Kayla Bonkowski has watched enough fitness cycles play out over the last several years to have a clear opinion on what lasts and what doesn’t. The approaches that stick are the ones built around movement that has a purpose. The ones that fade are the ones built around aesthetics, novelty, or the particular kind of motivation that burns hot for a few months and then disappears.
Functional fitness — training the movements your body was built for, under varied conditions, with real load and real intensity — is in the first category. Kayla Bonkowski believes this not because she read it somewhere but because she has trained this way since 2021 and it has continued to make sense in ways that previous approaches did not.
What Functional Fitness Actually Means
The phrase gets used loosely, so it is worth being specific. Functional fitness refers to training patterns that directly support real-world movement — the hinge, the squat, the push, the pull, the carry. These are not arbitrary selections. They are the movements that human bodies have performed throughout history, and training them builds strength and coordination that transfers outside the gym.
CrossFit, which Kayla Bonkowski practices in Macomb, Michigan, is one organized expression of this approach. The programming combines weightlifting, gymnastics, and metabolic conditioning in ways that are constantly varied and rarely predictable. That variation is not accidental — it is designed to build fitness that is broad rather than narrow, useful rather than specialized.
Contrast this with a training approach focused entirely on hypertrophy or aesthetics. That approach can produce a body that looks strong. Functional training produces a body that is strong, in the full-range, transferable, works-under-fatigue sense of the word. Those two things are not the same.
Why Other Approaches Fade
Kayla Bonkowski is not dismissive of other fitness approaches. She has tried several. What she has noticed is a pattern in how they tend to end: the novelty wears off, the initial progress stalls, the motivation that was driving the practice runs out, and the practice stops.
Functional fitness, done in a community setting, resists this pattern for a few reasons. First, the variation means the novelty does not run out — there is always something new, always a skill to develop, always a way to measure progress that is not just body weight or a single lift number. Second, the community creates accountability that persists beyond motivation. Third, the training is hard in the way that produces real adaptation, which means the results continue to come over time rather than plateauing after a few months.
Kayla Bonkowski has been doing this for years now and still finds things to work on and improve. That is not something she could say about a program built around a fixed set of machine exercises or a specific aesthetic goal. Functional fitness has a ceiling she has not found yet.
The Age Argument
One of the strongest arguments for functional fitness is what it does over decades rather than months. Approaches built around heavy isolation work, extreme caloric restriction, or aesthetic outcomes tend to be hard to sustain as the body ages. They require a specific kind of motivation and a specific kind of recovery capacity that does not always hold up into middle age and beyond.
Functional training, scaled appropriately, is something you can do at any age. The movements are the same whether you are 25 or 55 — the load and intensity change, but the patterns stay. That is by design. You are training the way you want to continue moving, not chasing a result you will have to abandon when the approach becomes unsustainable.
Kayla Bonkowski thinks about this regularly. She is training now in a way she can see herself continuing for a very long time, with modifications as needed and goals that evolve but with the same underlying approach. That kind of long-term coherence is rare in fitness, and it is one of the things that keeps her coming back.