These past few months with gyms being shut I have had many online consultations to help people create training programs in their own home. Most of the time these programs are designed with the intention of restoring function to a faulty movement, or correcting muscle imbalances causing chronic pain. To achieve this I had to teach them how to stabilise more efficiently using a handful of exercises that have a strong focus on movement. Within just a few weeks most of these people were feeling much better and beginning to look to do more which was great. However, there was one question that continually came up during the review consultation which was, “Do I need more exercises as I don't think my other muscles are doing anything?” The simple answer to that question is no. While I have seen a big shift in the last 10 years towards functional training methods, there is still a lack of understanding as to how much these integrated movements do. And more specifically how many muscles are used when you complete these complex movement patterns. In this article I will explain why you DO NOT need an exercise for each muscle group, and why it is more important to design your program around improving movement patterns instead of strengthening individual muscles.

My first memory of gyms and strength training as a young kid in the 1980’s were, that it was a place to pack on as much muscle as possible, and only for the "big boys" . The girls would do aerobics and only the big boys were allowed into the free weights area. Skinny athletic guys like me did not need the gym, and would focus more on fitness activities like running and outdoor sports.

Fast forward to 2005 when I began my career as a trainer and things had developed a lot more from those early days, but the philosophies of body building techniques with program design were still heavily taught. Programs were usually split into different days for muscle groups such as, “chest and triceps”, “back and biceps”, “legs day”, and core work. There was endless numbers of machines designed to cater for the array of exercises needed to fill up these workouts.

I did this training for a while as that was all I knew and I remember thinking this takes forever as there is so many exercises to do.

This type of training allowed people to develop stronger prime mover muscle groups such as pectorals, quadriceps, deltoids, biceps, and the “six-pack” abdominal muscles everyone was after. Training was all about how you looked, and not how you moved or how you felt. I worked with many people who trained this way and looked good from the outside but were suffering with all types of pain and injury. Their efforts to have an exercise for every body part only served to make them more and more dysfunctional, eventually creating a multitude of muscle imbalances and weakness to stabilizer muscles needed to protect joints from damage.

Focus On Movement Instead of Muscle

Early on in my career I began to question this type of training as I regularly came across people who were regularly injured and not suited to the demands of training in this fashion. I was one of those people where this type of training did not suit my body, or my goals at the time, very well at all. I was often sore and injured from the training methods that were beating up my joints and muscles. I began my research into better ways to train and found that there were many people already out there preaching a completely different perspective to strength training. One that prioritised movement over muscle.

Early influences for me were Paul Chek, Stuart McGill, Peter Twist, and Lee Taft and later on Gray Cook, Mike Boyle, Eric Cressey, and Evan Osar.

In my article from a few years movement not muscle I described how the movement based philosophy of strength training was in fact very old, and something developed as far back as the 1950’s. There was a team of scientific researchers (Kabat, Knott and Voss) hired by the US government to find a way to strengthen people suffering from extreme muscle loss as a result of the polio disease. They found that the isolated muscle approach could quickly add muscle, but did very little to improve movement function and strength in daily life. They scrapped all of the exercises and methods based upon the origin and insertion anatomy model and started over. This was the beginning of the functional movement model and where the evolution of PNF was discovered.

Unfortunately all of this great information was lost to the general fitness community for many years and used only in physical therapy. Now you see these PNF methods used in gyms and in particular sporting clubs all over the world, for it is proven to improve movement efficiency and athletic performance. And what happened to all of the methods the researchers found to be ineffective at improving strength? These were picked up by the bodybuilding community led to the invention of machine training and the methods we saw prominent in the 80’s and 90’s.

How does the movement approach work? While it seems quite complex to explain it is really quite simple when you break it down. Instead of looking at muscles, you focus on the fundamental movement patterns which are.

Fundamental Movement Patterns

Very simply you design a program that includes the following movements.

1. Squat
2. Bend
3. Lunge
4. Twist
5. Push
6. Pull
7. Gait

Each one of these movements is like a base motor program for every movement we can make as a human. By improving movement quality and strength across these patterns you improve the strength of every muscle in the body.

You will find a detailed explanation of each of these movements along with exercise instructions in the free report below.

Surely this is not enough to Build Serious Strength?

Most experienced gym enthusiasts will tell you that doing only a handful of exercises is not enough to build muscle and make you stronger. To some degree they may be right, as you will need more than a handful of exercises to continually challenge the body with different angles, positions, equipment, and speeds of movement. However, you will not need a 5 day split workout that has an exercise for every muscle.

