Why Should I Give a Shit About My Movement Quality?

A good question.  Surely exercise is just all about getting ripped/hench/toned/slim/skinny/Instagram likes, isn’t it?  Well, I’m not saying it’s NOT about those things, but I am saying there is more to it, and some of that ‘more’ is movement quality. 

First, let’s be clear about exactly what we mean by movement.  An online dictionary once said:

Movement:- “an act of moving” – insightful

It also said:

“to go in a specified direction or manner or change position” – better

With this in mind, I would argue that pretty much everything we all do involves movement.  From typing on a keyboard to bench pressing double your body weight, from swatting a fly to swinging a tennis racquet, from walking to work to running a marathon, you get the picture, pretty much everyone needs to move.  Now we’ve established the ‘who’ as ‘pretty much everyone’, let’s talk about the why.

Why should we care about how we move?

Pain and Injury

In my experience the biggest reason people start giving a s**t about or becoming interested in any sort of movement quality is through pain and injury.  No one Not many people like pain.  Sure, a lot of injuries are unavoidable and not related to movement quality, but do you know how many are?  A s**t load. 

There are many mechanisms for poor movement quality to result in an injury, but here’s the basic gist:  The human body is AMAZING at adapting to what it regularly does.  That’s why professional athletes can do things like hoist hundreds of kilos overhead, run a hundred miles in one go or seemingly twist themselves into knots…

Unfortunately that’s also why you will adapt to poor movement habits – for example your body becomes very efficient at sitting behind a desk with hands in keyboard position by creating tightness in your hips, shoulders and neck to support you in that position without much effort.  Smart, huh?  The repercussions of this are that your body will begin to use compensatory patterns to do fundamental movements, such as reaching overhead or even walking and running. 

What does this mean?  These compensatory patterns mean that your body is not moving in the way it was made to (designed/evolved, you decide).  As a consequence, the strong and durable parts of the body become underused and the weak and delicate structures are exposed to much more strain, wear and tear than they ideally would. 

And what does THIS mean?  Stick with me, this is the part where it actually matters.  Exposing the body to stresses through compensatory patterns or imbalances means small muscles get overworked (any runners got tight ITBs?), bone alignment is compromised (sore hips or knees much?) and fundamental movement options are restricted (discomfort or pain touching your toes or putting your arms overhead).  That might not sound too bad, but when you follow this path down a little further you see backs going into spasm picking up a pen from the floor, ACLs rupturing from a minor change in direction jogging, and shoulder injuries meaning you can’t even shake someone’s hand without excruciating pain. 

Performance

Now you’ve seen the downside, you’re scared, but you still think “meh, I’ll worry about that when this niggle starts hurting enough for my immense pain tolerance to actually register it”.  Okay.  Well, what if I told you that not only will poor movement quality wear holes in your kneecaps (this actually happens), but it is also making you slow, weak and appear less fit to go with inflexible?  Is your give a s**t factor increasing?  I hope so. 

There are a number of ways poor movement quality is robbing you of performance.  Poor alignment bleeds force – this means the power you put into each step, lift, swing or strike is not being transmitted directly in the direction you want it to so you’re using more effort and getting less output than someone else with better movement quality.  Imagine a car with one wheel stuck slightly off straight, that’s you when your foot whips out to the side when you run, or you press those dumbbells forward rather than directly overhead.  What a waste. 

Another is resisting your own movement through unnecessary tightness.  Let’s return to our desk adapted posture of tight hips and rounded shoulders.  This means that any movement we create has to overcome this constant tightness before actually having an effect.  You’re essentially adding your own resistance on top of whatever demands you’re imposing, be that making every step of a run a tiny bit harder or stealing kilos from your one rep max lift.  To get technical, we call this neuromuscular efficiency – being strong moving in one direction requires not only a good recruitment of the muscle fibres in the agonist (active contracting muscle), but also appropriate relaxation of the antagonist (muscles for opposing movements).  This tightness is basically a tug of war against yourself, which is totally avoidable.

Maintenance of Fundamental Movement Patterns

If reason 1 is to avoid pain and injury, reason 2 is to increase your athletic performance, then reason 3 is to retain the basic abilities that all humans should have.  These include:

Picking up things from the floor (your child perhaps)

Sitting down onto a chair, or the toilet (and standing back up)

Reaching something on the top shelf (not in that sense, you pervert)

Basic locomotion (walking around, running for a bus or cycling, without pain)

As I said before, the human body has a phenomenal ability to adapt to what it regularly does.  What this means is that if you want to keep being able to do all these basic tasks, it’s very much a ‘use it or lose it’ situation.  You only have to look at which old people you know still move well to see that those who never stop moving are the ones that fare best into old age. 

Conclusion

In our early years, we learn movement skills unbelievably rapidly by constantly challenging the edge of our abilities.  We progress from rolling to crawling to kneeling to squatting to standing and walking then running in a very short period of time.  Depending on how we then start to use our bodies, we adapt to our regular activities, potentially forgetting how to perform some of these basic patterns properly as they go unused. 

Those activities (or lack of activities) we do regularly will shape the way we move for the rest of our lives.  Whatever level of movement proficiency you aspire to, now or when you’re 80, be it an audacious athletic goal or just to live pain-free doing the things you love, the way you move matters.  Invest some time and attention on practising the skill of movement, avoid pain, perform better and retain your independence interacting with your environment.  Future you will thank you, trust me.