Functional Movement Patterns
Written by Kyle Ligon - MovementLink.FIT Head Coach
As the benefits of choosing a holistic, functional fitness program became more clear to us, the focus on functional movement patterns helped additional pieces to just keep falling into place, compounding into more and more benefits. Functional Movement Patterns are the body positions, postures, and sequences of muscle contractions that our body was designed to favor making them optimal for life and sport. By centering our workout program around functional movement patterns:
Performance potential is boosted as our muscles and joints are being used in the way our bodies have evolved to move.
Using the correct muscles in the right way builds a natural aesthetic by not over- or under-developing muscle groups.
Muscle imbalances are resolved as developing functional movement patterns will require weak muscles to catch up to overdeveloped muscles caused by previous errors in habitual movement and technique.
Tissues and joints will be used in a way in which they were designed to last a lifetime, helping to resolve previously nagging pains and creating a buffer from injury.
Our potential to learn new exercises and transfer our fitness and abilities into the real world and sports increases dramatically.
Epiphany: Posture, the squat, the push-up, and the jump & land lay a foundation for every possible variation of human movement.
We realized that everything we do inside and outside the gym is just a variation and a combination of the functional movement patterns from the squat, the push-up, and the jump & land. Once we made this connection, we noticed that when anyone had a technique issue, that we would not just see the issue in that exercise, but we could correctly predict the same mistake across all exercises. This was a huge boost in our coaching abilities, but the real power came when we realized that we are not working on developing all of our exercise techniques in individual silos, but instead as we are working on one exercise, because they all stem from the same functional movement patterns, we were actually influencing our technique in every exercise, all of them at the same time. But this only worked if we understood this concept.
We saw the opposite occur all the time. Poor technique caused someone to underuse a certain muscle group. They’d see a physical therapist and get prescribed corrective exercises that improved the strength, stability, flexibility of the weak area…yet, the problem would not go away. It’s because the root cause is not a muscle imbalance, but the deviation from functional movement patterns that caused the imbalance. Without correcting the functional movement patterns which lay the foundation for all exercise, the strength, stability, flexibility of an area doesn’t matter if we are not going to use the area properly.
By understanding that the basics lay a foundation for everything we do, not only can beginners pick up proper technique very quickly, but even the most elite can improve their efficiency and avoid nagging pains.
