Basic Human Movement Patterns (and How to Train Them)

Basic human movement patterns foundational to everything we do in the gym and in life. Learn what they are and how to train them.

Introduction

Much of the training advice you’ll encounter online looks a lot like watered down bodybuilding, a focus on how to build a big chest, back, set of shoulders etc.

When you dig into the programmes, that focus becomes even clearer: how to build as much muscle mass as possible in the absence of other considerations.

To be honest, that’s not significantly different to most of what you’ll find in most commercial gyms or even personal training facilities.

My first visit to a gym in 1994 was no different. The instructor taking me through my induction was a bodybuilder, and a very impressive one at that. He set me up with a fairly standard 8-12 rep programme on a series of machines and I set to work.

What neither he nor I grasped was that his bodybuilding goals weren’t applicable to a 5’11”, 63kg runner turned triathlete. I needed strength and strength endurance to stave off injury. His programme was suitable for building muscle mass but ignored my need for range of movement and strength gains without the addition of a lot of extra mass.

It took me years to figure out that he was wrong, why he was wrong and to figure out what would work better.

Isolated Muscles or Movement Patterns

Bodybuilding is as valid a sport as any. The commitment and sacrifice involved to get world-class results is extreme and those results should be admired for what they are: evidence of someone who understands how to give 100% to their sport.

But there is a problem with bodybuilding and it’s this: the pursuit of aesthetic perfection ignores what the body is really designed to do.

The human body is designed to move.

The extreme isolation of individual muscles to force them to grow, actually inhibits the body’s natural way of moving.

A far better approach to weight training is one that emphasises full human movement patterns over isolated muscles.

That’s the approach I take.

Yes, I like muscularity and leanness as much as anyone. The chiselled “Michelangelo’s David” appearance holds as much appeal for me as almost anyone. But I value physical capacity far more.

Basic Human Movement Patterns

Before we discuss some other issues related to human movement, here’s a quick list of those core human movement patterns.

• Hinge
• Squat
• Push
• Pull
• Rotation and Anti-Rotation

I also like to add Ambulation (crawling, walking, and running) as part of the mix because it’s a key part of being human.

Before discussing each of these human movement patterns and how to train them, we need to look at a few issues that affect our ability to use these patterns effectively, as well as a couple of other considerations.

Pre-Requisites for Patterns to Work Properly

Pain Free

Range of Movement

Another requirement for training human movement patterns is adequate range of movement. It stands to reason that you won’t be able to perform a pattern if you can’t attain the start and finish points of the movement or even have a restriction somewhere in the middle.

There’s often an understanding gap when it comes to range of movement and that’s in the difference between flexibility and mobility. I define the two concepts as follows.

• Flexibility is the length that a muscle can attain when you move its origin and insertion points as far apart as possible.

• Mobility is the range of movement you have around a joint under control.

These two things are different.

It’s perfectly possible to have extreme flexibility but very poor mobility. On the other hand, you need a degree of flexibility to attain adequate mobility. Also, excessively flexibility might not be as good a trait as some of the extreme yoga folks would have us believe. 

Being able to stretch a muscle passively a long way beyond our controlled range runs the risk of muscular injury when our nervous system reflexively tries to correct what it views as a dangerous position. 

Alternatively, we risk joint injury when our nervous system can’t prevent a dangerous position because we have no control of the extreme joint position that excess flexibility allows.

The bottom line is that optimum range of movement requires nervous system control, including the development first of a degree of flexibility and then control of the muscle/s in that stretched position.

Core Activation and Stabilisation

Other Considerations

Planes of Movement

Life is lived in three planes of movement; the sagittal, frontal and transverse planes and we move fluently between them and combine them as needed to achieve our goal of efficient movement in a 3D world.

The problem we often encounter in training is that we train in only one plane, usually the frontal plane. This leaves us vulnerable to injury in the real world. In fact, in my work with athletes, I’ve found that they’re very seldom injured during training or competition; they usually get injured in daily life, performing movements that are unfamiliar and not covered by their training.

This has led me to encourage strength training for endurance athletes, not as a way to enhance their sport-specific movements, but to enhance their human-specific movements and thus to avoid injury.

Single-Sided Training

In the same way as we often train only on one plane, most of us train primarily on two legs or using two arms.

The issue here is that much of life - and certainly most sport - occurs on one leg or uses only one arm at a time.

The stabilisation demand of performing patterns on one leg are significantly different and can be far more challenging. Training on two legs all the time is quite clearly not going to cut it for a world lived on one. The same for nice stable two-arm movements.

