In this piece I intend to explain once and for all why people keep repeating that basic exercises are the most important and why you should focus on exactly those in the gym.
It’s true: basic exercises are the foundation of everything, and in fact 99% of gym-goers, as well as athletes, should focus on basic exercises only.
It all starts with understanding human anatomy. Anyone who knows their way around human anatomy will quickly realize that the vast majority of exercises done in the gym can be boiled down to squatting, pressing and pulling. The lion’s share of the exercises we do in the gym are variations of these three, and most of the training results achieved come either directly from performing these exercises or from performing their variations.
Broadly speaking, we can classify as presses those exercises in which we push ourselves or something else away from us. In contrast to pressing, in pulling we draw something (a piece of equipment) toward us, or pull ourselves up or forward while holding on to something. The squat and its variations are exercises that develop hip and knee extension in a coordinated way. The deadlift and its variations develop these same functions too, but with a somewhat different emphasis. For clarity, the classification we use to describe squatting, pressing and pulling needs to get a bit more precise.
What I’m about to explain has long been figured out by functional training coaches, powerlifting coaches, strongmen, and also simply well-educated, broad-minded strength training experts. Men such as Mark Rippetoe, Glenn Pendlay, Ian King, Frederick Hatfield, Alwyn Cosgrove, Nick Tumminello, Brett Contreras, Joe DeFranco, Jason Ferrugia, Kelly Bagget, Michael Boyle, Dan John, Eric Cressey, Christian Thibaudeau, Pavel Tsatsouline, Chad Waterbury, Charles Poliquin, Tudor Bompa and others have long been guided, when designing their programs, primarily by the idea that both athletes and ordinary people really only need to do basic exercises.
So how do we classify squats, presses and pulls more specifically?
Vertical presses. This category includes all the exercises in which the weight is pressed (lifted) upward relative to the torso. The weight is pressed up along either the sagittal or the frontal plane. Examples are the standing barbell press and standing dumbbell lateral raises.
Horizontal presses. This group includes exercises in which the weight is pressed away from the body along the horizontal plane, or you push yourself away from a supporting surface. Examples are push-ups and all kinds of bench press variations.
Vertical pulls. This category includes pulls in which you pull something vertically from top to bottom, or pull yourself up. These are all kinds of pull-up variations and pulldowns on the cable machine (different variants).
Horizontal pulls. These are pulls that we perform along the horizontal plane relative to the body. This includes all kinds of rows and bent-over pulls.
The four categories above are, in fact, all upper-body exercises. Although at its core the deadlift and its variations also involve pulling something, the deadlift is often left out of the pulling category. The deadlift and the squat (and their variants) both fall under exercises that load the lower body. Although on the surface and visually the squat and the deadlift look like different exercises, many coaches and experts treat the deadlift and the squat as variations of one complex movement (we stand, lower ourselves into a squat by bending at the knees and hips, and come back up). In both the squat and the deadlift, coming up from the bottom means extension at the hips (hamstrings and glutes) and the knees (quadriceps).
The difference between the squat and the deadlift comes down only to where the weight is positioned (in the squat the barbell is on the upper back, in the deadlift it is on the floor in front of us). This in turn means that when coming up from the bottom, largely the same muscles work in both lifts, but with a relatively different emphasis. At their core, both the squat and the deadlift are exercises that come down to extending at the hips and knees. But as said, in these lifts the muscles involved carry a somewhat different emphasis.
Hip-extension-dominant exercises. Coming up from the bottom with the weight happens mainly through hip extension. This group includes the deadlift and all of its lift variations: the sumo deadlift, Romanian deadlifts and so on. There are a great many variations.
Knee-extension-dominant exercises. Coming up from the bottom with the weight happens mainly through knee extension. This group includes all the different squats, of which there are very many. Lunges and the leg press belong here too. It’s clear that in both cases a full set of muscle groups is at work, but the emphasis of the training load is significantly different.
If you do an exercise that requires extension at both the knees and the hips, which group it belongs to can vary. In fact, if you know the technique, you can determine it for yourself. Take lunges: I can feel very clearly myself that when I do lunges with long, reaching steps, the whole posterior chain is emphasized (glutes, hamstrings and even, slightly, the lower back). On the other hand, when I do lunges with short steps and an almost perfectly upright torso, it’s the fronts of my thighs that are sore the next day.
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If we sum up so far, we reach only one conclusion: 99% of gym lifters, whose goal is speed, strength, muscle mass or simply a better quality of life, should train holistically, not so much individual muscles. There are three of these basic movements: squats, pulls and presses. Hats off to the powerlifters, who figured this out long ago.
All powerlifting programs actually revolve around training movements, not individual muscles. Whatever split or program we look at, it all follows the principle that what drives progress is training whole movements, or the individual movement components of the competition lifts. Whether it’s a full-body split, an upper/lower body split or a pull/push/squat split, the starting point is always training movements.
The last of these is based quite directly on the classification of movements given in this article. You train three days a week: on the first day all the pulling movements, on the second the presses and on the third all the movements that develop the legs (lower body). There are splits that focus only on basic exercises, but of course, if you want to give a particular muscle (movement phase) more training load separately, a more isolating exercise or two is added. It’s clear that not all exercises have to be basic exercises only.
To be continued…
Author: Janar Rückenberg
Come and train! ArtGym
