Defining a Total Body Movement

Joe Kenn | Vice President of Performance Education

One of the most important pieces of proper program design for a strength training program is the development of your exercise pool. This is your movement toolbox. As you gain experience in your career, the number of exercises you become aware of as well as the more you can effectively teach will increase the variations you have available to implement into your athletes’ and team’s programming.

Creating specific categories of movements is a terrific way of organizing your tool box. This will help specifically in the choice and order of exercises being implemented into the program. The three basic movement categories I prefer to use are Total Body, Lower Body, and Upper Body. Depending on how in-depth you want to go, these categories are further broken down into sub categories based on specific types of movements. All this helps the coach properly plan a successful program.

As it stands today, I would define a Total Body Movement as a movement that is hip dominant as well as movements where the entire body is forced into action in synchronized manner. In the weight room setting, these movements would be sub-classified under an Olympic Lifting column, a Deadlift column, a Jumps, Throws, Swing column, Strongman Implement column, and a Hip Thrust column to start. From there I will further break down the variations of movements and develop an extensive list to choose from based on athlete’s training age and level of movement competency.

Regardless, of how you chose to write your program, I highly recommend starting with the development of an exercise pool to begin the process. Having all your exercises, classified and broken down is very similar to having a cook book. A cook book usually has all the ingredients needed to create a specific recipe and this is similar to creating a sound strength program.

Best Success and #wordswin

Coach Kenn