Episode 50: The 7 Exercises You Should Be Doing
Hey there! 👋 I'm Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains), personal trainer and host of the Coaching Corner podcast.
In this episode, I’m breaking down the seven essential movement patterns that should be part of your weekly workout routine. Whether you're training for aesthetics, strength, or overall functionality, these fundamental exercises will help you build muscle, improve posture, and move better in everyday life.
I’ll cover:
✔️ Why these movement patterns are the foundation of any effective training program
✔️ How they support strength, muscle growth, and injury prevention
✔️ Exercise examples for pushing, pulling, hinging, squatting, pressing, and rotation
✔️ How to modify movements based on your fitness level
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Jayd (00:00):
If you're working out for aesthetics or bodybuilding, these seven basic movement patterns will also help you to build muscle and look more aesthetic because by covering all of these basic movement patterns, you're essentially going to be hitting all of the major muscles in the entire body. Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I've been a personal trainer for about 10 years, and I grew up in the fitness industry, so I created this podcast to help share some of the tips and tricks that I share with my personal training clients and students. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about seven exercises that you absolutely should be including in your weekly training routine. These seven exercises will help you to get better at basic movement patterns like pushing, pulling, twisting, hip, hinging, squatting. Now, not only are these based on basic movement patterns that you use in your everyday life, but practicing these movements will help to increase your overall strength, strengthen your bones, and improve your posture, and that's why these movement patterns form the basis of all of the training programs that I create for my clients and my subscribers.
(01:18)
Keep in mind that I do have downloadable training programs that you can download and follow along with on my website at Jaydigains.com. You can also subscribe from my monthly membership where I post workouts of the month, including these exercises. And before we get into the episode, make sure to give this video a like and subscribe to the channel for more updates whenever I drop new podcast episodes and videos if you're watching on YouTube. And if you are listening to this podcast, make sure to follow the channels that you always get the latest episodes. Without further ado, let's get into the episode.
(01:57)
Now. Today we're going to be talking about the seven basic exercises that you should include in your training program, and we're talking specifically about resistance training here, but these basic movement patterns can also appear in other styles of training, like if you're doing cardio circuits or if you are doing some mobility work. These seven exercises are the basic movement patterns of the human body, and practicing them regularly will help you to move better in your everyday life. It will also improve your overall control and strength, and it will also improve your posture and alignment if you're working out for aesthetics or bodybuilding. These seven basic movement patterns will also help you to build muscle and look more aesthetic because by covering all of these basic movement patterns, you're essentially going to be hitting all of the major muscles in the entire body regardless of whether you are working out as a beginner, intermediate, or advanced exerciser.
(02:53)
All seven of these movement patterns should be in your workout program every week. So let's take a look at them. Now. First up is the push movement pattern. This is the basic movement pattern that you use when you perform exercises like pushups, planks, chest presses. In an everyday life, you might actually use this movement pattern if you are moving furniture or pushing yourself up off the ground. The major muscle groups that are involved with push strength are the pecs or pectoralis major muscles. That's your muscles in your chest as well as your triceps, the muscles in the back of your arms that are responsible for elbow extension and your shoulders or deltoid muscles. But you also have to have pretty significant stability in your core to perform push strength exercises. Well, your back muscles also have to engage isometrically to keep you stable as you perform push strength exercises, it's a good idea to include two to three different push exercises in your workout routine every week.
(03:54)
This will help you to practice the movement, but get a variety of stimulus for your muscles. You can do variations of pushups like regular pushups, kneeling pushups, incline pushups, decline pushups, and if you're using weights, you can do dumbbell or barbell chest presses or bench press using a flat bench, or you can also do it as an incline or at a decline to stimulate the muscles a little bit differently. Now, number two, press exercises are like push exercises in the sense that they involve you pushing against resistance away from your body, but instead of straight out in front of you, like the push strength, you're going to be practicing pressing against resistance overhead. This involves a very similar muscle group. It involves the deltoids or the shoulder muscles as well as the triceps, just like with push strength. But press exercises also involve a lot more of the back of the shoulder and upper back muscles like your traps and external shoulder rotator muscles.
(04:55)
Great examples of press exercises include the barbell overhead press or dumbbell shoulder presses, kettlebell shoulder presses, and if you're doing body weight exercises, that would be exercises that are variations of the handstand. Now, practicing press exercises is really important for not only strengthening your shoulders and making your arms look good, but it also helps to improve your posture and improve the health of your shoulders. Because press often involves external rotation of the shoulders. This is a really important movement pattern to practice to keep your shoulders healthy. Many of us work in front of computers or spend a lot of time on our phones where we're kind of rounded forward, and so our shoulders will often have this rounded forward position. But with press exercises, you really kind of have to focus on pushing your chest forward and externally rotating the shoulders in order to push the weight or the resistance overhead.
