Juan Carlos "JC" Santana

I received this book as an Library Thing Early Reviewer.

This book will be an excellent addition to my library of training books. I am not aq physical trainer, nor do I play one on television. I am, however, a volleyball coach, and as such I am quite keen on training my athletes effectively and efficiently for our sport. I am a great believer in training our sport but I do realize that there are certain aspects of sports performance which necessitates training that are not directly sport related.

I have searched around a bit for books on functional training specifically for volleyball. There are a few but none that are up to date. This book has some fo the most up to date information and training methods and philosophy.

It is sectioned so that the trainers can read through the first few chapters to get an idea as to what the author's philosophy is and then it breaks down into exercises that the programs will be using for each sport. The book then finally breaks out into the individual sports, talk briefly about the requirements of the sport and then provide a simple blueprint for coaches to use as a guide in designing their own practices.

I found the book useful and quite easy to use. It is a great first step towards building a sensible sport specific training program.… (plus d'informations)

I was very happy to receive this book as part of the library thing early reviewers program. Some training books give tons of exercises, but do not provide enough information on putting them in a program. This book does a great job of putting a good number of exercises into usable programs. I suffered an unrelated accident while doing home handyman work that lessened the injury because of some of the work I did with this book, so I even doing some of the work did payoff. My final comment is this has good pictures, and good sport specific items, so this should be very useful to most people.… (plus d'informations)

I received this book, for free, in exchange for an honest review.

This book is an above average training book. It wasn't as excellent as the last book I read from Human Kinetics (Bodybuilding Anatomy). These statements don't sound like particularly high praise but considering the sea of so so training books out there it is an accomplishment.

The book starts off with a series of exercises you can use to evaluate your weaknesses (major plus!).
It then moves into bodyweight exercises. From there dumbbells/kettlebells are covered.
Next up is medicine balls and then nautilus type machines. I am missing some of the exercise types that were less useful to me (balance balls off the top of my head), but this gives an idea of the expansive breadth of this book.

Each kind of exercise generally focuses on the same type of movements (which seems reasonable for a functional training book).There are usually 2-3 pictures per movement and the descriptive text is better than normal. Personally I would've liked more pictures (preferably anatomical)/detail in the exercises. This oversight seems to put the book's audience more towards trainers and away from trainees. I personally read training books to learn how to train better and although this book had more detail than most it didn't have enough for me.

The book concludes with general programs and sport specific programs.

This book focuses on the meat (exercises and programs). It doesn't talk about nutrition/supplements and other condiments that other similar books often throw in. I am not missing this content as other books usually do readers a disservice with their uninformed/unfocused coverage.… (plus d'informations)

As I understand it, the term "Functional Training" is an exercise philosophy that simplifies the more traditional model. The large-scale gym with its endless supply of expensive, fancy machines is replaced by a smaller space that houses only a handful of multi-use items such as dumbbells and medicine balls. Or the gym is portable, like in a duffle bag, and can be set up almost anywhere. Also, the author notes, functional training is about movement, not equipment.

There's a lengthy and informative series of several chapters before you get to the nuts and bolts of the specific exercises. This is good thing. Similar to warming up before a workout, it's important to understand the why's of doing a particular exercise before actually attempting it.

I've been wanting to reform my old, stale workout plan for a while now. I intend to use Functional Training as my guide to accomplish this.… (plus d'informations)