The Five Foundational Movements
I like to keep five foundational movements at the forefront of any training program. These movement patterns assist you in your day-to-day life — from job tasks to home chores.
When you master the following movement patterns, you reduce the risk of musculoskeletal injury, increasing your quality of our life significantly. The goal is to keep you safe and functional as you navigate life’s daily demands.
Let’s take a look at each action.
Bend-and-Lift These moves are squats and lunges. When you bend down to pick something up, your form matters, especially when you repeat the action over and over again.
I include a lot of bend-and-lifts in our workouts, through various planes of motion — including side lunges or curtsy lunges to challenge your balance and work different muscles at several angles. Improving your squat and lunge habits will also reduce the chance of lower back pain.
Push moves include exercises like:
Push-ups
Chest presses
Shoulder presses
Real-world examples include moving something heavy, opening hefty doors, and catching yourself before you fall.
These exercises strengthen your front body, making it easier to complete physical tasks and prevent injuries.
Pull moves are the direct opposite of push movements; they generally strengthen your back body. These exercises include:
Rows
Pull-downs
Rear flys
Pull-ups
Pull moves are crucial to include in workouts because we spend so much time with our shoulders rounding forward (working at a computer, texting, etc). If the rounding isn’t balanced out, you can develop pain between your shoulder blades, neck pain, pain at the base of your skull, headaches, and even temporomandibular joint disorders (TMJD).
Thankfully, pull moves help strengthen your back muscles to even out the imbalances. It becomes easier to pull your shoulders back, hold your head up straight, and open up the areas that cause tension.
We use rotational movements every day in activities like:
Turning to hand someone something
Twisting to put dishes up on a high shelf
Playing golf or tennis
Rotational exercises mimic these movements. They include wood chops and twists where you’re rotating through your spine.
These moves are crucial because most of a spinal twist should come from the thoracic (middle) spine rather than the lumbar (low) spine. If you don’t have the proper mobility in the thoracic spine, you’ll compensate with your lumbar spine — leading to low back pain, pinched nerves, and disc pain and syndromes.
As you’d probably guess, single-leg movements help with balance! Balance training strengthens the muscles that hold you upright, prevents falls, and improves stability.
When writing workouts, I’ll include lots of single-side strengthening to note the differences between your right and left sides. From there, I’ll know what imbalances we need to address and focus on more. These moves are also an excellent way to make an exercise more challenging.
