Function over Form

You know what I love? A mid-session epiphany. 

There was an idea I was circling around in last week’s newsletter, that I haven’t properly articulated - to you, Gains and Brains rearer, nor to myself. 

If I had to define my gym identity, it’s as a powerlifter. I rock into the gym, do my big lifts, walk away snapping off my belt like a badass, pretend to do some accessories, mainline a protein bar and completely ignore the cardio machines. Big muscles, lots of strength, chalk everywhere. 

(Look, it’s a cliche, but there’s also a reason it’s true.) 

But…I haven’t really powerlifted for a year. My current programme is “rehab and move as much as I can.” I haven’t tried to one rep max any of my lifts seriously in months. 

I stood in the gym, primed to deadlift, and then realised that maybe “powerlifter” isn’t who I am right now. There was a little bit of grief. It’s like when you leave a job you loved, and you have to think “oh God, who am I now?” If I am not a powerlifter, who am I?

I didn’t start out in the gym as a powerlifter. I got there because we discovered I have the capacity to be strong and because lifting really heavy things makes me feel great. But I started out working with Nellie (longtime G&B readers will know her as my first trainer, and complete legend) on function. When I started out I wanted it to not hurt to put on pants anymore. 

I am a massive believer in functional strength. The one rep maxes really aren’t the point - being able to get up off the floor when I am old is. 

And the thing is - post injury, I can’t. Get up off the floor, that is. I am aware that my body is well and truly strong enough to do it, but I have lost the bit of my brain that remembers how to easily get up and down. 

I have also lost confidence in my body. This happens - injury, age, time away from training, stress. We’re taken away from our bodies all the time. 

For the past couple of months I thought that getting back to squat, bench, deadlift was the way to get it back - because I thought that was where I found the confidence. 

But that was never it. The confidence came from trusting my body to be able to lift the thing - and I got there by training it to lift the thing. I did movements repeatedly, and I learned how to do them without thinking, and I got stronger and stronger at them over time. 

Y’all. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it see what’s staring it in the face. 

Now is not the time to be maxing out my deadlift. There’s not a lot of point in being able to deadlift 100kg if I can’t pick myself up. 

So, now is the time to figure out how to reconnect with my muscles. 

But how? 

On Thursday, I woke up with a sore back and tight hips. And I thought, OK, what exercises would help with that? And so I went to the gym and I did single leg RDLs (with a heavy kettlebell, cos my ego is still pretty big), and banded lateral extensions, and banded diagonal walk thingees that Carl had made me do a week before. I did an actual proper warm up, with a bunch of mobility exercises. I made myself do reverse nordics, even though I hate them and they hurt, because they help. 

And then, I spent some time playing.  I tried a hip rotation exercise that I couldn’t figure out, but I decided I would ask Carl to demonstrate at our next session. I did the pallof press variation we mentioned last week. Because I knew it would help my back, but also because flinging around a 5kg plate on a rubber band is silly fun that also works.

I sent Carl a video on Insta where someone referred to these kinds of exercises as “chaos variations.” I am very into that idea. Because doing a windmill with a kettlebell threatening to unbalance me keeps my brain engaged, while also making my shoulder stronger, more mobile, and more stable. 

I walked out of the gym feeling like a new person. A pep in my step. Because it worked. My legs moved easier and my back felt great. How incredibly annoying. 

I think wherever you are in your fitness journey - and whatever kind of movement works for you - there’s space for a bit of chaos. Maybe building trust back requires it. 

That’s how we pick ourselves up. 

Carl here…

Megan comes in again with an insight that mirrors my own journey and gets me fired up to talk about the science behind it.

First, identity and becoming a generalist. I have lived through a few versions of this. As an athlete I was a rugby player who could turn my hand to most sports. Injury stripped that away. Then, through the rehab process (as I've spoken about before), I became a natural bodybuilder, the dreadlocked bodybuilder, to be specific. Then I cut the dreadlocks off and stopped bodybuilding, because I'd become sore and less physically capable, or functional. Who was I?! Nice segue…

What Megan is describing, that grief of losing a sporting identity and not quite knowing who you are without it, actually has a name in the research. It's called athletic identity foreclosure, and it happens when someone's whole sense of self gets built around being "the athlete," "the powerlifter" or "the runner," (Brewer & Petitpas, 2017). The tighter and more exclusive that identity, the harder the fall when injury, retirement or a life change takes the role away, and reviews of athletes forced into involuntary retirement through injury consistently link a strong, single track identity to worse mental health in the aftermath. So if you've felt that particular flavour of grief Megan described, that's not you being dramatic. It's a well documented pattern, and the usual antidote isn't willpower, it's deliberately building other identities and sources of self worth alongside the physical one, before you need them.

So then I began my own journey to become "physically free." Meaning I wanted to be able to do the things I wanted to do, be well, and be able to turn my hand to almost anything at short notice. In other words, a generalist. I kept lifting, added some gymnastics, some capoeira, dance, circuit training, trail running and anything else that excited me.

Here's a funny video of me at the peak of my "primal flow" embodiment. I felt good. I felt able across most physical domains, fit, stable and strong. My logic was, I'm good at lots of things, not terrible at much, and not great at anything. For general health and wellbeing I still think this is close to the right approach. I describe it as ‘having a well rounded movement diet’.