• Incorporating single leg training into our programming comes at a cost to our egos.The amount of weight you can lift when unstable on one leg or when using one arm (or even a combination of one arm and one leg) is significantly reduced because of the uneven core demands and the balance requirement.

• Most people don’t stabilise well on one leg and are, therefore, likely to move like a wobbly baby giraffe when performing single-sided movements, at least in the beginning.

Poor Positions Versus Good Form

Pretty much everyone will preach about the importance of correct exercise technique and if you ever proudly post a video or worse, photo of what you consider a good lift online, you’ll be inundated with criticisms from the “technique police”.

I’ve seen this with several athletes who are training for specific competitions and who have purposely lifted fairly big weights in compromised positions because they know they’re likely to have to do something similar in the “heat of battle”.

For every pattern, there is the ideal, “safe” way to perform the pattern and a load of potential variations. Take the squat for example; the ideal form (and the one you want to use most of the time when you load it) involves heels flat on the floor, feet wide enough to make space for your hips, knees not collapsing inwards, spine neutral, chest up etc.

But, for some applications, you could make a case for squats on your toes, or with knees in, or feet together, or a less than ideal back position, or… (you get the point).

Don’t write off potential “bad form” versions of an exercise. Instead, whilst doing most of your work with excellent technique, experiment with other options without load. Understand that they’re compromised positions, but that there are some that may have value for your specific situation.

An Approach for Training Human Movement Patterns

The standard way of thinking about training is just to get into the gym, choose exercises that cover each human movement and get lifting. Shortly after starting, the person gets injured.

Why?

Simply have a look at the prerequisites for human movement patterns to work properly, discussed earlier in this article, and you’ll spot some potential issues.

The standard response from many social media experts when you confess to having got injured is, “Your form was poor.”

They’re probably right, but a few pointers on form might not cut it. Instead, it might be that you don’t have the mobility, core activation or stability to allow you to have good form.

With that in mind, here’s the approach I take when training human movement patterns.

1. Test and Improve Mobility

Bottom line: If you haven’t got the necessary mobility for particular human movement patterns, you aren’t going to be able to perform them correctly, no matter how hard you try.

Acquiring mobility permanently is a bit of a slow process, but the good news is that you gain a little bit of mobility for a short period after mobility exercises. This means that incorporating these in your warmup will give you a bit of space to learn and practice better human movement patterns, at least to some degree.

Any time you’re working on mobility, follow the pattern of TEST, INTERVENE, RETEST.

Testing self-evidently tells you where you are now.

Your intervention is where you try to make a change. There is a bit of trick to knowing what interventions you need and it’s difficult at first. But because we all tend to have recurring issues, you’ll very quickly learn what you need to work on (e.g., Internal rotation on my right shoulder is a weakness for me and has been for years, But I also know what to do to make a change).

Your retest is vital because it tells you whether your intervention has worked or not. Most people omit this step. That’s a mistake because you’ll always labour under the illusion you did something useful when you might have achieved nothing. Often, these are the same people who have been stretching their hamstrings for a year and still have tight hamstrings.

[Note: For each pattern, I’ve included a test you can do. The tests are certainly not definitive or “the only test you can do” but they provide you with a starting point.]

2. Fix Stability and Activation Issues

If you lack stability and core activation, again you’re unlikely to be able to perform human movement patterns correctly.

There are lots of exercises that you include in your warmups to “switch on” the muscles you’re trying to target, as well as ways that you can learn to activate your core musculature. I’ve included some of these in the descriptions of each pattern.

A word about whole body tension: when performing any of the human movement patterns under load, the ability to maintain full body tension will (a) protect your lower back and (b) allow you to move more weight. For those interested in being as strong as possible, this is the key difference between people who lift enormous weights and those who are probably as strong, but don’t lift as much.

3. Learn the Terminal Positions

4. Practise the Movements with No Resistance

It might seem like a step backwards to perform movements with no load, but it’s not. Instead, you’re allowing yourself to learn, not just where to start and finish, but how to move smoothly between these positions.

Aim for smooth movement and accurate terminal positions. Perform the movements only for as long as you can do them perfectly. Once you’re tired, you are no longer learning good form. 

An important principle is that what you do last is what your nervous system remembers best; if that’s sloppy, tried form, you will have learned sloppy, tired form.

5. Load the Basic Movement

Now comes the moment you’ve been looking forward to since you decided you were going to do some weight training. You’re going to perform the whole of the basic movement with some external resistance.

It’s no more complicated than the unloaded version, except that you’re now forced to maintain your core tension with a little more focus. Don’t go mad on the weights initially, although you should see good progress fairly quickly.