(05:52)
So this will help to improve your posture and alleviate back pain and shoulder pain by putting your body back in alignment. It is also one of the best expressions of overall total body strength to be able to press weight overhead and hold it there with stability. One of my client's favorite facts about the overhead press is that it is the primary way that in Marvel comics, they measure who among the superheroes is the strongest, and who among the superheroes that is the strongest is the one who can perform the heaviest overhead barbell press. I used to not really like this exercise as much as others because you typically can't use quite as much weight on the bar when you're doing an overhead press as you can for things like deadlifts, squats, and bench press. But it is such a great one for sculpting the shoulders and helping you to improve your overall total body control.
(06:50)
You can perform press exercises from standing or from a seated position with or without back support. Now, seated with back support is going to be the easiest version of an overhead press. The more unstable you can make either your seated position or standing, the more that your core and your other muscles are going to have to work to stabilize. So if you're just getting started with this exercise, I recommend starting from seated with some back support and then progressing up to the point where you can stand. I recommend performing press exercises one to two times per week. Number three, another important movement pattern for the upper body is pulling strength or horizontal rowing. Now this movement pattern is really important for helping you to develop good posture and put your body into alignment. Like I said before, many of us have a habit of rounding our posture forward with our shoulders rounded forward and hunched over.
(07:46)
But practicing a horizontal rowing or pulling is a great way to put your body back in alignment and strengthen the muscles that hold your spine upright. The main movers of this type of exercise are going to be the lats or lattice, his doci muscles as well as your posterior deltoid or the back of your shoulders, as well as your traps and your rhomboids, as well as external shoulder rotator muscles. Your biceps and forearms also will get a significant challenge while you're performing pole based exercises, which will strengthen your overall grip strength, which is a really important part of building overall strength. Great examples of pole strength exercises are cable rows, band rows, and dumbbell or kettlebell rows. You can do these with both hands going at the same time. Or for isolation work, you can do unilateral single arm rows. The angle of your elbow can change which muscles are doing the most work as you're performing your pole based exercises.
(08:48)
In general, the closer your elbow is to your body, the more you're going to be working your lats. The further out your elbow is from your body, the more you're going to be working more of your posterior deltoids and your traps. I recommend including two to three different pole based exercises in your routine every week. Now, in addition to horizontal pulling exercises, it's also important to practice pulling down or vertical pulling. Great ways to practice pulling down are exercises like the wide grip or narrow grip pull downs. You can also do assisted pull-ups where you use either a band or a assisted pull up machine. All of these are great ways to further target your lactus dorsi muscles or lats, as well as the other muscles in your back, like your traps and your rhomboids. Wider grip variations of the pull down will also help you to further develop your posterior deltoid and your external shoulder rotator muscles.
(09:48)
So if you really want to improve your posture and improve the health of your shoulders, pull downs, especially wide grip pull downs or pull-ups are a great option. Doing these types of exercises is really great for physique work and developing a nice wide strong looking back. And by improving your grip strength, you will be better able to perform activities of daily living like carrying heavy objects like groceries. And anytime that you train the muscles in the back, you are setting yourself up for a reduced risk of injury. I recommend including one to two variations of a pulling down motion exercise in your workout routine every week. So we've talked about different movement patterns that you should be focusing on with your upper body, but now let's take a look at lower body movements that are super important for you to practice for developing your overall strength and physique.
(10:42)
The hip hinge is an incredibly important and foundational movement pattern to master as soon as possible when you start to lift the hip, pinch involves flexing your hips or pushing them back behind you, keeping your back straight, and then you bring your hips back forward to a standing position by using your glutes and your hamstrings. Great examples of exercises that incorporate the hip hinge are good mornings using a band or barbell, as well as Romanian deadlifts and stiff like deadlifts. Hip thrusts from a bench are also hip hinge exercises. All of these involve you flexing and extending your hips under resistance. Now, when you're performing any variation of the hip hinge, you need to focus on keeping your back rigid and in alignment by engaging your torso muscles like your abdominals, your obliques, and your erector spina. The primary target muscles of the hip hinge are the gluteus maximus muscles in your bottom, as well as your hamstrings in the back of your thighs and your lower back, your erector spin muscles and your core muscles as well because they have to engage to stabilize your spine.
(11:50)
Mastering this movement will help you to greatly reduce your risk of injury because many people, especially as they get older, develop poor movement patterns when they go to reach down to pick something up from the ground. Having a solid hip hinge where you're using your glutes and you're keeping your back in alignment will help protect your back. When you go to do that, I recommend including some kind of hip hinge exercise in your training program one to two times a week. You can use bands weights, cable machines, and do a variety of exercises like I mentioned before, good mornings, R dls, stiff leg deadlifts and hip thrusts. In addition to developing a solid hip hinge movement pattern, it's also important that you learn how to master the squat. The squat is the basic movement pattern that you use whenever you go to sit down or stand up from something.
(12:41)
In addition to the hip hinge, this movement involves bending the knees and the ankles to lower your body down. And just like with the hip pinch, it's important to perform this exercise while keeping your spine in alignment. So having a solid core is important for this as well. The main muscles involved in performing squats are the quadriceps in the front of your thighs as well as your gluteus maximus muscles in your bottom, as well as your hamstrings. And then your caps and your tibialis anterior muscle along the front of your shin are also important. Here you can perform body weight squats to focus on mastering the form. I also like to give my clients a super band to hold across their shoulders to help cue them to keep their shoulders back and engage their upper back to keep their back straight. As you master this movement pattern, you can make it a little bit harder by adding weight.
