No book has impacted my physical being as much as Adam Sinicki’s, Functional Training and Beyond: Building the Ultimate Superfunctional Body and Mind. Adam Sinicki is a nearly-famous YouTuber, that goes by the name of ‘The Bioneer‘. I discovered The Bioneer on YouTube while looking for training options for medicine balls.
I arrived looking for creative types of medicine ball training, but what I found was an incredible understanding of muscle, mobility, nerves, brain-function, and how all these things work together. The Bioneer’s unique value proposition was a revolutionary idea for me: if you can performance train for specific sports, then you can performance train for your work or lifestyle. As someone who was never really athletic, the decoupling of performance training from sports training was mind-blowing for me.
I also have a logic-driven, computer programmer’s brain so this approach was one I could get easily get behind. Through Sinicki’s work, I finally had a framework for understanding physical health. From 2010 to 2019, I used hiking as the primary means of exercise. After I moved north to the mountains, I started a farm. It used to be long hours in the office with one or two big hikes a week to offset it. Now it’s long hours in the office with a short dose of manual farm labor each day. The combination changed my core physical being. With the farm work, I quickly became the strongest version of myself ever, but I was sore and broken all the time, even after recovery days.
After watching The Bioneer’s videos, I begun to understand muscle mechanics and how mobility is connected to strength and performance. I bought a copy of Sinicki’s Functional Training and Beyond because I wanted the farm work to stop hurting. The book was eye-opening. I now understand small muscle fibers vs large muscle fibers and the importance of working your muscle groups in the different planes of motion. I understand how speed, power, and endurance effect your performance and produce different results. I’ve begun to understand how brain function is related to muscle performance too.
All these concepts are illustrated beautifully in the book. It’s not just a one-off read either, it’s definitely one you are going to be referencing for a long time. While I have lot more sweating to do before I become a performance-tuned desk jockey or a performance-tuned farmer, I take great comfort knowing I have the answers I need to succeed.
After getting the book, and adopting functional training, I saw an immediate increase in work performance after just one month of training! The problem is that it didn’t yet solve the aches and pains I had from farming. It nearly doubled my work capacity meaning I could lift more and had more force, but I’m still in the same pain boat. It could be just a matter of knowing when to quit when you are ahead. Maybe The Bioneer will cover that in his next book.