6. Add More Complex Versions of the Movement Pattern

Once you can perform each of the basic Human Movement Patterns accurately under load, it’s time to add more complex versions of each.

Adding complexity both challenges and reinforces the pattern that you’ve already learned.

Complexity can include things like offset loads, single-leg or single-arm versions, different hand positions etc.

7. Combine Patterns

Human movement patterns do not exist in a vacuum; linking them together smoothly and efficiently is what allows us to navigate the 3D physical world we inhabit.

Probably the easiest way to come up with interlinked patterns is to look at what common activities involve and to mimic these.

Some complex patterns will come easily, others will require a bit of help or tuition. Don’t be afraid to experiment but remember that there is no kudos to be gained from breaking yourself in the process.

Now that we’ve had a look at some of the general considerations for training human movement patterns and a framework for doing so, let’s have a look at the patterns themselves in a bit more detail.

The Hinge Pattern

The hinge pattern could be described as a hip dominant lower body movement pattern.

It’s how you would pick something up off the floor whilst keeping your knees fairly straight and your lower back neutral.

The hinge movement pattern relies heavily on the glute muscles, arguably the strongest muscles in the human body (aside perhaps from the jaw, apparently).

It’s also a pattern in which many people in the western world are severely deficient. Why? 

We spend the majority of out lives sitting, usually in slumped, supported positions that require no core activation and no gluteal activation to maintain. By contrast, standing and walking require a degree of core and glute activation just to remain upright.

Our habitual positions mean that we “forget” how to activate these muscles properly and the pattern becomes compromised.

Mobility

The simplest mobility test for the hinge pattern is to try touching your toes whilst maintaining straight legs. Can you get your hip angle to 90º before you have to give up a neutral spine position (this is the minimum)? Can you get your fingertips on the floor? Palms of your hands on the floor?

Mobility work for most people who struggle with this will revolve around improving hamstring and hip flexor flexibility, the necessary control at the end points of that flexibility.

Core Control and Stability

At its most basic, you need to be able to maintain a neutral spine position throughout the movement.

Finding neutral spine can be done several ways, but I favour the following.

• Stand tall, feet about shoulder width apart.
• Squeeze your glutes hard, while you try to screw your feet into the floor.
• Sniff sharply, focusing on breathing as low into your abdomen as possible (you should feel a strong ab contraction).
• Maintaining the ab contraction, relax your glutes most of the way.

You should now have a strong neutral spine position, forming a pressurised cylinder with your diaphragm and pelvic floor as the ends and your Transversus Abdominis muscle as the walls. 

You want to maintain this pressurised cylinder throughout your movement. Think also about keeping your diaphragm and pelvic floor parallel to each other.

How to Perform the Hinge Pattern

Now, we need to learn/relearn how to perform the hinge movement effectively. The following simple exercise will help to teach you what a good hinge feels and looks like.

• Stand about a foot from a wall, facing away.
• Squeeze your glutes (the muscles in your butt) hard and notice that your abs contract at the same time - the neutral spine exercise above.
• Maintaining a quarter to half that contraction, place the heels of your hands in your hip creases and use these as a cue to hinge at the hips whilst keeping your knees straight (or very close to straight).
• Push your hips backwards until your butt touches the wall, without toppling backwards.
• Stand back up by contracting your glutes hard.
• Move another inch from the wall and repeat, adding an inch until you can no longer keep your balance.

Once you’ve got the basic movement, practise it whilst keeping your feet flat on the floor, weight evenly distributed across the heel, little toe joint and big toe joint and only a small bend in the knees.

Terminal Positions

Start Position

• Standing tall, looking straight ahead
• Feet roughly shoulder width apart (when you do specific exercises, this will vary)
• Neutral spine
• Shoulders packed (down, lats engaged)

Finish Position

• Bent at the hips
• Head remains in line, so you’re looking down at the ground
• Knees slightly bent
• Neutral spine
• Shoulder packed

Sample Exercises

The Squat Pattern

In contrast to the hinge, the squat pattern could be described as a knee dominant lower body movement pattern.

Actually, depending on what version you’re doing, a squat is a triple flexion movement, flexing at the hips, knees and ankles.

It’s the movement you’d perform if sitting into or standing up out of a chair without using your hands.

[The bottom of the squat is a natural human resting position and is still widely used in the developing world for exactly this. Also, if you watch young children playing on the floor, you will most often see them adopt the bottom position of a squat and maintain it for extended periods of time.]

Mobility

The best mobility test for the squat is the squat itself.