(13:30)
I like to start with a goblet squat using a single hand weight or kettlebell in front of the chest, and then progress my clients into dumbbell front squats and eventually over to the barbell where you can perform different variations of the barbell squat, back squats or front squats. The squat is probably the most complicated of these movement patterns, and it usually takes a little bit of time to master it. Here are a couple of tips that I use to help my clients to perform this movement pattern correctly. One is that you want to focus on having your hips, your knees, and your ankles bending at the same time. Now, many people, because they sit in a chair all day for work, tend to have tight hamstrings and calves, and so if you have tightness in the back of your legs, that's going to greatly limit your mobility.
(14:18)
So you may not be able to lower yourself down all the way into a seated position with your thighs parallel to the floor, but that is the position that you want to eventually work towards being able to hold. If you have trouble getting low in the squat without rounding your spine, then you need to focus on developing your ankle mobility, the strengthen your calves, as well as the mobility of your thighs, namely your hamstrings and your quadriceps. Strengthening your back will also help you to be able to keep yourself upright while you're performing this exercise. I recommend taking it slow in the beginning and practicing all of your squats with a slow rate of lowering down for four seconds before pausing at the bottom to make sure that your body's in alignment and balanced. And then coming up for one second, going slow with this movement will help you to ensure that every step of the way as you're lowering your body down into the position, you're keeping your balance, you're using the right muscles, and you're keeping your body in alignment.
(15:17)
It's also a good idea to take a video of yourself performing this exercise from the side so that you can analyze how your ankles, your knees, and your hips are bending if they're going together or if one area is lagging behind the other. As you master the squat exercise, you can make it a little bit more challenging for yourself by performing unilateral squat exercises like Bulgarian split squats or lunges. But focus on mastering the form first and keep in mind that no matter how advanced you get as a lifter, you're always going to need to take some time to focus on your technique. It's very common for even advanced lifters to get some bad habits that slip into their technique here and there, which can greatly limit their ability to lift more and can also lead to risk of injury. So I always recommend taking the reps nice and slow most of the time, train some variation of the squat one to three times per week using a variety of exercises to develop this movement pattern and build muscle throughout your entire body.
(16:19)
And now number seven, the last movement pattern that you should be practicing in your workouts every week is rotation. By this I mean specifically rotation of the torso or thoracic spine. For this, you should practice actually rotating through the thoracic spine with exercises like Russian twists, wood chops, and bicycle crunches, which you also should practice anti rotational movement where you resist rotating while your body is performing some kind of an uneven exercise. Good examples of this would be holding a plank position while doing shoulder taps or lifting your legs or stepping them outside to side. All of this will help you to develop better posture and core control, which is super important for helping you to reduce your risk of injury while performing other exercises. It's also a really great way to develop mobility in your back. I know most of my clients struggle with tightness in their backs and performing rotational exercises greatly reduces the discomfort and the back pain that they feel in their everyday lives in addition to making their core stronger and allowing them to lift heavier.
(17:25)
Now, the main muscles that are involved in thoracic rotation are your obliques muscles in the size of your torso, but other muscles also have to engage here to stabilize you and to assist with the exercise like your latus and doci muscles as well as your abdominals. Practicing rotational exercises is also really important if you are an athlete because most athletic movement involves some form of rotation. So when you practice this movement pattern slowly with resistance, you can ensure that your body will move better while you're doing your athletic performance. This type of movement is important to practice a lot more frequently than the others, and I recommend including at least one exercise that involves thoracic rotation in every workout. You can do this as part of your warmup or actually do it as part of an accessory during the muscle building portion of your workouts. So there you have it. Seven exercises that you should be using in your workout program every single week to help you to develop a better overall physique, improve your athletic performance and improve your strength.
(18:34)
And that's the episode for today. Thank you so much for joining me. Let me know what your thoughts are about these seven exercises, and also let me know if you're using them in your workout routines. Are there any exercise patterns that you are not including that you are thinking about adding more of? Let me know all of that in the comment section. If you're watching this on YouTube, if you're listening to this podcast, thank you so much for listening. Make sure that you have followed the channel, that you always get the latest episodes. If you're on YouTube, make sure to like this video if you found it helpful and subscribe to the channels that you always get the latest videos. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. Remember that you can find my workout programs including exercise tutorial videos that I have made with some other additional coaching and guidance at my website, jd gains.com, J-A-Y-D-I-G-A-I-N-S.com. And also keep in mind that you can join me live and ask your fitness questions on my Twitch channel on Tuesdays. That's Twitch tv slash Jaydigains. You can hang out with me while I do my workout, ask your fitness questions, and just share your progress and hang out. I hope you have a great rest of your day. I'll see you in the next episode. In the meantime, take care.
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