The 6 movements you MUST be doing for a great body

I have used just six movements over the past five years in my training to take my physique from this to this building effectively all the muscle I could want, and at the same time, built the strength and mobility to move my body like this, unlock all the physical abilities I could want from it as well. In this video, I’m going to show you exactly what those movements are and why if you train them properly, they are all you ever need for these goals, but stick with me because these movements themselves when trained using a traditional approach, aren’t actually enough. And using those traditional methods, you go in struggle to ever build a comprehensive strength programme, which is why traditionally strength training has become so complicated and hard to get right. There’s an important difference in the way that you actually train these movements that if you ignore, you’re leaving a huge amount of gains on the table and it’s going to lead you to getting fewer or no results.
But if you do get it right, it means that just these six movements are all you ever need to maximise strength and muscle gain in under 40 minutes of training a week. A really common problem I see in strength training, I have been through myself a lot in the past, is doing a bunch of different exercises, having a really extensive programme seemingly covering everything and not making tangible progress in any of it. As a result of the traditional method of strength training, the fitness industry has massively over complicated what’s required to build full body strength and mobility. It made us think we need a million different exercises to cover all our bases depending on our unique goals and strength deficits, postural issues, et cetera, et cetera. If you go and do some research online, it’s very easy for your strength routine to quickly become a laundry list of stuff that takes plenty of time to do but doesn’t work.
You keep yourself really busy, your programme looks good, but you don’t reach your strength goals and your physique doesn’t change. In reality, there is only so much range of motion that we need to build strength in if we want all the muscle mass and mobility possible that our bodies can build. If we map it out, it almost seems too simple, but it’s quite straightforward. If we think about upper body training, everything hinges around the shoulder, so we can basically take our shoulder through full range of motion from extension, holding your arm back like this all the way up to flexion where it’s over your head like this. That is basically complete range of motion pushing. And then if we reverse that and go from flexion down to extension, then we’ve covered full range of motion pulling. Now you’ve also got your elbow joint, but we can think of that as a kind of accessory joint that helps the shoulder do the primary movement.
Now, if we think about the lower body, so if we think about the range of motion in the hip, we can basically go from full flexion sitting in the bottom of the squat to full extension and think of the top of a jumping position. And again, like with our body, our knee assist with that to make that movement pattern happen. And then we think about the reverse. It’s hip flexion, so moving from full extension to a full flexed squat position or from standing to squatting very simply, those are basically in terms of building strength and mobility, all we can train those ranges of motion. That’s the basic theory. Now, the issue that comes up when we look at traditional strength training is this traditional methods of strength training only train one specific portion of that range of motion in an exercise. If you look at the range we have in the shoulder, it’s quite a lot from all the way back behind our body to above our head.
Or if you look at the hip, it’s all the way from this deep squatting position all the way to fully extended standing up. If you look at traditional strength training, whether it be in the gym or using body weight exercises, machines, barbells, whatever, no exercise trains either of those entire ranges of motion in either direction. At max intensity through the full thing at best, we get a small portion, maybe 10%, that actually reaches a point of failure on our max effort reps. And that is because of something called the strength curve, which basically describes the fact that for any movement pattern, we don’t have even strength throughout the lot of it, but the movements we use to train those movement patterns have a fixed level of resistance, meaning at all, but one tiny portion of the range of motion, there is a gap between our maximum potential strength and the strength that we’re demanding of ourselves with the exercise.
For instance, if you think about a bench press when you fail at pushing the barbell up, it’s always at a specific point in the rep. It’s about halfway when you’re maximally mechanically disadvantaged and it’s harder. No one ever fails their rep of bench press at the very bottom of the rep or at the very top. It just doesn’t happen. And that’s not because the weight of the barbell is changing. It’s always a fixed load. If you think about the force required to move the barbell, it’s always at the same level depending on how much weight is on the bar, but our potential, our strength potential changes across the range of motion. And so at the start, I’ve got a bit more strength as I reach the middle point of the rep, the sticking point where things get really heavy. Imagine doing a one rep max that you fail.
You reach this point towards the middle where it’s impossible. If you get past that sticking point or your spotter helps you, suddenly things get much easier again and towards the top it’s a piece of cake. And that’s because of the strength curve. Your body’s own mechanical ability to produce force changes depending on the positioning of your body, and that’s just due to biomechanics. You can look at the physics of it and whatever, but it doesn’t really matter. When we’re trying to build strength, we’re trying to signal our bodies to grow stronger, build muscle tissue, improve their performance, their mobility. The thing that signals that progress is the proximity of the force we’re demanding on our muscles to their maximum ability to produce force. So the intensity, the closer we are to failure to maximum level exertion, the stronger the signal that we send and the more gains we make in this rep of bench press.