For starters who has that much time to workout like that? And secondly you do not need to if you are doing exercises like squats, lunges, chin-ups and deadlifts for you are already working many of the smaller muscles multiple times with these "big" integrated movements. If you spend time completing mainly integrated exercises, which is what you should be doing anyway if you want to move well in life, there is no need to use exercises to target small muscles as you have just exhausted them.

To give you a good visual explanation of what I mean, let’s take a look at two integrated exercises to see just how many muscles are being used.

Below is a picture of the chin-up and the squat. Take a look at how many muscles are being used in these exercises. I have highlighted in yellow the main prime movers of each exercise, which are the main muscles that will be fatigued. What is often missed is the other muscles that are also activating on a lesser scale to support the joints and the movement. I actually simplified these pictures too as I would not have enough room to list all of the muscle names involved such as the abdominal muscles and small shoulder stabilisers. 

The amount of muscles involved in the squat is incredible! This is the same for lunges, deadlifts, and all the single leg exercises commonly used. This also explains why your heart rate increases rapidly and you get all sweaty and puffed when doing leg exercises as there is so many muscles on the go. The heart has to pump huge volumes of blood to these working muscles and leaves you drained and exhausted.

If I was to perform 4-5 sets of each of these two exercises I would be working all of these muscles listed to their limit within this pattern.

For the chin-up exercise this is equivalent to doing the following;

• 4-5 sets of bicep curls
• 4-5 sets of abdominal training
• 4-5 sets of upper back strengthening
• 4-5 sets of rotator cuff strengthening
• 4-5 sets of forearm grip strengthening

The more efficient I become at the movement, the stronger I become. All of the muscles within this pattern are now improved, but even better than that is the fact I also change any motor program that shares the same relative timing and positioning. In other words any movement that looks similar to a chin up is now improved. To make sure I get an even distribution of strength across all of the prime mover muscles I need to include at least one exercise from each movement pattern. The quads will be the main focus in the squat, but the posterior muscles will be the focus in the deadlift. All of the muscles will work in both patterns, just the primary area will change depending on the movement.

I often aim for 20-25 sets of exercises for each workout. This is usually enough volume to create overload within the muscles and nervous system without compromising technique.

Timing & Stability

The danger of performing isolation exercises all the time is, they ruin the timing and sequence of muscles needed to create stability of our joints when we move. For example in the pictures above it is clear to see how many muscles are involved in performing the movement. What is not clear and more difficult to understand, is the role of several other muscles working further from the moving limbs that are working to provide stability.

When you appreciate that almost every case of injury is related to poor stability of joints you can see how detrimental the isolated strength philosophy is. Often a single muscle is blamed for creating injury when in reality it was several muscles.

The strength of these muscles is not of importance, the timing is!

For example the muscle interaction during the act of walking every muscle from the trunk down has one function the minute your foot hits the ground. All the muscles of the lower limb (glutes, quads, hamstrings etc) act together to stop the ankle, knee, and hip from bending to prevent you falling to the ground. All the muscles have the same function which is to apply the brakes and slow you down - (reference Movement by Gray Cook).

This goes right against the concept of the origin and insertion understanding of movement. But when you really think about it you will see it will make perfect sense. During the landing phase of running the quads are contracting eccentrically to prevent the knee from flexing while the hamstrings are contracting to prevent both the knee and the hip from flexing. We have not even spoken about the role of the muscles in the foot and ankle as they are also contracting at various stages to decelerate, lock, and unlock the multiple joints in the foot to provide motion.

There is a sequence of events where all muscles work eccentrically to slow a movement down, and then within a millisecond contract to create a movement. 

The Brain is The Key to Strength

The traditional resistance training model focuses on isolating the muscle within a safe and simple movement pattern in order to fatigue the working muscle as much as possible. In this situation, neuromuscular activation (brain), is actually minimised. Simple isolation movements do not challenge and overload the nervous system, rather it is “dumbed down”. The consequence is low skill integration.

Movements are predictable and the objective is to perform the same movement at the same speed with the same technique every time. Movement performance is sacrificed for hypertrophy and muscle definition which is a potential disaster for any sporting athlete but also for the average person looking to improve fitness.

Have you ever wondered why beginners can improve their strength really quickly once they learn the correct technique? It was not their muscles that changed, it was the neuromuscular system that improved.

