Take a moment to visualize a training environment and the exercises performed in a typical gym or weight room. What are the athletes in your mind doing? Running on treadmills? Performing lifts with free weights and cable machines like chest presses and rows or maybe barbell back squats and dumbbell biceps curls? Perhaps you’re picturing a more “functional” type of gym where you’re seeing box jumps, kettlebell swings, or even battling rope waves? Great work! These are all fantastic exercises. It would seem that if we built a training program consisting of all the drills we just pictured in our little thought experiment we’d have more than enough to forge an amazing physique. It might be a surprise then to learn that such a seemingly comprehensive program would likely put our trainees on the path to muscle imbalance, limited movement function, and dramatically increase their risk of injury, especially to their joints and spine!
If all the exercises that we just visualized are good ones, and the athletes performing them are skilled and being coached on their technique, then what’s the problem? Just this: all the movements in our hypothetical program are in one plane only. This is a very common element to overlook, unfortunately, and it creeps its way into many unsuspecting exercise routines. The human body is inherently designed to move forward using bipedal locomotion in the sagittal plane. As such, the majority of our daily activities occur along this plane. Because we use it so much in life, it gets heavily featured in fundamental exercise programming and here’s where we run into trouble.
By inadvertently neglecting training along all the other planes we’re capable of using, we risk becoming one-dimensional athletes who are under-prepared to face the challenges posed by the forces of a multi-planar world. Injuries usually occur when we are unexpectedly forced to rotate or stabilize in a surprising direction. Without training our connective tissues, stabilizing muscles, and the joints used for the twisting movements of the transverse plane, we can expect disc herniations, sprained muscles, and other soft tissue damage. If a body only builds strength linearly, and avoids lateral movement training, then excessive use of the dominant muscles that move in the sagittal plane can lead to weakness in the other forsaken frontal plane muscle groups, resulting in imbalances that can cause chronic joint pain.
So… It’s time to nerd out on body mechanics! I hope we didn’t lose everyone with that already, because this old timey anatomy class stuff is actually pretty cool; especially when you consider that even a passing awareness of it can help us make better and safer choices in our athletic endeavors. Solid technical training and good programming remains harmoniously in tune with proper body mechanics and should be un-compromised by fitness fads, diverting gym modalities and so-called “bio-hacking.” If a new trending fitness activity only moves the body in one plane, then it’s only getting a piece of the puzzle and on it’s own could hurt us in the long run. Mindfulness of movement in all the available planes can drive renewed focus in our training sessions; helping us better understand the importance of including some of our less favored exercises and build a safer, higher functioning body.
You can do a quick search for an image of the planes of movement if you need help with the visual, but let’s take a moment to break down the how the human body moves in each of the three planes: saggital, frontal, and transverse.
The sagittal plane movements, everyone’s favorites, are the obvious forward and backward ones (no confusion on those). The frontal plane, however, confuses many of us, but it’s not so complicated if we just think of it as basically encompassing side to side or lateral movement. The transverse plane movements (also confusing) are rotational or twisting.
Running, rowing, biceps curling, KB swinging, even our beloved squatting and deadlifting are all sagittal plane movements. Yes, we need them in our programs for sure. Frontal plane movement, however, is far less plentiful in training but we still need it too, so lateral lunging and side-bending activities like windmills or boomerangs all need to get some practice time as well. Transverse plane activities are all about the twist, like chops, T-spine rotations or medicine ball side slams, rotational throws etc., and these should all get some of our training time too.
So where does all this movement classification get us? Well, in and of itself, it doesn’t get us very far. The important thing in the fitness world is for us to use this categorization to qualitatively analyze technique, and to build safer, more comprehensive training programs. Sometimes we might look at the training plan for the day and wonder why a particular type of exercise (usually one we don’t like or we’re not particularly good at) is so often included. The answer might simply be “If not for this session, I will certainly not otherwise move in that plane for the rest of the day.”
When it comes to exercise technique, considering these body mechanics implications makes things quite interesting. If you take the rotational moves in the transverse plane, for example, it becomes easy to identify optimum mechanics for generating some serious power. If the lower body forms a solid base while the upper body twists as far as it can go without disturbing that base, it will reach a point where the upper body can twist no further. At this point, with the upper body paused isometrically at it’s extreme end range of motion, the lower body can initiate a twist from the hips in the opposite direction, resulting in an explosive uncoiling of the upper body. This is the mechanic used in good golf, baseball or tennis swings as well as the strikes and throws prevalent in many martial arts styles. These sports ask us to repeatedly generate quite of a bit of force in this plane. Ergo, training our joints and connective tissues to handle these dynamic movements safely is a must if we want to be able to perform them well and perform them often.
Codifying movement in terms of planes just encourages us to use all-inclusive drills that safely promote skill, mobility, stability and strength in our training sessions. This approach elevates our activities in life and sport while making our bodies more resilient to injury. A good coach can recognize when one of these planes is under-represented or when movement is happening, but at the expense of proper stabilization. Knowing how to identify when motion is impeded by a lack of joint mobility or stability and how to correct or regress an exercise to better suit an athlete in this situation is an important skill for our coaching workforce to possess. If a drill using one particular plane is difficult or painful, but a comparable exercise moving in another plane isn’t, that gives a coach more data to work with in correcting movement dysfunction and designing an effective program. An athlete who spends a lot of time practicing movements in one plane for their sport, might need lots of programming in the other movement planes to balance them out. Knowledge is indeed power!
It’s not only productive but it can also be fun to look at training through this lens, and ask; “Does my session include some element of moving side to side, and some rotational work, in addition to all the obvious sagittal plane stuff?” If the answer is “no” then there better be a good reason for it. It can also be fun to look for moves that effectively address two or three planes all at once. (Why do you think we love the Turkish Get Ups so much!) Considering body mechanics in our program design enhances the enjoyment and understanding of how training makes us perform, feel and look even better!