If I’ve closely matched this to my maximum level of strength, I’m at the end of a set, it’s getting really heavy and I’m only just able to get it up trying as hard as possible through that sticking point at best, I basically train this portion of the range of motion really effectively or maximally effectively. The rest is pretty lacklustre. All of this is somewhat intense, but it’s far from maximum. And then we have this whole section here and here we we’re basically doing nothing. We’re not getting any specific range strength gains throughout that whole section of the range of motion. And so what this means is, yeah, we need multiple max intensity reps just to get a decent amount of work. And that also means there are multiple sets of building up to that level, which talk about in other videos, but more specifically for us here, it means that there’s a lot of range of motion.
We’re not training and therefore not gaining in terms of strength, in terms of mobility and in terms of muscle mass that we could build in response to that max intensity training. And so the result of this, if we’re talking about selecting exercises, selecting movements for a comprehensive strength programme, assuming we do want to build as much strength, muscle and mobility as possible using traditional fixed resistance strength training, it means that each exercise on its own is quite cheap. If we said that this is the range of motion for a basic movement pattern, let’s call it horizontal pushing like the bench press, we’ll talk about this more in a second, but that’s basically taking the first half of your shoulders flexion range of motion, so from max extension to about halfway through its plex position. So it’s about half the shoulders range of motion in a flexion direction, horizontal pushing the pattern that the bench press trains in terms of max effort work.
The bench press only maybe trains one slice properly at max intensity like that, but we still have for our movement pattern of horizontal, pushing a whole bunch of range of motion that we want to train because we want to make all that progress. And so the result is that, yeah, cool, we’ve got our bench press in our programme. We’re training it hard intensely, we’re building up strength on it, we’re doing everything we can do with that movement. It means that we still need maybe another nine movements, assuming this was about 10% of that range of motion, which is probably being pretty generous if you’re talking about maximum maximum intensity. We still have 90% of the range of this movement pattern still left, not optimally trained. And so theoretically we’d then need another nine different movements just to cover that movement pattern and train it properly.
So even if we do our best bench pressing possible, it’s still a 90% inefficiency as a movement for something that’s trying to train horizontal pushing. And as I said, that’s ignoring the fact that most sets take 80% of the set just to build up to the reps where you are almost failing trading at max intensity, which takes you more down to a 2% efficiency. We’ve got other videos discussing that in more depth. So what is the solution to this problem? Because if we were trying to cover all our range of motion for all our basic movement patterns, doing it this way is going to take a lot of different exercises and getting it done in six is not feasible as you probably already imagine. If you thought about this range of motion spectrum like a rainbow, each little section, a different colour from red at one end, range of motion all the way to purple at the other end range, normal gym exercises, bench press, pull pull-ups, cable machines only target one colour bench press gets you green.
And so if you want to have the full spectrum of colours, you need to insert a different exercise for each colour itself individually. A really good example of this is squats. If we’re trying to work the full range hip extension from a fully flexed squatting position up to a fully extended standing position, squats just like the bench press only train one little section here. Maybe you’ve got green covered by the actual squat because there’s that one section in the lower middle part of the squat where you get stuck as soon as you’re past that, the top becomes super easy, looks very much like a bench press up here is just a piece of cake. And so if we want to then train high and hip extension, we need to add in more movements like deadlift might be up here to train this part. And then, okay, we want to train slightly higher.
Maybe we do a box squat or a hack squat. And then, okay, I want to train also my knee extension right at the top. So then we might add in a knee extension there. And then I want to train, oh, really high end deep violet level hip extension. So then I might add in rack pools as well, like the top part of the deadlift. And so we put in all these different movements for our lower body just to try and train. It is a large range of motion from squat two standing, but to train each of those bits, we need to add in all these different exercises, one per colour, and then we’re still missing parts of the rainbow. There’s colours that aren’t even there because it’s just very hard to design an individual exercise for each specific section of the range of motion that inevitably, even if you’ve got a really good programme, it’s comprehensive and you’re training it all really hard, you’re still going to have gaps.
It’s just a very difficult exercise to engineer this using this approach of fixed resistance exercises. So if we want a programme that’s comprehensive and covers the entire rainbow for all our movement patterns, what the hell do we do? The answer lies in the strength curve. Now what we’ve got with fixed resistance exercises is inherently one level of force required across the full range of motion, but we can’t change, we can’t adapt the strength curve because that’s just inherent in the human body and how it moves, but we can change the resistance. And so if we adjust the difficulty of the movements as we train a rep, what we can do is match the difficulty to the strength curve. And so rather than having a max intensity portion of the rep just here, we can have the rep max intensity throughout the entire thing. And it’s not that complicated to do because if you use body weight movements whose difficulty comes from the positioning of your body, then there’s nothing stopping you from adjusting that positioning at each point in the rep.
