What is ideal movement?

How does the human body move naturally?

In my first article, I shared a little about my story and why the mainstream advice and movement education I’d received had not fixed my movement issues and in fact, could have been causing or at the very least, exacerbated them. Before I get into my journey exploring the solutions in later articles, I want to first lay a foundation that I have started using since late 2021 to view human movement.

First, it’s based around observations of how humans move optimally in the real world and, second, using that to both guide how to approach training the body move and feel better, plus using it to identify what to avoid. What to avoid is incredibly important, because if you’re consistently overriding your Central Nervous System with training and movements that are counter to ideal biomechanics, it can undo any of the good work you do.

Although today, I’ll just focus on the first element, observations of how humans move optimally in the real world, which I use to try and get to what is the fundamental truth of how we are meant to move.

How do we really move?

If you wanted to get a true sense of how a lion moved and behaved, you wouldn’t go to a zoo. Ideally you would travel to Africa and observe them in the wild. So with humans, we have a critical issue that the vast majority of us have been living in “cages” for years. Sitting in chairs, driving in cars and exercising in places that are far removed from the environments we evolved to move in. This presents the problem that the vast majority of people we can observe moving in the real world, myself included, have already been subject to years or even decades of living in environments that have dramatically altered our natural movement.

For us to get a true picture of the fundamental truth of what natural human movement looks like, I feel we have the following examples:

1. Children between the ages of around 5 to 8 - my own two children have been incredible models for me to follow in determining what ideal movement is. The ages aren’t hard and fast, but from I’ve seen around the age of 5 my daughters seemed to have a full grasp of both their fine and gross motor skills. Then from the age of 8, I could start see some negative patterns creep in from sitting for long periods in school.

2. Adults from societies that have do not have an excessive amount of sitting during their day - Kathleen Porter shares some very interesting observations in her book Ageless Spine and if you view her website you see a great video of how well she moves and holds her body at the age of 77. Very cool.

3. Athletes - while most of the athletes we can observe tend to come from countries and societies where there is a lot of sitting, or will have been exposed to much of the mainstream fitness advice, I tend to observe what I feel are ideal movement patterns in this group. My theory here, is that this group has continued a consistent movement practice (running, jumping, throwing etc) from childhood through to adulthood, so they held onto their natural movement patterns.

But isn’t everyone different?

Something I hear a lot, is that everyone is different, “We have individual differences, our bodies are different and we all need different solutions to our movement problems.” Yes, there is some truth in this, although I think our differences are a result of nurture and not nature.

What led me to this thinking was largely observation. First, observation of how my children developed their different movement patterns, seeing all the similarities in how they move and how it looks very similar to how their friends move. Then, when I’m out and about and I see adults run, noticing how different every adults running style seemed to look. I could see 10 adults out running in a single day and almost every style looked unique.

So, in my observations, children tend to move in very similar ways, but adults tend to move in very different ways. Although not all adults.

If you watch well trained adults, the decathlon 1,500m is a great event to pull up, because these are well trained athletes but not out and out running specialists.

The olympics won’t let me embed the video, but here is London 2021 event.

I’d welcome other observations, but what I see are far more similarities in how everyone runs than there are differences. No, it’s not exactly the same for every person, but key aspects such as posture, a natural side to side sway of the head, no excessive arm movement, smooth stride. Everything looks like its well co-ordinated to optimize forward movement.

Why do I even bother bringing this up?

For me, this suggests that we mostly grow up with very similar movement abilities and we lose them along the way…..if we’re not careful. Now I know that’s fairly obvious, you either use it or lose it and that makes sense for someone that’s been mostly sedentary for years. Although what if, as in my case, I’d been doing all the things that are supposed to work: yoga, foam rolling, stabilising my core, functional movements, implementing a standing desk rather than sitting…….the list goes on.

This was a real wake up call for me. I was doing everything that the mainstream fitness industry was telling me to do, yet I did not have what I considered ideal movement, which to me meant what I was doing was causing harm along with the benefits I was receiving.

So what is ideal?

Can anyone define what ideal movement is? But we’re all different right?!

I can’t define ideal and I won’t claim to know every aspect of optimal function of every aspect of human biomechanics.

What I can do is share the key things I focused on to start to address my own problems (again the solutions I followed will come in later articles), how I’ve started to define ideal based on what I’ve picked up from people and what I’ve see in my own observations.