When people are not sure of the technique they slow things down so their brain can make sense of everything. There is just too much information to process, and they cannot move unless they look at it piece by piece. And while it helps them to see things more easily and prevents them from falling over, the slow timing they have adopted quickly ruins their strength. Moving too slow is very inefficient and forces muscles to work out of their normal role forcing load upon a muscle that is not designed to handle it. This is where muscle imbalances and injuries are often created.

This also explains how a person who can move 400kg on a leg press may be very weak with a squat. (see the article squat vs leg press). The neuromuscular requirement of the leg press is minimal and stability is created by the machine. The strength of the muscles is not of any use in the squat where timing and stability of joints from the big toe right up to the head and neck is essential. If any of these joints is compromised the strength is dramatically reduced.

Examples of Great Brain Exercises

Some of the best exercises for improving neuromuscular strength are contralateral sling movements. These slings connect our upper body to our legs via diagonal fascial tissue. This is why our right arm moves forward in combination with our left hip, and why we plant our left foot forward when we throw a ball with our right hand.

When you move you move your right side and left side simultaneously in complex movements like this both sides of the brain are highly responsive. During a single cable push exercise almost every muscle in the body is being turned on to either accelerate or stabilize the body.

Below is a great video to watch with these in action

Other great exercises include exercises like the Turkish Get-Up and the Toe Touch Drill. Both of these require a high degree of stability and concentration from the nervous system to complete correctly. There is so many things that can go wrong with both of these exercises that they force your brain to figure it out. 

These exercises require your body to move in all three planes and demand stability from almost every joint in your body. The brain has to stay in control of all these things in order for you to control the movement and just a handful or reps is all you will need to make significant progress with these exercises. The strength gains will be driven mainly from the neural improvement in the beginning and later on with the muscles once you have mastered the technique.

Functional Training Exercises Helps to Prevent Alzheimer’s & Dementia

One last thing to consider for adopting a movement approach over a muscle approach is the value these exercises have to the health of your brain. The more complex a movement the more your brain has to keep working at its full capacity which is a great way to prevent the onset of disease like Alzheimer’s and dementia. The neural involvement needed with a leg press or a bicep curl is minimal, whereas the brain demands during a single leg deadlift with a single arm row is immense.

Many people are aware of the need to keep our minds engaged as we age to prevent this decay but it is not common knowledge that we can use exercises like the slings, Turkish get ups and single leg drills to do this. As much as these change muscles and how you move, they play a huge part in maintaining the health of your brain.

Do You Need More Ideas?

I know that we have only scratched the surface with exercise ideas and how to really maximise everything we have just covered and you must be thinking I need more ideas on how to do this right. Well to make your life easier a few years ago I created a training resource that listed 101 different workout ideas using the philosophy discussed in this article.

Click here to see more about this and get your PDF report instantly.

Summary

I hope this article has given you more knowledge about creating strength training programs based upon movement, instead of muscles. We must let go the thinking of the past where we needed an exercise for every muscle group and appreciate we can improve our strength much more quickly by using integrated movements. By spending time to improve the efficiency and strength within these movements you will improve the strength of every muscle in your body.

If you enjoyed this article, live in Melbourne and would like to organise a Free Consultation to discuss how we can help you improve your strength and movement fill in the form below and I will be in touch within 24 hours to schedule a time.

About The Author

Nick Jack is owner of No Regrets Personal Training and has over 15 years’ experience as a qualified Personal Trainer, Level 2 Rehabilitation trainer, CHEK practitioner, and Level 2 Sports conditioning Coach. Based in Melbourne Australia he specialises in providing solutions to injury and health problems for people of all ages using the latest methods of assessing movement and corrective exercise.

References:

• Movement - By Gray Cook
• Corrective Exercise Solutions - by Evan Osar
• Athletic Body Balance by Gray Cook
• Diagnosis & Treatment Of Movement Impairment Syndromes - By Shirley Sahrman
• Low Back Disorders - by Stuart McGill
• Back Pain Mechanic - by Stuart McGill
• Anatomy Trains - by Thomas Meyers
• Motor Learning and Performance - By Richard A Schmidt and Timothy D Lee
• Assessment & Treatment Of Muscle Imbalance - By Vladimir Janda
• How To Eat, Move & Be Healthy by Paul Chek
• Scientific Core Conditioning Correspondence Course - By Paul Chek
• Advanced Program Design - By Paul Chek
• Twist Conditioning Sports Strength - By Peter Twist
• Twist Conditioning Sports Movement - By Peter Twist
• Twist Conditioning Sports Balance - By Peter Twist