If you have specific competitive goals though, this generalist approach isn't really possible. There is a genuine tradeoff, and you have to accept that. Worth noting though, the science here has actually softened over the years. The original alarm bells around mixing strength and endurance training in one programme came from Hickson's 1980 work, which found meaningfully smaller strength gains when the two were combined. A later meta analysis broadly confirmed that pattern across studies. But the more recent picture is more forgiving than that early work suggested. The interference effect seems to depend heavily on how the training is structured, showing up mostly when endurance and resistance work are crammed into the same session, done at high frequency, or sequenced badly, rather than being an unavoidable tax on anyone who trains more than one quality. So being a generalist will still cost you some ceiling in any single quality, but it's a smaller, more manageable cost than we used to think, provided the week is built sensibly.

Last year with my triple challenge I learned that lesson again. Three completely contrasting events over six months (powerlifting Jujitsu fight and trail marathon. I did all three, decently, not amazing but decently, and there were plenty of niggles, identity challenges and frustrating moments along the way.

Which brings me to the part I actually want to dig into properly. Function.

Megan's line, "the one rep maxes really aren't the point, being able to get up off the floor when I'm old is," is basically a perfect summary of the difference between performance training and functional training, and the research backs her up more than you might expect.

Functional training has been used as a marketing term, often showing someone balancing on a swiss ball pulling on a band with one hand and pressing a kettlebell above their head with the other. In what world is that functional?! The world where you are a circus performer riding a unicycle across a tightrope, one arm hauling a rope to raise the big top banner before the ringmaster loses his patience, the other arm holding a flaming torch aloft so the crowd does not riot, while a rogue clown on a unicycle of his own tries to cut in front of you for the finale.

Functional, for me its highly individual, with some normal human requirements built in. It's training that specifically targets the movement patterns you actually need for daily life or work, rather than training a lift in isolation and hoping it transfers across (Fleck & Kraemer's definition is the one most researchers use here). The evidence base is mostly built on older adults so far, so I'll hedge appropriately, but the principle holds up well. Traditional resistance training makes you stronger, but that strength doesn't automatically transfer into being better at getting off the floor, climbing stairs or carrying groceries unless the training also rehearses those specific patterns. Recent systematic reviews land on the same conclusion, that strength training and task specific functional training are complementary rather than competing, and the choice between them should come down to what you're actually trying to get better at, not which one sounds more serious.

This is exactly what Megan bumped into. She has plenty of strength in the bank. What she'd lost was the practised, automatic pattern of getting up and down off the floor, and no amount of adding kilos to a deadlift bar was going to hand that back on its own. She needed to actually rehearse the pattern, ideally in a way that kept her nervous system paying attention, which is where the single leg work, the banded chaos variations and the pallof press earn their keep. Novel, slightly unstable, attention demanding movement isn't just more fun than a straight barbell lift. It's doing real work on coordination and confidence that a fixed bar path under load doesn't touch.

Which gets me to the bit I think matters most for you, reading this. How do you work out what your own function actually needs?

A few questions worth sitting with.

What do I actually need my body to do? Not what do I want to lift, but what tasks, in real life, do I need to be capable of. Getting off the floor. Carrying a toddler and a bag at the same time. Reaching overhead into a cupboard. Be specific rather than general here.

What do I quietly avoid? We're very good at routing around the things that feel unstable or scary without noticing we're doing it. If you haven't sat cross legged on the floor in a year, or you always ask someone else to grab the thing off the top shelf, that avoidance is information, not just a preference.

Where does confidence, not just strength, feel low? You can be strong enough on paper and still not trust your body in a given position. That gap between what you're capable of and what you believe you're capable of is worth training directly, and it won't close just by getting stronger in the gym.

Once you've got an honest answer, the fix is usually simpler than people expect. Practise the actual pattern, regularly, in a low stakes way, and let success build on success. This lines up with one of the more robust findings in behaviour change research, that mastery experiences, actually succeeding at a task yourself, are the single strongest driver of confidence in your own capability, ahead of watching someone else do it or being told you can (Bandura's self efficacy work is still the reference point here, decades on). You don't rebuild trust in your body by thinking about it. You rebuild it by giving your body small, winnable tasks and letting it prove to you, repeatedly, that it can.

That's the actual science behind Megan's chaos variations. Not just fun for fun's sake, though there's nothing wrong with that either, but a legitimate way to hand your nervous system a string of small wins it can bank.

Cool, so how do I actually make this work, when I’m told there are so many things I need to be doing?!

Everything above is about what's ideal in a vacuum. In reality you're choosing between modes of training against a fixed budget of hours, energy and money, so the honest question isn't "what's optimal" but "what's sustainable." That includes weighing consistency against variation. The research on this is fairly consistent: early training consistency is one of the strongest predictors of who's still training six months later, more than what exact programme they started with. But enjoyment matters too, and not as an afterthought. Studies on exercise adherence find that people who find their training enjoyable and rewarding are more likely to stick with it long term, largely because enjoyment feeds the same intrinsic motivation that keeps you showing up when life gets busy (Frontiers, 2022; PMC, 2026). So variation isn't just there to chase chaos for its own sake, some of it is what keeps you coming back at all.

Which is really the point. None of this is about picking the single most correct method and grinding it out. It's about being consistent enough to actually build something, varied enough to keep your nervous system and your interest engaged, and honest enough with yourself to notice when you're avoiding a pattern rather than genuinely not needing it. Get that balance roughly right and the one rep maxes will still be there if you want them. They just won't be the point.