I’ll break it down into three categories:

1. Standing - I spend considerable time thinking about how I should be able to stand with ease in good posture and positioning, because if I can’t find stability here, how I can expect to have it when I move. Ease is an important word here, as in my mind, I shouldn’t need to excessively “hold” myself in a good posture and in my mind, there should be no discomfort.

2. Movement - what are the biomechanical principles I’ve been shown and started to implement to improve how I move and feel.

3. Resting - an important measure of success for me, is how I feel when I’m at rest. In short, I shouldn’t have chronic tension and discomfort, I should be able to just……well, rest.

1. Standing posture

A big influence here was Kathleen Porter’s book “Ageless Spine” with the key lesson that I took from the book being:

The structure of our skeleton should do the majority of the work holding our body upright and not our muscles.

This is contrary to what I’d either consciously or subconsciously been doing for years to try and hold myself in an upright posture. I used to try and brace my core, pull my shoulders down and back, and even squeeze my glutes all to try and achieve good posture. Then, when I tried to relax I found it incredibly hard, it was almost like I didn’t want to “let go of the tension in my body, like it was a sign of weakness to be relaxed. Again, more on what I think caused that in later articles.

As I watched my children standing, I realised, they do not have to think even for a second how to hold themselves in good posture, it just happens.

This is an example Kathleen gives in her book of good natural posture:

These are the key things I picked up on:

1. The head, shoulders, ribs, hips, knees and feet all stack over each other.

2. The head sits naturally like a bowling ball balancing on a stick, with the chin falling down slightly (with the mouth closed)

3. The shoulders *IMPORTANT POINT ALERT* are not down and back, they rest on top and in the middle of the ribs, which looks like they are slightly forward and rounded

4. The bottom of the ribs and top of the hips are mostly parallel with each other and there is only a small curve in the lower back

5. The legs are quite close together, the big toe points slightly in and so do the knees, which suggests an internal rotation of the femur - I have Devon Brown of One Of A Kind Fitness to thank for this and you’ll hear a lot more about him and his ideas.

Fortunately, I’ve never had bad posture, but here are two images to contrast, on the left is Jan 2019 and on the right is Aug 2024, at the ripe young age of 41. This is not a mind blowing transformation, I still have things to work, but there are subtle differences:

1. There is better alignment through my ear, shoulder, elbow and hip on the right and my chest is not driving up. This suggests I’m not pulling my shoulders down and back for “good posture” and that I have less hyperextension in my lower back.

2. Harder to tell, but there is far less tension in my stomach on the right, making the position much easier to hold. No, I’m not fatter, I actually weight less in the picture on the right with the same muscle mass, I’m just not “sucking it in”.

Yes, I do have to put some conscious effort into standing like this, but it’s minimal and for me, a big difference to how I was about 2 years ago. The goal is for this to be natural 100% of the time without thinking.

Please remember, all the mainstream solutions I’d been using, for literally decades, did not get me here. Throwing out those standard conventions and following the principle of training how we move in real life got me here.

Moving on.

2. Movement principles

Identifying ideal movement patterns is far more difficult than picking out key aspects of someone standing in good posture, because there are so many more factors. Also, again, I’m not claiming to have all the answers, I just want to share the major things I’ve focused on to fix my own movement issues.

The lens I’ve started to use is to think how I train my biomechanics for what our most fundamental movements would be, if we were living out in nature 100% of the time using hands and handmade tools to survive, i.e. would we have to do these movement on a fairly regular basis to survive.

For me, that means: Walking, Running, Throwing, Jumping, Picking Up & Carrying.

You could possibly add in Climbing to the list, and I could be convinced, but I don’t feel it would be an absolute essential in all cases.

I’ll also skip the reasons why each of those movements, its been done to death, what was important for was using the lens of:

My strength trainnig should closely align with the biomechanical principles and patterns we see across those 5 movements when performed naturally.

This isn’t my own unique idea, I’ve picked it up from several others, who I’ll mention more in later articles. It’s also different to something like MovNat, where those and other kinds of movements are the form of training, in this case, it’s more adapting our strength training to specifically target certain biomechanics to help re-train our body to move the way it used to before modern life took its toll. I think the idea of MovNat is great, but that kind of movement practice didn’t work for me, a more targeted approach was needed.

Again, I won’t talk about those targeted exercises here, I just want to give a high level overview of the natural movement principles that feed into those exercises.

