What is a movement pattern?
Is it helpful to subdivided movement? Short answer: maybe sometimes?
The human body moves through space in a multitude of different ways. Biomechanics is the study and analysis of human movement and is the process through which modern exercise was developed: look at how bodies move and create a repeatable version of movement that leads toward predictable outcomes with intentional goals.
That’s a generalized and simplified explanation. Don’t come at me in the comments talking about “um, actually….” or do—comments get me in front of more people, so you’re helping either way.
Back to the point:
There’s a lot of different ways to structure exercise programs and few of them are wrong. How your exercise program is structured depends on what you want to get out of it (I’ve mentioned Intention many times in this newsletter, including here, here, and here), but the point is this: once you know what you want to get out of your exercise program, it becomes a lot easier to figure out what and how to do it.
Most programs default to a bodybuilding style of program: choose a muscle group or part of the body and do exercises for that part. The next day you go to a gym, do a different part, and so on.
It’s funny: when I say the word “bodybuilding” many average exercisers clutch their pearls and go “I don’t want to look like THAT!” but then use the same methods used by bodybuilders.
Two quick things about that:
It takes a lot more than just a body part split program to look like a professional bodybuilder
Most of the information we get regarding exercise is from marketing, and weight loss/body transformation is an absolute behemoth of an industry, and, of course, they use many bodybuilder types (this includes social media influencers, celebrities, and fitness models) to sell their products.
Body part split programs are one way to structure exercise, and the primary way most people first engage with resistance training, but it’s not the only way. There’s a lot of other approaches and maybe we’ll get to them in the future, but today we’re just talking about movement patterns.
Movement patterns are predefined patterns of movement through space, usually based on a generalized position or shape. They’re the basic vocabulary of exercise: shapes, positions, and movements that outline and simulate a fraction the complexity of human movement. They are used to create a simple outline of some possible ways to move.
We can organize exercise-adjacent movement patterns into 4 categories in order to better understand and use them:
Squat
Hinge
Push
Pull
These four patterns are by no means the only ways to move or categorize movement. I’ve found that these are an easy way to introduce people to handling load, building body awareness, and developing strength and adaptability - plus they work well with the equipment available in most gyms.
Exercise choreographed movement—a utilitarian version of dance, in some ways: a set of pre-defined movement patterns executed for specific purposes, and relies primarily on leverage and position to create these desired results.
Here’s a handy chart from my books Paradoxa and Arcane Exercise that names the pattern category, the primary direction it moves the Center of Mass (CoM), and the primary body parts involved in pattern, as well as some basic tips to help you better understand the purpose of each:
Are movement patterns the right way to organize exercise?
No, but they’re another way to do it. The health and fitness industry loves to talk about “right” and “wrong” ways to do things, and I heartily believe that it all depends. Movement patterns are a different way to structure exercise programs and a way to move away from the aesthetic-focused way of exercising—doing more with exercise than just changing the body. There are other ways to do this, and we’ll talk about them more in the future, but movement patterns are accessible to most, relatively simple, and still work within the context of the typical gym.