Squat down, keeping your heels flat on the floor, without losing your balance. You may use your arms out in front as a counterbalance. If you want to make it more challenging, perform the squat with your arms overhead, grasping a broomstick, dowel or PVC pipe (this is the version in the Functional Movement Screen). 

The most common mobility issues related to the squat are restrictions at the ankle that don’t allow the heels to remain flat on the floor, overactive adductor and underactive gluteus medius muscles, forcing an inward knee collapse and general tightness in the major muscles of the legs, limiting the depth of squat that you can achieve.

Core Control and Stability

The same neutral spine principles apply as described in the hinge section.

Activation of the gluteus medius muscles is important to prevent the knees caving in. The easiest way to encourage this is to use an elastic band around the knees, to provide gentle pressure pulling them inwards. The natural reaction is to push the knees out against the band, which is exactly what we want.

How to Perform the Squat Pattern

Terminal Positions

Start Position

• Standing tall, looking straight ahead
• Feet slightly wider than shoulder width apart (in the bottom position, you need space for your hips between your calves)
• Neutral spine
• Shoulders packed (down, lats engaged)

Finish Position

• Bent at the knees and hips
• Neutral spine
• Feet flat on the floor, weight evenly across heel, small toe joint and big toe joint.
• Knees tracking middle of the feet
• Head in line (looking diagonally down at the floor)
• Shoulders packed (even with arms extended out front)

Sample Exercises

The Push Pattern

Self-evident from the name, the push pattern is the act of pushing something away from you.

This is the most popular pattern to train in gyms the world over because it develops the much coveted “show” muscles of the chest and shoulders.

Mobility

Core Control and Stability

If you’re going to do standing overhead pressing exercises, you’ll need the same ability to attain and maintain a neutral spine as discussed previously. 

For horizontal pushing exercises (away from you parallel to the floor) you may have to maintain neutral spine in a horizontal rather than vertical position (think push up). If you want to practise effective core engagement, the plank exercise, done properly is a good way to learn this core tension in a horizontal position.

For all pressing exercises, the ability to control your shoulder blades becomes important. Shoulder blades are meant to move as you press at different angles, in order to provide stability at the shoulder. 

 Scapular push ups, band pull-aparts and face pulls will all help with this important ability.

When pressing heavy, it’s important to be able to lock the shoulder blades down and together for shoulder health. Learning to pack the shoulders by contracting the lats is helpful with this.

How to Perform the Push Pattern

Starting in a tall standing position, either with feet roughly shoulder width apart or in a split stance (think one foot in front of the other as if bracing to stop someone pushing you backwards).

Start with the hand/s close in towards the body about the level of the middle of your sternum. As you push the hand/s away, generally speaking, you should keep the elbow/s fairly close to the body but a small elbow flare is OK.

Terminal Positions

Horizontal Press

Start Position

• Neutral spine
• Shoulders packed (lats engaged)
• Shoulder blades pulled down and back
• Hand/s at roughly at mid sternum level
• Elbows bent and tucked in near your sides - a small flair is OK, but arms out at 90º is hard on the shoulders

Finish Position

• Neutral spine
• Shoulders packed (lats engaged)
• Slight protraction of the shoulder girdle (think about spreading your shoulder blades flat on your back)
• Arms straight

Overhead Press

Start Position

• Neutral spine
• Shoulders packed
• Elbow tucked in towards the body (imagine you’re trying to stop someone punching you just below the ribs)
• Elbow vertical

Finish Position

• Neutral spine
• Arm directly overhead
• Shoulder packed

Sample Exercises

The Pull Pattern

The pull pattern is, again, well named as it describes the action of pulling something towards you.

A muscular back is the mark of an athlete. You don’t usually need to worry about the person on the other team with the big chest muscles, it’s the person with the big glutes and back muscles who you should avoid tangling with on game day.

Mobility

Use the same mobility test for the pull pattern as you did for the push pattern.

Core Control and Stability

The same neutral spine approach applies as the other human movement patterns.

For many pulling movements where you’re moving yourself in space rather than moving an external load, the ability to maintain a slight hollow body position is an advantage.

How to Perform the Pull Pattern

Probably the most important part of the pull pattern is how you initiate the movement.

Most novices simply try to pull with their arms first (and often that’s all they do). Your shoulders and elbows won’t like this at all, especially as you get older and are carrying a little more wear-and-tear.

Instead, the first movement should come from your lower trapezius muscles. You’ll feel the contraction below your shoulder blades but above your lumbar spine. This contraction should raise you an inch or two if you’re doing a pullup, before you then continue the pull with your lats, more of your middle back and your arms.

