5 Simple Strategies to Elevate Your Movement Practice
Key Takeaways
Your body is built to move in patterns — and training those patterns with intention builds strength that actually translates to real life. By combining foundational movements, diverse planes of motion, and an understanding of how your body manages energy, you can train smarter, not harder.
Movement patterns like pushing, pulling, lunging, and walking mimic how we live, so include them all in your workouts.
Move in all directions; life doesn’t happen in a straight line; neither should your training.
Lifting well helps you sit, stand, carry, and recover with ease — it’s just practice for being human.
Foundations of Movement Patterns
There are somewhere between 5 and 7 fundamental movement patterns: gait, push, pull, anti/rotation, hip dominant, knee dominant, and lunge. An argument can be made that the latter three are really just variations of push or pull movements- a conversation for a different day. Our muscles and bones (and transitional tissues in between) are a series of pulleys and levers to make movement happen.
A full-body, valuable workout protocol incorporates all of these in some way. Some of them pair more nicely than others- for instance, a pull movement in the upper body pairs nicely with a pull movement in the lower body. That said, checking off the boxes is a level-one, solid start for any movement practice.
Planes of Motion
We move through 3 dimensions (though some of us might dive a bit deeper into the fourth): frontal, saggital, and transverse. The frontal plane is side-to-side movements, the saggital plane is front-and-back movements, and transverse is a lil bit of both*. Most all of us live most all of our time in the saggital plane. Loading weights, for sure, is most often moved through that plane of motion.
Incorporating the other two, especially integrating frontal plane movement, contributes to healthy, multidimensional joints. The transverse plane is an eventual byproduct of moving the full body, in a balanced way, through gravity’s constant pull.
*the transverse can be said to embody step one of an eventual thrust into the fourth dimension.
Practical Applications
We lift weights and stay strong so that we can perform best in our day-to-day life. I’ll say it over and over: movement, nutrition, and mindset are all just skills to be practiced. We continually arrive at deeper levels of nuance as we become more embodied and aware of our experiences. In life we sit and stand (knee dominant), we pick things up off the floor (hip dominant), we push a shopping cart, we pull a door open, we walk with a sleeping baby dangling off of us. All of these things are replicated in the gym setting, with the addition of load, in order to train and maintain the strength necessary to live with less injury.
Keep it simple! Over and Over, do the thing that looks like the things that you’re already doing and you’re likely to find that you end up doing the things in a way that feels a bit better every time.
