Exercise

FUNCTIONAL TRAINING vs BODYBUILDING

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Unfortunately the sport of bodybuilding was driven from it roots of healthy living and the pursuit of a powerful athletic physique, to an obsessive, steroid ridden multi-billion-dollar industry, driven by equipment manufacturers and supplement peddlers. That said, there are natural bodybuilding organizations who claim to test their members on a regular basis.
Bodybuilding has a vastly different training methodology to related strength orientated sports (such as Olympic Weight-Lifting, Power-Lifting and Strongman Competitions) and indeed functional resistance training (both for health or sports conditioning).
Bodybuilding focuses on isolating muscles through using stationary benches and machines. This sort of equipment generally only allows for movement in one plane and often not in the joint's full range of motion. This isolation allows a hypertrophic set of an exercise to place maximum stress on the muscle tissue. this results in the micro tears, forcing the body to adapt by laying down additional muscle sarcomeres.
Functional training is used by sportsmen and those seeking a healthy form of resistance exercising. The idea is to train with resistance in patterns of movement, as opposed to statically focusing stress on a targeted muscle group. It is said to be "functional", as the movement patterns are are used by all humans on a daily basis. We unknowingly splice them together in order to perform more complex movements. The resistance is added and applied in sets similar to those used by bodybuilders, but the movement brings into play a natural sequencing of many if not all of the major muscle through the movement.
Bodybuilding leads to a development of muscle bulk, although the tempo and number of repetitions may be varied to achieve different outcomes. Functional training leads to a natural development of muscle balance amongst opposing muscle groups, and improves the bodies ability to harmonize muscle contraction/relaxation in order to produce exacting movements.
Functional training produces a lean and powerful physique, with an excellent strength to mass ratio. This is sought after by athletes, since their performance is determined by the speed, strength and variation of movement that they're able to produce, without being weighed down by excessive and uncoordinated muscle bulk.
Functional training has for many decades been used by top personal trainers as well as sport strength and conditioning coaches.
Together with paleolithic nutritional principles, functional training forms the basis of the increasingly popular Crossfit training ideology (Crossfit London).