How healthy are your Functional Movement Vital Signs?
We are all familiar with the traditional Doctor’s office experience. You go in, they take your blood pressure, heart rate, listen to you breathe, check your height and weight, and maybe even run some blood work to check how “healthy” you are.
Despite how good (and important) all of these vital signs are, if you can’t move effectively, we at Peak Performance would argue that you are not, in fact, healthy.
The definition of health, according to Miriam Webster is:
“The condition of being sound in body, mind or spirit”
“A condition in which someone or something is thriving or doing well”
A key component that is often missed in our regular physicals and our own estimation of our health is our functional mobility, including essential movements like the squat, deadlift, lunge, overhead press, and even our ability to get up and down from the floor.
These are the movements that allow us to perform our normal daily functions, including basic household chores like emptying the dishwasher, doing laundry, and even more meaningful activities like picking up our kids.
These movements are the things that bring meaning to our lives and that form the foundation for all of the activities we enjoy.
So often we see potential patients who are in need of our care, but think they are doing okay anyways, because who needs to squat down or be able to pick up something heavy from the floor without pain? They don’t see how it affects both their own quality of life, as well as that of their family and friends who they have burdened with some of their own essential independence.
Today we are going to go over a few movements that we feel are as essential to daily life as a normal heart rate and blood pressure. These are movements that fit into our everyday lives, and should be able to be performed both without pain and under load in order to truly live a healthy lifestyle and maintain our independence into our old age.
To be clear: the inability to perform just one of these movements (or pain with these movements) equates to having high blood pressure, tachycardia (clinically high heart rate), or being pre-diabetic. It affects every aspect of our daily lives, as well as our quality of life and prevents us from performing the daily maintenance we need in order to properly care for our joints and build/maintain strength as we age.
Functional Movement Vital Sign #1: The Squat
The squat is one of the most basic and essential movement patterns, requiring mobility in the hips, knees, ankles, and good core control to perform both with and without load. This is essential for everyday tasks ranging from bending down to pick up furniture to gardening and reaching into low cabinets. This movement is essential for preserving knee, hip, and ankle health as well as strengthening the core, and making sure that when you’re 80, you can still get up and down from a chair!
Functional Movement Vital Sign #2: The Deadlift
The deadlift is by far the most controversial weightlifting movement we will discuss, and in our eyes is possibly the most important movement vital sign to be able to perform. In a nutshell, this encapsulates your ability to pick things up from the floor and lower them in a controlled manner. This is one of the most essential movements we perform on a daily basis, from truly lifting heavy stuff around the house to picking up our littles, all the way to something as simple as picking up a pencil from the floor. If you don’t have the ability to hinge at the hips and stabilize your spine under load, you can not adequately function independently, and you are completely useless if you ever decide to move houses (just saying). This is also one of the most feared movements in patients who have experienced back injuries, and is one that we find doctors frequently caution against, leading patients to think it is a dangerous movement and usually to replace it with a movement that does not suit the demands of their environment and lifestyle.
When done correctly, the deadlift is an incredibly effective way to strengthen your spine, hips, hamstrings, and core, and is the most energy efficient way to lift heavy shit from the floor. Therefore, in our eyes, it is one of the most essential movement patterns to daily life.
Functional Movement Vital Sign #3: The Overhead Press
Whether it’s a strict press, push press, push jerk, or military press, the ability to push weight overhead is an essential movement pattern and another one that we find patients are often cautioned against by the medical community. The problem is, if you can’t lift overhead, how do you expect to reach into a standard top cabinet and put a plate away? No matter the shoulder/neck/upper back injury, if you are unable to lift overhead, you cannot be described as healthy or fit.
Functional Movement Vital Sign #4: The Push and Pull
Ever needed to push or pull a piece of furniture out of the way to clean or rearrange? How about pushing a car to a gas station after running out of gas? How about pulling yourself out of a deep pool when you can’t get to a ladder? Like it or not, we all need the core and upper body strength to push and pull heavy objects (including our own body weight) so that we can navigate through life independently. As with the other functional movement patterns, we should be able to push and pull heavy objects without pain and with enough strength that we don’t often have to rely on other people to help us.
Functional Movement Vita Sign #5: The Lunge
The importance of single leg strength and stability utilized in the lunge cannot be emphasized enough, especially considering that we spend a huge portion of our lives on one leg (ever gone up or down stairs or gone for a walk or run?) A lunge is also a great strategy to get up and down from the floor, especially if your hands or full (every mom or dad with a newborn knows this struggle!) As such, we believe that a lunge is a functional movement pattern that is essential for daily life, and that should also be trained for both overall health and for fitness.
Functional Movement Vital Sign #6: The Burpee
*Cue loud groaning...
We get it. Burpees suck. The fact of the matter is, we all need to be able to get down on the floor and get back up, and no other movement pattern more fully encapsulates this need than the burpee. We love to hate them, but unfortunately we need to do them, both in our daily lives, and in our training.
Today, we’ve discussed 6 different functional movement vital signs. All of these have essential uses in our daily lives, but all of these are also common struggles and pain points. If you are struggling with pain or difficulty performing any of these functional movement patterns, stop accepting this as normal. You cannot truly be considered healthy if your vital signs are abnormal, so why do we think we are healthy if we cannot perform basic functional movement patterns?
If your vital signs are abnormal, call your doctor.
If your functional movement vital signs are abnormal, call your Performance PT: (864) 362-0072
Our 3-step process:
Get Out of Pain
Address the Root Cause
Reach Peak Performance