1. Walking - watch this clip of a Maasai Warrior (Josphat) walking next to a British travel journalist (Stuart). To my eye, you can see a fluidity and poise in Josphat’s movements with a natural side to side sway and bounce in his step. Contrast this with Stuart’s more rigid torso and more rigid arm and leg movements. I see this same fluidity in my own children, there is a natural side to side sway, a bounce in his step and minimal arm movement. There is not a rigid and stiff torso.

2. Running - I’ve skipped over several of the elements present in walking and I’ll just cover them here, and again I’m just touching on some major points. In running you also, in the ideal, see a side to side sway of the head and torso, as the body shifts to maximise the amount of weight over the lead foot. Although the big thing to notice is, as you’ll see in this clip, is that when the foot lands the leg stabilizes and the femur rotates internally as the opposite side of the torso rotates towards the lead foot. There is definitely not a rigid spine, it sways but it also twists. There is also not excessive arm movement, you only really see big swings behind the body during all out sprint, not more moderated paced runs.

3. Throwing - with throwing, you can really see some of these mechanics played out, as they are amplified. If you take this slow motion video of an MLB pitcher, you can clearly see that the plant foot stabilizes (toes pointing forward) and the femur rotates internally into the hips as the rest of the body whips around. Yes, there is stability in the throwers spine, but it’s not rigid and there is ample rotation. Harder to see are the breaking mechanics once he has released the ball to pull the arm quickly back, then once he has completed the throw and is stood upright, notice where his shoulder sits, on top of the ribs, slightly up and forward.

4. Jumping - Take a look at LeBron dunking in slow motion and you see a similar thing with the lead foot pointing forward and stabilizing as the torso rotates towards towards the planted foot, creating internal rotation of the femur and this clip of the Late Great Kobe Bryant and you’ll notice both knees come inwards to create the internal rotation.

5. Picking something up & carrying it - this one is a little less cut and dry, as there are so many different objects you could pick up and different ways you would need to carry them. Although through my own experimentation and watching my own children, what does not look or feel natural to me are the movements we use during a traditional squat, or deadlift and I’ll discuss why in the next article. I’m not saying that this is the ideal example, but looking at an atlas stone carry and how there is a long forward curve to the spine during the lift phase and also how the shoulder comes up and forward during the carry phase, seems to me to be a reasonable reflection of how we would most naturally pick something up and carry it.

While this is a fairly quick overview of the all the biomechanics in play during these movements, the following are the key things I’ve thought about when approaching my own training to gear it towards how we move in the real world:

1. The torso and spine are not rigid, and there is rotation and a side to side sway during walking and running, buts it’s not forced, it should happen naturally.

2. There is lateral stability in the lead foot as it plants during walk, running, throwing and jumping - by lateral stability I mean the hips do not dramatically shift to one side as the bodyweight shifts over to the lead foot, it holds stable against the lateral movement of the bodyweight

3. The femurs rotate internally when walking, running and jumping - not externally as we traditionally do with most squatting

4. The shoulder sits naturally in a stable position slightly up and forward, sitting on the ribs.

Of course, there are more elements, but I think that’s good for now in terms of basics, to understand in the next article why so much mainstream fitness training is counter to how the body is meant to move.

3. How should I feel when I rest?

I’ll keep this section short, because if you’ve made it this far (thank you!) you’ve already read a lot.

For me, the biggest thing here is when I want to rest, I should be able to rest. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve carried over excessive tension and stiffness in my body from my training and its really hard to rest comfortably. The biggest example for me was how hard it was to sit around the dinner table with friends, after a certain time I felt like I just needed to get up and move, my back would be stiff, my hips tight, I’d have tension in my neck and shoulders. Or maybe be doing light activities with my kids and I’d get distracted by my left hip being super tight and my lower back feeling sore.

Of course, there could be a whole host of reasons why I felt that way, not just my physical training. Although I have noticed that the more I’ve focused my training around how the body moves naturally, the less and less I get these problems. I feel far more comfortable in my own body and don’t feel like I need to do equal amounts of supplementary work to just feel normal again. Yes, sometimes I overdo it and I’ll feel sore and tired the next day, but this new approach has lead to far more balance and comfort in how I feel when I’m not training.

….and, that’s it for now.

In the next article, I’ll carry forward these same ideas and show how so much of the mainstream modalities are counter to how the body moves naturally and why I believe it caused so many of my problems.

Disagree? Great! Let me know in the comments below and I’d love to discuss it with you.