this book for a couple of weeks, and I am very pleased. It is clear and concise (for the most part, I had trouble deciphering a few of the exercise descriptions). I especially like how he organizes the exercises by body area and then by difficulty. This helps me design my workout, even as I progress in strength.

One warning, he uses a certain level of technical jargon. He occasionally uses terms such as flexion and extension (as in "flex the knees" or "extend the hips"), abduction, and some of the anatomical names of joints (as in "Scapulothoracic Joint," the joint between the shoulder blade and rib cage). If you don't know these words, you probably will still do ok with the book. However, the tone of the book is more geared towards an athletic trainer or a fairly curious individual who is training himself.

I am not a trainer, but I am in massage therapy school. I have more than the average knowledge and curiosity about body movement, so I especially like the explanation and theory he gives for this training approach. As some reviewers have pointed out, he doesn't present scientific research. He presents his own findings from his experience, and the experience of some his colleagues around the USA, with training athletes at many levels.

Personally, I have experimented with a variety of training approaches, and his findings resonate with what I have learned through my own experience. These exercises make sense to me, and I feel that they are working really well for me. That's enough for me, but I'm no elite athlete and I'm not training any elite athletes, either. If your career is on the line, or something like that, maybe you will want more air-tight evidence before you commit to this system.

if you are a personal trainer or just someone looking for sport specific exercise, this is a must have for you collection. some of the theories on this book are now outdate but the exercises are terrific

like the title says. I'm a veteran personal trainer and find this book to be one of the most useful in my library. Clear & concise, thoughtful. Indispensible.