Skip to main content
ShapierLab
Understand your body. Shape your progress.
Hub
Beginner
4 min read

The fundamental movements

The Movement pillar answers one question: how does the body produce this movement? Six families of movement — squat, hip hinge, pushes and pulls — provide a reading grid for almost every exercise, joined by walking and running.
The Movement pillar answers the question: how does the body produce this movement?
Exercises are countless; ways of moving are far fewer. Six families are enough to describe most resistance movements: squatting down, bending forward by folding at the hips, pushing in front of you, pushing overhead, pulling towards you, pulling from above. A bodyweight squat and a back squat belong to the same family: the same joints work, in the same order.
Two movements escape that grid and joined the pillar later: walking and running. They are not loading patterns but ways of travelling, and they were missing while eight pages in this corpus referred to them to explain what a muscle is for. What separates them from each other, incidentally, is not speed but the presence of an instant with no support.

What a movement page contains

Every page describes a movement, not one single technique.
  • What the movement is for: what it moves, and in which direction.
  • The phases, broken down: descent, bottom position, ascent, lockout.
  • The joints involved and the direction in which they travel.
  • The muscles that produce the movement, those that assist them, and those that stabilise without producing any visible displacement.
  • The variations tied to build or to equipment, and why two people doing it correctly may not look alike.
  • The common misunderstandings, corrected without any value judgement.
Technical vocabulary stays minimal. The term kinetic chain is defined the first time it appears on each page where it is used.

How to work through the pillar

The simplest approach is to start with the movement you already practise, then follow the links to the structures that produce it in the Body pillar.
Two pairs are worth reading together: the horizontal push and the horizontal pull on one side, the vertical push and the vertical pull on the other. Setting them side by side brings out what separates them: the direction of the load and the orientation of the segments change the role of each muscle, without making the movement better or worse.
The squat and the hip hinge also read well in parallel. Both bend the hip and the knee, but in different proportions, which shifts the load between thigh, hip and back.
Caution
A description, not an instruction
These pages explain how a movement works. They prescribe no load, no number of repetitions and no technical correction suited to any particular person, and they do not replace direct observation by a qualified professional.
If a movement causes pain, the answer is not to be found on a biomechanical analysis page.

What the pillar connects

A movement is where the other pillars meet. It calls on structures described in the Body pillar, it consumes the energy described in the Energy pillar, and repeating it produces the changes described in the Adaptation pillar.
It is also the pillar most exposed to received wisdom, because every movement comes with instructions passed from gym to gym. The pages therefore separate what belongs to mechanics — verifiable, described in the literature — from what belongs to training preference, which varies with goals and with people.

The eleven movements of the pillar

The first six are the ones that structure resistance work: squat, hip hinge, pushes and pulls. Two have joined them, each posing a problem the other six do not. The lunge narrows the base of support and makes sideways control of the pelvis a constraint in its own right. The loaded carry removes the movement of the load altogether: everything in it becomes holding.
Rotation has since joined them: it is the only pattern that plays out in the horizontal plane, and the one whose origin is most often misplaced — the range comes from the hips and the thoracic spine, hardly at all from the lumbar.
Sport-specific movements are not part of this set.
Put it into practice in Shapier

Find exercises for each movement family

Picking concrete exercises for each of these movement families happens in the Shapier library; Body Lab only explains how these movements work.
Find exercises for each movement family
Body Lab explains; Shapier lets you act and track.

Every movement in the pillar

  • Squat
    The squat is a simultaneous flexion, then extension, of the hips, knees and ankles with the feet planted on the ground. This page describes its phases, the joints involved, the muscles that contribute and the most widespread misconceptions about it.
    With a 3D scene
  • Hip hinge
    The hip hinge concentrates the movement at the hip: the pelvis tilts over the femoral heads, the torso leans forward, and the knees stay only slightly bent. This page describes its phases, its joints, its muscles and the confusions that surround it.
    With a 3D scene
  • Lunge
    The lunge is a staggered stance: one leg forward, one behind, and a body descending between the two. That deliberate imbalance is what sets it apart from the squat.
    With a 3D scene
  • Horizontal push
    The horizontal push drives the hands away from the trunk along an axis perpendicular to it. This page describes its phases, the shoulder and elbow joints, the prime movers and stabilisers, and the most frequent confusions about it.
    With a 3D scene
  • Vertical push
    The vertical push takes the hand above the head. This page describes its phases, the coordination between the shoulder and the shoulder blade, the prime movers and stabilisers, and the most widespread confusions about overhead movements.
    With a 3D scene
  • Horizontal pull
    The horizontal pull brings the hands towards the trunk along an axis perpendicular to it. This page describes its phases, the shoulder, shoulder blade and elbow joints, the muscles involved and the most frequent confusions about it.
    With a 3D scene
  • Vertical pull
    The vertical pull brings the arm back towards the trunk from a position above the head. This page describes its phases, the rotation of the shoulder blade that accompanies it, the muscles involved and the most widespread confusions about it.
    With a 3D scene
  • Rotation
    The only pattern that plays out in the horizontal plane. The range comes from the hips and the thoracic spine, hardly at all from the lumbar — and confusing the two changes everything.
    With a 3D scene
  • Loaded carry
    Walking while holding a load is nothing like an arm exercise. It is holding work, where the grip, the trunk and the pelvis must hold while the legs move.
    With a 3D scene
  • Walking
    The most frequent movement of the human body, and the least described. One step involves some twenty muscles whose main work is braking, and a balance problem nothing signals.
    With a 3D scene
  • Running
    What separates running from walking is not speed but an instant with no support. That instant changes everything: the forces taken, the role of the tendons and the way energy circulates.
    With a 3D scene

Available offline

Offline download is available in the mobile app.

Trust and method

Author
equipe-editoriale-shapier
Editorial review
Thanh Chau
Scientific review
Pending
Published on
August 2, 2026
Reviewed on August 2, 2026
Next review due August 2, 2027
Limits of this page
  • This entry page describes how the pillar is organised; the detailed analysis of each movement, its sources and its limits sit on the pages concerned.
Educational content. Body Lab does not diagnose and does not replace professional advice.
How we work