Healthy long term athletic development requires us to train ourselves to move strongly. Doing this effectively and efficiently starts with a good understanding of what we are doing. In our highly specialized and removed-from-nature culture, to train as outdoor athletes we may need to learn to think about our bodies somewhat differently.
All training is ultimately specific to our own goals and visions, but most athletes in nature share a few general objectives. Overall, all outdoor athletes train to improve movement and to develop power, stability, and durability as actors in motion. Particularly if we start venturing into the backcountry, we may also need to be able carry loads, respond to and make strong moves over variable terrain, and become more fatigue resistant.
To be able to stay strong and mobile for the long term, it’s important to be able to think about movement well and understand the essentials of what we need to accomplish in training. There are hundreds of great workouts but if they don’t cover our essential functional athletic needs ultimately this will catch up with us and we will break or find ourselves very limited. It’s also healthy to free ourselves from thinking about body parts and learn to focus on movement instead. Our exercise culture has a tendency to break the body into its parts and create separate prescriptions for each part. This is rooted in Western anatomical thinking and the deeper Western approach of separating everything into pieces and focusing on the parts while neglecting the systems. When we focus too much on parts it often leads to systemic dysfunction and maybe even breakdown, and we don’t want this in our bodies. In our exercise culture we’re also heavily influenced by bodybuilding which is grounded in treating each body part separately, focuses only on helping people look a certain way, and has no real concern with how well our muscles function together as motion systems.
“Upper body,” “lower body,” and separate muscles do not exist when we are in motion. There is just movement being performed by an integrated system. Outside of any sports specific activity, an effective and efficient way to approach general strength and conditioning training in order to meet our demands as athletes is to organize training around basic human motions that we want to master, gain strength in, and maintain.
Here are five basic movements in which to gain proficiency:
1. Squat: A squat involves lowering our hips towards the ground with flexion at the hip and the knee. This has always been the main staple of muscle strength work for athletes. There are many ways to do squats (kettlebells, barbells, front squats, back squats, overhead squats, etc.). We can start with bodyweight squats and work our way up to various types of weighted squats.
2. Hip Hinge: These movements involve bending at the hips with a neutral spine. They typically emphasize the muscles of the “posterior chain” (i.e. glutes, hamstrings, and low back). Hinging movements have become really popular recently as we are discovering how our seated lives destroy our posture, tighten our hips, and often bring our bodies into various states of distress. Our lack of hip mobility appears to be a major contributing factor to our epidemic of low back pain. 80% of American adults suffer from low back pain at some point. Hip hinge exercises include bodyweight hinges, kettlebell swings, straight leg deadlifts, and deadlifts. Many modern people are incapable of performing deadlifts properly without devoting attention to restoring the hip mobility that we have lost in modern life.
3. Single leg: Most of our athletic movement actually involves power being transferred from a single leg so it’s critical for athletes to work on this motion pattern. Training with single leg movements forces us to develop greater overall balance and hip stability as we are generating force. Single leg exercises include step-ups, lunges, and split squats.
4. Push: These movements involve pushing resistance away from the chest, either horizontally or vertically. Horizontal pushing is best illustrated by the push-up and various push-up progressions (including push-ups with upper bodies elevated for beginners, push-ups with feet extended, weighted push-ups). Push exercises also include weighted bench presses and incline presses. The bench press gets a tremendous amount of attention in our fitness and athletic culture because we appear to really like big chests (and heavy bench presses are extremely effective for that purpose.) However, bench press is not actually a very functional exercise for most athletes. In contact sports it can be quite useful to have substantial pushing power and upper body mass but its usefulness drops off in other sports and certainly in nature based challenges. Most outdoor athletes are probably better off doing various push-up variations (which include a plank and constitute a more functional full body movement). Vertical pushing involves movements like overhead presses or handstand push-ups.
5. Pull: This includes both pulling our bodies up vertically and horizontally. The vertical pull is well illustrated by the basic bodyweight move of doing pull-ups. Horizontal pulling involves rowing movements. There are dozens of good ways to practice pulling in a gym or using our bodyweight or some basic home equipment. If we want to use our bodyweight and don’t yet have the strength to do pull-ups we can do negative repetitions (in which we only perform the downward resistance part of the movement) or assisted repetitions (with the help of a spotter or an elastic band). For long term athletic development, our regular training practices should give us experience and progressive improvement in each of these basic movements. In addition to these five movements, as we progress as outdoor athletes we also benefit from adding the following to our general regular strength and conditioning training: A. Explosive full body motion: Being able to use the whole body as an integrated functional chain is essential to athletic capability, and as we optimize ourselves we will be able to do this powerfully and explosively without tearing ourselves apart. Full body power moves include exercises like power cleans and snatches. These are not beginner moves and we generally benefit from having developed some foundational expertise and strength in the five functional movements listed above before we try to link them together explosively. B. Core strength: All athletic movement involves forces operating from a stable core and all of the five functional motions above involve substantial core activation. However, we can usually benefit from performing some extra core work (like planks, various plank variations, rotations, etc.). C. Weighted carries: Walking with loads challenges our muscles to work together and transfer forces differently from more controlled repetition based movements. Particularly for backcountry explorers this type of strength is essential. Sandbag carries, farmer’s carries, and heavy pack hikes are examples of ways that we can train. If we want to be athletes for life, the main priority of our strength and mobility work is to become extremely good at moving. With practice, consistency, and view towards improving ourselves we can naturally add difficulty and load slowly and fairly steadily over time, and ultimately we can become capable of moving extremely substantial loads effectively if we want. It’s common to place our focus on exercises and outputs instead of movement practice but this perspective can get us into trouble. When we don’t maintain attention to how we’re doing our movements but focus exclusively on output, it is like building on a cracked foundation. This generally leads to injury and athletic limitation at some point. Almost invariably, at certain times in training we will find ourselves stepping back to relearn or improve some of our movements. This can be really frustrating but it’s helpful to stop thinking of this as “backward progress” and instead focus on how we are improving our movement. When we gain expertise in how we move it will help us develop body awareness. We’ll begin to notice when we develop difficulties or limitations in our movement. This can help us make adjustments (a little more stretching, a shift in our efforts, etc.) to our practice to stay balanced and functional for the long term.
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