What are the 7 Primal Movements?
The 7 Primal Movements are seven basic movement patterns that form the foundation of physical fitness. These patterns, which include squatting, lunging, pushing, pulling, bending, rotating, and gait (walking/running), are essential to performing everyday activities with ease and strength.
Strengthening these movements helps to improve posture and balance while preventing injury. Additionally, mastering these primal movements can provide a solid basis for other forms of exercise such as weight lifting or sports training. By incorporating exercises based on the 7 primal movements into your workout routine you can take steps towards improved overall health and well-being.
What Primal Movement Patterns?
Primal movement patterns are 7 basic movements that help us stay fit and healthy. They include basic movements that translate into strength in everyday life.
Working out at the gym is great! It helps you stay healthy, grow muscle, improve strength, keep your heart healthy, and lose weight. But a lot of the exercises that you perform in a gym don’t directly translate into functional strength to perform daily activities.
For instance, when you do a hammer curl you are training your biceps to lift in that exact motion and strengthening them for use at that exact angle. Lifting things in that manner will become easier as you continue to develop strength for bicep curls.
But we don’t pick things up in the exact same manner and hand position every day in life, so your hammer curls may or may not even translate into functional strength. Many objects will be in different places in relation to your body and will be different awkward sizes and shapes.
That’s why there are so many variations of bicep curls, to strengthen and grow the same muscle at all different angles.
How Primal Movement Patterns Differ from Exercising at the Gym
Your hammer curls and other weight-lifting exercises may not create as much functional strength to be used toward your daily activities as you’d hoped for, but exercising your primal movement patterns do.
Our early ancestors and animals used these movements to survive in the wild. Imaing a caveman hunting in the wild or any number of different animals running through a field, climbing a tree, or jumping over an obstacle.
Though we may not be so vigorously doing outdoor activities like those on a daily basis, most of our daily movements are very similar. (Though much more relaxed and smaller forms of those movements.)
Doing exercises based on these 7 primal movements will help improve your posture and balance while preventing injury and increasing functional strength that you will use in daily life.
The greatest benefit of those things is that they will help you reduce the injuries that we encounter doing nothing “hard” in particular as we age. (Like bending over or walking up stairs.)
RELATED: What are Primal Movement Exercises? Everything you need to know.
What Are the 7 Primal Movements?
The 7 Primal Movements are exercises that help us stay strong and healthy. They are:
- Squatting. Squatting helps you sit down and stand up with ease. It also helps you bend down and pick things up.
- Lunging. Lunging builds strength in your legs to help you jump, hop, walk up stairs, or step up onto anything.
- Pushing. Pushing helps you lift your own body and heavy boxes, move furniture, and even close doors.
- Pulling. Pulling can make it easier for you to open doors or pull yourself up onto something high. It can help you lower things from above your head and carry luggage.
- Bending. Bending helps with reaching for things on the floor or even on a low shelf.
- Rotating. Rotating can help you navigate through life without hurting yourself or help you to turn around quickly when needed. You even rotate a lot while driving or grocery shopping, it’s a useful movement pattern!
- Gait (walking/running). Gait is walking/running which is how we get from one place to another quickly and safely.
7 Primal Movement Exercises
Check out some of the best primal moment workouts and primal movement exercises to get started! By reading the 7 primal movements above and how basic they sound you may think something like, “I know how to do lunges, I do them at the gym all the time!”
But if you look at that post above and what people often refer to when they say a Primal Movement Workout, you’ll realize the movements are not done at all how you’d expect.
Primal movement workouts and exercises have an animalistic motion to them. There is a lot of crawling, rotating, and floor work. These types of body weight exercises may sound simple, but believe me, they are not!
But once you follow along to a primal movement workout you will understand what I mean. You can actually feel how those moves (MOST of them, sometimes people get a little wild designing primal movement workouts.) could translate into functional strength in your daily life.
Wrapping Up The 7 Primal Movements
The 7 primal movements are a great way to improve your posture, balance, and overall strength. They can help you reduce the risk of injury while increasing functional strength that will be used in day-to-day activities.
By following along with primal movement workouts and exercises you’ll understand how these types of bodyweight exercises translate into real-life scenarios. So if you want to get stronger without going to the gym or using weights, give the 7 Primal Movements a try! You won’t regret it!