And if you take your time and change things as you train, then it’s very easy to find your maximum, find your limit, and just keep adjusting things so that it stays there the whole way through. And doing this, you can effectively stack different exercises all into the one thing. And so you effectively get the benefits of 10 different exercises in a rep of one single movement. And doing that, you basically guarantee that every single exercise is itself a full rainbow, the full spectrum training, every single section of the range of motion at its limit and getting all the benefits possible of to strength and muscle mass mobility. So what does this look like? Well, let’s take a few examples. If we’re talking about the bench press, then the equivalent using constant max intensity body weight training would be a plange pushup or a variation of that.
And so the difficulty here comes from the forward lean. You have how far your shoulders are in front of your hands, which puts force on the shoulder joint as it tries to flex. And if we can just keep adjusting how much lean we put on the movement, how far forward we get our shoulders from our hands, it allows us to do exactly this and match it so that not just that hard section of the bench press occurs, but that level of intensity is reached all the way through from deep shoulder flexion all the way up to the point where we’re pressed out horizontally as far as possible. Looking at the squat movement pattern, again, a back squat just targets that one tiny portion, that 10%, but if we stacked on say 75% of our body weight in weighted vest and did a single leg squat and just assisted ourselves as little as possible throughout the range of motion, then all the way up to quite close to the top, we can achieve maximum intensity, keep it at maximum difficulty, and therefore all the way until we no longer need assistance, we can work at a hundred percent intensity and get the benefits of doing, like I said, a back squat, a box squat, a hack squat, a deadlift, a rack, pull all in the one movement and with one rep a week, cover your entire lower body’s extension range of motion.
So given that principle of adjusting the load to keep it at a hundred percent so that we train not only the portion of the range of motion that is difficult for a given exercise, but we actually make the entire range of motion maximally difficult intentionally and therefore gain the whole spectrum, we gain strength and muscle across the full range of motion. What ranges motion do we want to train? And this brings me back to the original model of ranges of motion, and at this point it’s really simple because as long as we train our shoulder through full range of motion flexion and then extension, and as long as we train our hips through full range of motion extension and flexion, then we’re good. And so in achieving that, we basically just need four movements for upper body, one that can take us from full shoulder extension to partway through that range of motion, and then another movement to take us from there up to full shoulder flexion.
And then we need the reverse. So something that can take us from shoulder flexion down to midway and then from there to full shoulder extension. So to achieve that, all we need is basically a horizontal push and a vertical push and then a vertical pull and a horizontal pull provided we are, again, keeping the difficulty at maximum intensity throughout those ranges of motion. We then ensure that we’ve trained the full range of our shoulder from full extension deflection and back again with four movements, and it doesn’t actually really matter what movements we use to do that. Again, as long as we are training that full range and able to adjust the difficulty of whatever movements we’re using to keep it at a hundred percent, then our system’s working. And so what we use in our system for this is again, body weight training allows us to adjust that difficulty because the load comes from the positioning.
And so we just use the basics for those four movement patterns, a form of pushup or plange pushup for horizontal, pushing a form of row or front lever, row for horizontal, pulling a form of one arm chin up for vertical pulling, and then a form of handstand pushup for vertical pushing. And all of these scale completely down from zero level difficulty up to elite level strength because the point isn’t where you’re up to. The point is just what your maximum strength is at any given point in time. So you need to be able to adjust all the way down from zero to really high if you’re going to be able to A, train effectively and B, progress from beginner to advanced. So we’ve got other videos outlining what those progression schemes look like for each movement and how you can adjust the difficulty across that full spectrum as needed.
But the principle here is one exercise per movement pattern constantly adjusted to keep it at max and everything’s covered for your lower body. Again, there’s theoretically two movements. There’s a squatting motion which takes you from a squat, full hip flexion to standing full hip extension. And so the way we train that is with a single leg squat. So as I said in the example, we load up 75% body weight, spot ourselves through the full range of motion, keep things at a hundred percent by just using as much help as needed for the opposites of the reverse squat, going from standing to squat. This is the only part of our system that I don’t think is perfect because I’m yet to come up with a way that works really effectively for training the opposite of a squat. So what I have settled on for now, which works fantastically well is just actually attacking knee flexion, so getting this part of it right?
And so what we use for that is a Nordic curl, again, not traditional but adjusting things as needed, but the end goal being a Nordic curl, full body weight straight that covers knee flexion. The only thing left here that we haven’t technically covered is hip flexion. Person who has pioneered a lot of work in these kind of reverse squat motions is Ben Patrick knees over toes. He has some cable things I think he does with that, and I think a lot of his experience has shown that there are huge athletic benefits to training the opposite side of what gets trained in a squat. However, I haven’t really bothered going down that route. I may change my view on this in future, but the main thing that seems the most important for muscle and strength development and counterbalancing the squat is the Nordic, the knee flexion.
