The 7 Basic Human Movements

Pull:

• Focuses on the back of the upper body.
• Any of the row variations or pull-ups fall into the pull category.
• A pulling motion is the opposite of a pushing motion because you are pulling a weight towards your body, or pulling your center of mass toward an object, like in a pull up. The pulling motion takes place in daily life when you are pulling that cord to start the lawnmower, pulling dishes down from the cupboard or pulling dead branches out of a tree.
• There are two primary pulling movements, a vertical pull and horizontal pull. An example of a vertical pull is a pull up. When performing this exercise you develop strength in your back, shoulders, biceps, and even core. An example of a horizontal pulling motion is a single arm dumbbell row which will strengthen biceps, upper back, and shoulders.

Hinge/Bend:

• Bending is a movement pattern where you bend your torso by hinging your hips. This is also a very common movement that we use daily without even thinking about it.
• People often injure themselves doing simple things like bending over to pick up a bag of groceries, their child or boxes off the ground, because they aren’t bending over properly or they haven’t trained their bodies to use their bending muscles correctly. This is important because bending over properly can save you a lot of lower back pain in your life.
• Deadlifts, swings, cleans, and snatches are all hinges.  The main muscles being used are hamstrings, glutes, and lower back.
• A classic deadlift movement is one of the most functional of daily movements. Think of how many times we are picking up an object from the floor.
• Bearing the majority of the weight on your hips, glutes, and legs is the key to lifting weight in a bent over position. This is done by keeping your low back in a neutral, to slightly arched position, as you bend over to lift an object off the ground. If you round your back, significant pressure can be put on your intervertabral discs, which may cause a disc herniation.

Squat:

• It is so important to squat properly! We squat to perform many daily activities like getting in and out of chairs or picking things up off the ground. This is probably the most important movement to master because we use it so often to function in our daily lives.
• Squats build leg strength especially in the quadraceps. They also give you healthy hips and knees so you can easily pick things up.
• A squat is a movement pattern where you plant both feet on the ground, then bend your legs to lower your body down while keeping your chest up and lower back straight. We use squats in our daily life such as squatting in and out of a chair.
• You can provide resistance to a squat from the front of your body by holding a kettlebell with both hands in front of you, dumbbells in either hand next to your sides or wearing a weighted vest.. With each of these methods the lower back and abs must contract to keep the body upright as the body is lowered down. The most common reason why people have trouble squatting is because of tight hip flexors, hamstrings, or calves.

Gait:

• Walking, jogging, or sprinting is called a gait, which requires pulling, lunging, and twisting motions to propel the body forward. Whether you are walking your dog or sprinting to catch the bus, gait is the most frequently used of all the movement patterns in our daily lives.
• You should always engage your core muscles while walking and remember to keep a good posture.

Lunge:

• The lunge is an important movement pattern that has good transfer into walking, stair climbing, and picking up things from the floor.
• A lunge is single leg exercise movement that requires one leg to step forward and bend while the other leg remains stationary. Lunges will make your quads and hip flexors sore from the long range of motion and will require more core strength to stand up out of than the squat or deadlift.
• It is vital to your performance to know how to do lunges correctly if you play sports. Every sport uses some form of lunge whether you are into martial arts, tennis, volleyball, soccer, football. Etc.
• To add resistance, you can hold a medicine ball, dumbbells, kettlebell or even a sandbag on one shoulder to help engage the core to a greater degree.

Rotate/Twist:

• This is your ability to twist in your core, from your pelvis to your rib cage. Every step you take has rotation in the thoracic spine, as a matter of injury prevention. Not only will it keep your core strong and mobile, it will also tone up those midsection muscles!
• If you think about lunging down and reaching across your body, or throwing a ball, running, or even walking, most human movement has some element of a rotation involved. The problem, however, is that most exercises we do in the gym have no rotational component.
• There are two primary types of twisting movements rotational and anti-rotational. Rotational movements are the basic twisting exercises, such as twisting to throw a ball. Anti-rotation are exercises where you hold still while something or someone is trying to get you to twist out of alignment. Such as a dumbbell row.