Five People Have Passed This Test in 27 Years
Nine movement patterns every athletic adult needs, and why most people are missing four of them
by Jeremy Hudson, Athlete for Life
There’s a test I give called the leg lower. You lie on your back and lower your legs to the floor without letting your spine or hips move. No weight, no equipment. In twenty-seven years of coaching, only five people have passed it — college athletes, professionals, and men who deadlift four hundred pounds included. It’s also the single test I’ve found most closely correlated with back pain.
I tell you this because the thing standing between you and the athlete you used to be is almost never the thing you think it is. It’s rarely the number on the bar. It’s usually a movement pattern you lost so long ago you stopped noticing it was gone.
Here’s the clearest evidence I have for that. When people score their own movement quality, it comes back looking like it’s their strongest area. When I assess those same people in person, it’s usually their most broken. That gap is why the leg lower humbles the strongest guy in the room. He’s never actually seen his own movement quality, so he grades it by the number he can see, which is the one on the bar.
If you train muscles, you’ll move like a bodybuilder
Nobody moves one muscle at a time. You don’t fire a glute, then a hamstring, then a calf, and end up standing. You just move — it’s automatic. The body moves the way you train it. If you train muscles, you’re going to move like a bodybuilder. If you train patterns, you’re going to move like an athlete.
Traditional gym culture is built around building muscles, and more recently around the high-intensity competitive fitness style of training. Both have their place. But what really matters is how the body actually moves, and how we train that in the gym. There are a handful of movements you need to keep access to if you want to perform well and keep performing well for the rest of your life. There’s no official number — most coaches use six or seven. I use nine, because it’s easier to assess, program, and progress separately, which means I can point at the exact place performance is leaking and know what to do about it.
Here they are:
1. Triple extension, hip dominant
2. Triple extension, knee dominant
3. Vertical push
4. Horizontal push
5. Vertical pull
6. Horizontal pull
7. Core — both resisting movement and producing it
8. Carries
9. Locomotion
The two lower body patterns
The first is triple extension that’s hip dominant — the deadlift pattern. It builds propulsion by driving the hips, and it’s the engine behind every sport that asks you to move with your legs. It’s also how you stand up off a chair, and how you accelerate in a run and maintain top speed.
The second is triple extension that’s knee dominant. That’s the squat pattern with an upright torso, or with the heels elevated, where the knee does more of the work. This is the pattern that reinforces your ability to land and to stop. Change of direction, deceleration, absorbing a landing — anything where the quadriceps have to accept load rather than produce it.
The four upper body patterns to master
Push and pull, each of them horizontal and vertical. You need all four, and the reason is that every expression of complex power runs through them.
And this is the part most people never connect. When you run, your arms swing forward and then back. Forward is a push, back is a pull, and that’s your vertical push and pull doing the work. The moment you add agility — a crossover, a shuffle, a change of direction — the arms start swinging across the body, and now you’re using the horizontal push and pull too. Your gait is built out of the same four patterns you file away as upper body training. Vertical pull correlates with speed in particular: the stronger your chin-up, the more speed is available to you when you run. And further up the ladder sit the movements you’re ultimately progressing toward — the push press, the jerk, the clean, the snatch. Those are where real power gets produced, and none of them happen without the upper body carrying its share.
The core is not just sit-ups and planks
The core produces movement, and it resists movement. Producing is bending, extending, side bending, rotating. Resisting is holding still while something tries to bend, extend, side bend, or rotate you. That second one is the job most people never train. They assume a plank covers it, and a plank is a piece of it, but nowhere near the whole picture — there are a dozen ways to train the core to resist, and almost all of them get skipped.
Carries are how you train the resisting side under real conditions. A carry is anything held while you move: a suitcase carry, a loaded lunge, a sandbag on one shoulder. It asks the core to hold its position while a load pulls you out of it. That’s a different quality than a plank builds, because the core responds best when you ask it to react to a load. A plank is a position you hold — no reaction required. A carry is training your core to be reactive, which is exactly how it has to work in real life — every step is a new problem to solve.
Locomotion: you can walk and jog, but that’s not close to where you should be
Locomotion runs from walking to running to sprinting, and it includes the agility work in between — crossovers, shuffles, changes of direction. Because walking and running sit at the front of that list, almost everyone assumes they’ve got it handled.
They’re on a machine, or they go for a run, and the run is slow. It’s always slow. Nothing is ever fast, so the speed of the pattern quietly declines even though the pattern itself is still there. And it feels fine, because they’re only ever working inside their slow ability. You don’t find the edge until something asks you to move quickly, and by then the top end has been gone for years.
Mastering a pattern happens in three stages
Those are the nine. Having them and mastering them are different things, and mastery comes in three stages. First, can you do it clean? Unloaded, no compensation, full control through the range. Second, can you do it strong? The same pattern at your maximum, still clean. Third, can you do it fast — loaded or unloaded, with power?
The order matters, but not the way people assume. You can’t add load to a pattern you can’t control; that part is strict. Speed is different. Your speed will always be limited by the load that pattern can handle, which means speed work and strength work belong side by side, not one after the other. You train them together. You’re just capped at whatever load you can move well.
How to fit all nine into your week
Very few people get even half of these into their programming. Locomotion is missing. Carries are missing. The core work is a fraction of what it should be, and there’s almost always a push or a pull nowhere to be found. That’s not a small gap — that’s four or five patterns going untrained, indefinitely.
But all nine fit into two days. Here’s the structure:
Day one: triple extension hip dominant, a push, core, locomotion.
Day two: triple extension knee dominant, a pull, core, a carry.
That’s it. Every pattern covered in two sessions. If you train four days, it’s the exact same structure run twice with different variations — which is where the second push plane and the second pull plane get their own day, and where you get room to work each pattern at more than one point on the ladder.
These aren’t nine things to rotate through when you feel like it. Every one of them belongs in your program, every week, whatever your week actually looks like.
Which brings you to the only question that matters here. For each of these nine, where are you? Is this one a movement problem, a strength problem, or a power problem? Those are three different answers with three different programs behind them, and most people are guessing at all nine.
You’ve probably already got a suspicion about two or three. Go test them. And if you want to know where to start, the Athletic Edge Scorecard takes about three minutes and tells you whether your limiter right now is movement, strength, or power — which is the thing that decides what your training should look like from here.
Take the Athletic Edge Scorecard at athleteforlife.ca.
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Jeremy Hudson is a strength and conditioning coach (NSCA-CSCS) with 27 years in the field. He runs Athlete for Life in London, training adults in their 30s through 60s to move like athletes again. Curious how you’re actually holding up? Find your Athletic Age in three minutes: athleteforlife.ca
