The Basis Of Athletic Achievement? Movement Quality!

Movement Quality: The Basis of Athleticism

Hardly a week goes by without your classic story in the sports press about some burly 250lb NFL star learning yoga, or maybe even ballet, or of course the tale of the baseball star who does T’ai Chi. Aside from a reputation for being paradoxically un-masculine, what do these traditional dance and mindfulness exercises, Hindu devotional movements and a ‘high’ traditional Chinese martial art have in common?

Attention to movement quality. That's what they all have in common. T’ai Chi focuses on the precision and quality of movement to a very great degree.

Two years, focusing on movement quality.

Want to know yet another activity where participants focus on movement quality?

How about Olympic weightlifting? Oly lifters are widely known to be some of the most explosive athletes on the planet, and while they might not be as strong as powerlifters, for instance, they are usually significantly strong. Yet one of the most famous and successful Olympic weightlifting coaches of all time, A. S. Medvedev, recommended that newbies to the sport spend their first two years lifting weights no higher than half bodyweight, with technical proficiency being their only goal.

Let’s find another… how about Brazillian Jui Jutsu? 

BJJ is a part of every MMA fighter’s arsenal now, ever since the first UFC where the then-bright star of Brazil’s Gracie family wiped the floor with a big range of fighters from striking disciplines by pulling them to the floor and choking them unconscious with an ease that made the martial arts world blink and sit up. We don’t have to swallow the claims made for BJJ that it’s the most effective martial art in the world to observe that it works. 

Yet this highly effective system, full of moves designed to break people’s arms and strangle them, is full of one and two person drills designed to improve movement quality in BJJ and even has its own exercise system, Gynastica Natural (natural gymnastics), designed to improve movement quality generally. 

So that seems like wide agreement: training that focuses on movement quality is training that produces results. What does movement quality consist of?

What Is Movement Quality?

Movement quality is produced by interactions between the nervous system and the musculoskeletal system. Consider an Olympic lifter performing a snatch. If you aren’t familiar with this movement, a snatch consists of lifting a barbell off the floor to shoulder height, rapidly squatting under it with the bar held overhead and then standing erect. I’d go and spend a few minutes on a video site checking out people doing this, for an awe-inspiring display of athleticism, if nothing else.

Back?

Good. Now, the snatch is a good contender for the fastest movement in professional sports. Get it wrong and you could drop a barbell on your head. It requires a big range of motion, great stability, great strength, power, speed… great movement quality.

They take the movement apart and work on strength by doing back squats and overhead squats. They learn it as sudden transitions between set positions, and get fast in the transitions and stable in the positions.

The first time you try to overhead squat, one of two things happen: you don’t get anything like all the way down, or you fall over. The combination of stability, strength and mobility it demands is daunting. But with constant practice it becomes second nature, a position that can be held easily. That familiarity is key to developing movement quality.

Developing Movement Quality

By the time an O-lifter picks up a heavy barbell, the positions of the sport are ingrained. They might be using a heavier weight, but they’re lifting it with a movement that’s as familiar as tying your shoelaces or opening a door. Again, that’s movement quality in action.

The other common way to learn good movement quality is the T’ai Chi way: do it very slowly. It’s a common misconception that T’ai Chi is meant to be done slowly. In reality, T’ai Chi is meant to be practiced slowly: when students learn combat applications the goal is to be, not slow, but very very fast. This is supposed to be achieved by having ingrained the movements in detail by practicing them very slowly, and by having highly efficient movements.

Leaving aside the combat effectiveness of T’ai Chi for a moment, does this slow movement actually lead to better movement quality? Boxers certainly seem to think so: you can see them practicing in the mirror at gyms, doing combinations slowly, watching their guards and posture, studying their footwork and correcting their bad habits – working on the quality of their movements. 

Movement Quality Drills

Here’s a couple of drills for building better movement quality in the gym. I’ve used the bent row as the example movement, but just substitute whatever you’re actually doing.

1: Slow and Light

Use an empty bar, a broomstick or a plastic pipe. Go through the motion of the lift as slowly as you can, focussing on your breathing as you go, and feeling the shape of your core and lower back and thoracic spine posture as you work through it. Do 8-10 singles and try to make each one better in some way than the one before it  - a straighter back, a higher pull or a more stable base, or a smoother movement. Then lift as usual, and feel the difference!

2: Slow and ‘Heavy’

For this, you’ll use a load about a third to half your normal training load. While the load is less, though, the effort should be the same. In other words, you’re going to lift a lighter load as if it was heavy. Contract as hard as you can. The idea here is to focus on movement quality with heavy contraction, to get over the trap of having a great, neat empty-bar lift and a horrible, muscling real lift. Work on the contraction patterns, too – where should you be contracting hardest, at which point in the lift? Again, do 8-10 singles, trying to constantly improve, then lift as usual and see the difference.

3: Loaded Positions

In the bent row, there are really two main positions, the top of your pull and the bottom. You’re going to use a bar with about half your normal training load to hold these positions for time. Start with the top position, and go for a hold of up to a minute, trying all the time to contract harder and lock the bar into position.

Don’t try to pull the bar higher, try to lock it into place wherever the top of your pull is. Then lower the bar to the bottom position and hold that for a minute. There’s no disguising the fact that this is both hard and boring, but it does mean you’re going to be more used to holding those positions when you lift. Ideally, the bottom position of the lift with your normal training weight should start to feel almost effortless.

4: Do Some Cartwheels

No, I’m not joking. Yes, it’s for kids – but most kids have far better movement quality than most ‘fit’ adults. If you can’t do a cartwheel you’re not fit. Further, it’s a great way to improve general movement quality and trigger your proprioceptive system to get better.

Proprioception is the nervous component that tells you where the parts of your body are relative to one another, and it’s a really important feedback system for movement quality development. Make sure your cartwheels are down a line, and go for ten each side, then start trying to make them neater. Since they wake up the proprioceptive system without exhausting the CNS they’re a good addition to a warm-up.