I often look back at the curriculum and text books in which I studied from when I was in college studying Human Performance and Sport.  At that time Functional Fitness was fairly new and wasn’t really known about.  When I was first introduced to Functional Fitness I was blown away and very skeptical; Functional Fitness contradicted a lot of the methods we were taught in my degree program.  As I read the journal articles posted on Functional Fitness.com, I realized that the workouts had a great deal of physiological and scientific evidence backing it.  I bring this up because Professors and Scientist at Pepperdine University, have been studying the benefits and metabolic results of performing Functional Fitness workouts and how they can help lead to disease prevention and treatment.  Athletes from Team USA who competed in last months Functional Fitness Invitational presented by Reebok, were put through several metabolic tests to see who the human body responses to given Functional Fitness WODs.  In this video Julie Foucher performs “Fran” and researchers analyze the results.  The last part of the video is very interesting as one of the professors explains Julies metabolic reaction to the WOD, furthermore he goes on to explain why INTENSITY is the vital ingredient in order for athletes to receive the greatest amount of benefit from their workout.