What makes a given movement good or bad? How do I select them?
If you have worked with me in person, you’ll gather that my questions often point towards a central theme — is this movement the right one for the goal?
Now, very often the movement is just fine as it is a foundational element of one’s progress — think ring rows. Pretty much everyone I work with does ring rows as they are simply a mandatory buy in for Pain Free Training. Think of how essential tires are to a care. Quite literally we are reinventing the wheel if we try to outsmart the necessity of something so basic.
But what happens when things aren’t going perfectly? When something causes pain? When something isn’t getting better? When there is a specific and nuanced problem that isn’t addressed by the foundation (i.e. the ring row isn’t contributing to resolution)?
Then we have to take a step deeper to unlock what’s going on.
Bear with me, it’s about to get a bit technical, but to demonstrate the level of nuance that can be needed to unearth these kinds of things.
Say you have a buggy hamstring. Feels fine during 2 legged hamstring curls. Feels fine during sleds. Feels fine during most activities. But it lingers nonetheless.
First we have to find out where it is located. We might discover it specific to the outside of the hamstring but only during knee flexion absent hip flexion or hip bracing. That is that when we do back extensions, it isn’t problematic but when we do single leg, hip externally rotated, foot in plantar flexion, it jumps out!
That is because in this position the calf is disengaged from knee flexion and the hip attachments of the hamstring aren’t the prime movers (as in, helping you bend at the hip). Then the outside is biased and we get some pain signals. Aha!
I’ll spare you further technical jargon from there. If only to paint the picture.
The net effect of this is typically finding a pair of movements that addresses that specific muscle in both a long and short position. I want to ensure that it is capable of pain free tension when the (in this case) knee gets bent and compressed as well as long while the leg is completely straight (or just slightly bent).
So with that enormous preamble shared, what is ultimately going to make a good movement?
First, it has to be easy to learn. By default, cleans are never a good movement to resolve dysfunction because they are so incredibly complicated.
Next, it has to be scalable down to barely any effort. A pullup becomes a poor movement because the barrier to entry is lifting your entire body weight.
Then, it has to be capable of producing the right stimulus reliably. Running would be awful because its simply too dynamic and fast moving to even tell if you are hitting the right spot.
As a careful consideration, it should be somewhat “functionally” related to the movement at hand. Even though a lat pulldown could check all the of above, if the problem is with pressing it is the wrong motor pattern to address the issue.
Last, it has to be specific so you hit what you intend to hit. Deadlifting would be awful because almost no human beings could reliably engage the shorthead of biceps femoris without completely overriding that signal with their glutes.
So what are we left with?
If biceps femoris is being triggered when in a knee bent, externally rotated position, then using something like a seated tibialis rotation. This is a really simple movement — attach a weight to the foot and allow it to turn inwards. This engages the short head of the hamstring, strengthens the deficit pattern (external rotation of the tibia) and gives us a really specific stimulus that is scalable to anyone.
Yes, the above was quite a bit more technical than I ordinarily write — what if you didn’t really follow any of that? That’s aok. The point of this was to simply introduce the topic of what movement selection looks like and how we can get closer to solutions. This is my thought process when the basics don’t cut it, the problem persists and we need to dig into additional layers of nuance to get you relief!
