5 Functional Movement Patterns
Even if your fitness goals strictly revolve around losing weight, strength training should be an essential piece to your routine. Everyone knows that resistance training grows your muscles and increases functionality, but outside of that, strength sessions will put your body into a more positive metabolic state, which will increase the amount of calories you’ll burn at rest. This combined with the increase in ability to perform daily actions, makes strength training a must for anyone with aspirations to lose weight. Recommendations on what specifically to do in the gym can vary depending on who you’re talking to, but anyone with a brain and any type of fitness background will recommend these five movement patterns as your starting point. Without further ado, here they are.
Squat
Arguably the most important of them all, being able to squat effectively demonstrates core stability, as well as symmetry in the hips and shoulders. The muscles trained here are essential for walking, climbing stairs, bending over, and many other everyday activities.
Primary Muscles Used: glutes, hamstrings, quads, adductors, hip flexors, calves
Exercise Examples: barbell back squat, front squat, dumbbell goblet squat, bulgarian split squat, lateral squats, plyometric squats
2. Push
The push movement pattern is like the squat for your upper body, in the sense that its very indicative of your supportive structure. Strong pushing ability is crucial for lifting objects overhead, moving them out of the way, and bunch of other things that you probably don’t need me to explain. A lot of people (especially men) find push exercises very fun, so this one is a little easier to remember to hit.
Primary Muscles Used: chest, shoulders, triceps
Exercise Examples: bench press, overhead press, dips, dumbbell chest fly, skullcrushers, lateral raises, arnold dumbbell press
3. Pull
Pulling motions bring objects toward you, utilizing mostly your back muscles along with a few others as accessories. Strong pulling muscles are often neglected because we usually can’t see them (out of sight, out of mind), so the urge to train them isn’t quite as persistent as the “show muscles” on the front of our body. However, when this movement pattern trained consistently, it works wonders for your upper body stability and overall posture.
Primary Muscles Used: lats, traps, rear delts, biceps
Exercise Examples: pull-ups, bent-over row, t-bar row, bicep curls, dumbbell shrug, seated cable rows, dumbbell pullovers, cable face pull
4. Hinge
Hinge exercises are defined by movements where our spine and pelvis stay neutral, but we bend forward with our hips. Along with the squat, this is one of the most important patterns to train for older individuals, as it reflects very heavily on a person’s ability to perform daily activities, such as picking something up off the ground, or house-cleaning. It can be a little intimidating to begin implementing hinge movements because of the common association with back pain, but in reality that’s only ever caused by poor form. If you keep your spine straight and get used to driving your hips forward properly, then you won’t have any issues.
Primary Muscles Used: hamstrings, glutes, erector spinae
Exercise Examples: deadlift, romanian deadlift, stiff-legged deadlift, hip thrust, goodmorning, kettbell swing
5. Plank
What is often considered to be the most boring core movement, is one of the most paramount in getting started with weight training. The plank works your stability from head-to-toe, and can be easily scaled to add or decrease strain depending on your fitness level. Especially as we get older, it’s important to be able to support our own body weight safely, as well as get on and off the ground without too much difficulty. Plank exercises are great for improving both of those skills, and should always be present somewhere in your routine.
Primary Muscles Used: core (abdominals + obliques), shoulders, lats, forearms
Exercise Examples: static forearm plank, high plank, side plank (effective for oblique focus), plank jacks, walking plank, plank shoulder taps, rocking plank