So that’s what we’ll start with there, but that’s it. They’re the six movements, so you should be able to see by now that it’s actually not the movements specifically that are magic. The magic is in the training technique. The magic is in throwing away the traditional model of having one load that you use for your full exercise. You only adjust between sets and end up with this really inefficient training that misses a lot, and instead actually learning to adjust the difficulty of things as you train, which is yes, very different, yes, requires a new skill to be learned. Yes, it’s probably something you’re not comfortable with yet, but it means that these six movements literally cover everything possible and you get your training done in under 40 minutes a week whilst maxing out progress and eliminating a bunch of junk volume from your programme and eliminating the need to have 20, 30, 40 different exercises in your routine, which still miss developing certain parts of your body, both functionality and muscle wise.
I used to be so the opposite, obviously falling into the traps of listening to all the things that you should be doing with your training and trained a lot of specific movements. I would do handstand press work static holds for my various calisthenic skills. I did isolation work to try and build certain muscles, scapula work, bulletproofing mobility stuff that’s trying to get at weak links and set up your body to be able to do higher level skills by addressing the uighur things. But I eventually just got tired of feeling busy and simplified my work down to just five or six space compound lifts and going hard as possible at them and just really trying to wreck myself, go as heavy as possible and build raw muscle and strength. Lo and behold, the result of that was building muscle and strength. And when I built that raw ability to just exert force, all those other things I was trying to achieve came with it just by getting my handstand push up on my vertical, pulling really strong.
I unlock handstands, handstand presses, even stole presses just for free with hardly any practise of getting skill right, because I had the raw strength to be able to do the movements, getting my basic horizontal pushing and pulling. So building up my level of plant pushup and front lever row with this technique got me all the static holds and stuff for free front levers, back levers plan has all improved massively, and that’s without a single bit of static hold work at all. Think about our rainbow metaphor. Static holds are like a tiny sliver, like a very specific half colour where you’re leaving 99% of the range of motion untrained to me ridiculously inefficient. Hopefully that should make sense to you now too. But basically this just taught me that you don’t need to target things specifically with strength. You just want to build global strength, and then you get all the parts of the spectrum, all the specific skills for free.
Same thing goes with muscles, I think trying to isolate muscles and build your body, bodybuilders love doing that in my experience. Again, a complete waste of time in that the muscle comes as a way of your body getting stronger and being able to perform on these basics. And so again, we’ve covered entire range of motion by training of max intensity. There isn’t really anything else to train other than getting these to a higher level. And so if you want muscle, just focus on doing this well and you’ve by definition buy a model covered all the muscle that you could want to build, and I’ve yet to see a single person implement this and be disappointed seeing certain deficits in their physique. This builds comprehensive full body strength and therefore muscle tissue. So for skills or for aesthetics, you don’t need anything else. Another concern that comes up is thinking maybe, oh, well this is six movements.
Cool, but don’t I need novel training stimulus and I need to keep mixing things up to make sure my body’s got something to adapt to. Changing your training is just a great way of staying distracted and from hiding a lack of progress. The way you keep the stimulus novel and tell your body to grow is by making things heavier. You need to be increasing the level of difficulty over time as fast as possible. Pushing your body to work at higher and higher levels of strength. Sticking with these consistently for five years has allowed me to get very good at training them, meaning I can milk the most out of every single portion of every rep that I do and make maximum progress. Switching exercise and changing things up is just breaking rhythm and meaning. You have skill acquisition to achieve again before you start leaning into strength gains that are purely from muscle gain.
So I just see switching things up as being inefficient. Make one routine that covers everything and works and then just lock into progressing on it long term’s, a much more straightforward way of guaranteeing consistent progress in my experience. So those six movement patterns, the most important takeaway is to start adjusting the difficulty of the movements as you train so that you gain strength, not just on one tiny portion of the range of motion, but on the lot. If you can do that, the six movements all you’ll ever need to get everything you want from your body, the things you need to learn are how to find maximum intensity and adjust the difficulty of the movements you do to train there. How to get the right weekly dose of training when you’re doing super potent work might sound like it’s easy to underdo doing this much work because I think it’s much more easy to overdo it and there are problems you can run into with that. And then learn to fuel yourself with the right nutrition to be able to respond back to this training for those latter two things. I dive pretty deep into everything you need to know in this video, so if you haven’t watched it already, I’d recommend checking that out. And if you want to see some more stuff on this training method, generally learn more about the movements, how they train them, well then YouTube’s going to recommend a video for you here, so go watch that. Thanks for watching.