There are a number variations in exercises for the pull pattern, but the easiest way to think of what you need is pulls with a wide grip (hands far apart) and pulls with a narrow grip (hands close together). 

The former are often called rows and focus more on the muscles in your mid and upper back, whilst the latter rely far more on your lats. Of course, there is some crossover, especially as you get tired, but this is more about where the focus should be.

Whilst most people focus on the lats, probably because they’re big and give that V-shape, rows are important because it’s the mid back muscles (rhomboids and mid/lower trapezius) that contribute most to shoulder health.

Terminal Positions

Pull Ups (anything where you’re pulling yourself as the load)

Start Position

• Active hanging - lower trapezius and other back muscles engaged - you’re not just hanging passively off the connective tissue of your shoulder capsule
• Comfortable hand position around shoulder width

Finish Position

• Arms flexed
• Collar bones up at the level of your hands
• Shoulder blades retracted (try to pull them together)
• Head neutral
• Slight hollow body position with abdominal muscles contracted

Rows (mostly where you are moving an external load)

Start Position

• Neutral spine
• Shoulder width or split stance
• Lower trapezius and other back muscles engaged
• Arms extended

Finish Position

• Neutral spine
• Shoulder width or split stance
• Lower trapezius and other back muscles engaged
• Arms flexed, pulling to just below the ribs (your anatomy will dictate your best leverages to some degree).

Sample Exercises

Rotation and Anti-Rotation

The rotation/anti-rotation patterns are important because they tie upper and lower body movements together. They also amplify the power of other patterns.

Consider being punched by someone standing stock-still, shoulders square on to you and punching you in the chest just by extending their arm.

Now, compare that to someone who throws a punch by planting their feet, rotating their hips and shoulders, finishing by launching the fist.

Who is going to hurt you most?

More important is the ability to resist rotational forces. Any time you do an exercise on one leg, use only one arm or when you do something like running, you have to resist rotational forces, both to protect your spine and to transfer forces effectively so that your energy isn’t wasted.

Mobility

Rotational mobility is required all the way down the kinetic chain, but the area where many people struggle is with thoracic spine mobility (your thoracic spine is those vertebrae with ribs attached). 

Because our modern world tends to make us immobile in that area, many folks find that needed mobility in the lumbar spine instead, resulting in lower back pain over time.

Core Control and Stability

The neutral spine rules that apply everywhere else apply here too. The difference here would appear to be in the rotation but remember that this occurs primarily at the level of the thoracic spine, above the pressurised cylinder that supports a neutral lumbar spine.

Also keep in mind, once again, the need to resist rotational forces. Much of the stabilisation you need to do when resisting rotation is quite subtle, but using the Pallov Press mentioned below, you should notice this core engagement.

Terminal Positions

Because this is mostly about anti rotation, we’re only going to consider maintaining the tall standing neutral spine position, either with a shoulder width or a split stance.

Sample Exercises

Ambulation

The ability to ambulate is a vital human skill. The fact that we could walk and run upright gave us numerous advantages in our evolution.

I have no doubt someone out there wants to sell you a programme to teach you “the right way to walk” but in essence, we all know how to walk. Just think of these…

• Stay tall
• Head over shoulders 
• Shoulders over hips 
• Hips over feet
• Stay upright by keeping your hips forward as you walk (this is the tough one because all the daily sitting means most people walk a little like a duck, with a forward lean from the hips)
• Swing your arms naturally

Crawling has gained in popularity in recent years and can be effective as a re-education tool where you find walking painful or have poor gait patterns. It’s a developmental step towards walking, which is why this regression can help.

Unfortunately, many trainers simply prescribe crawling as a form of punishment/torture and seem not to understand what its proper role in rehabilitating gait might be.

Combining Patterns

Training isolated human movement patterns is a great way to make sure that you do actually train them. But it can never be all we do because living in a 3D world requires that we combine patterns effectively.

Whether it’s lifting something off the ground to put it on a high shelf, dragging something heavy across the floor, starting the lawnmower (for those who remember or still have petrol lawnmowers) or simply throwing a ball for the dog to fetch, you must be able to combine human movement patterns if you’re going to be effective.

With this is mind, here are a few ideas (not an exhaustive list by any means)…

• Overhead Squat
• Squat to Overhead Press
• Clean and Jerk
• Turkish Get Up
• Loaded Carrying

Keep in mind that some of these are quite technically complex and you’d do well to find a good coach to make sure you learn good technique from the start; as discussed above, learn great form before tinkering with compromised patterns.

Summary