Activities of daily living require movement in all directions. Sports demand movement in all directions. The human body is designed to move in all directions. Training should include, and help improve, movement in all directions. The three basic movement directions are forward and backward (sagittal plane), side to side (frontal plane or lateral), and rotation (transverse plane).
Too often, the training programs of athletes and general fitness exercisers overemphasize sagittal-plane exercises such as the Power Lifts (squats, dead lifts, and bench presses), Olympic Lifts (snatches, cleans, and their variations), pullups, pulldowns, and rows. These popular lifts can be extremely valuable for both athletes and fitness enthusiasts. However, the power and Olympic lifts have been around for so long that they have unfortunately become almost synonymous with athletic conditioning and staples of many general fitness programs.
We should remember that powerlifting and Olympic lifting are sports in and of themselves. Training programs for athletes competing in these sports should have a primary emphasis on these movements, and success in these sports can legitimately be measured by the amount of weight one can lift. But just because a powerlifter’s success can be measured by a one-repetition maximum in the dead lift, squat, or bench press, the success of most other athletes should not be. Nevertheless, almost every high school and college weight room in the country has a leader board posting the strongest players on the team, as measured by their maximum weight in these lifts. The players whose names appear on these leader boards are often among the coach’s most respected players.
The father of one of our over-achieving 115-pound female lacrosse players, now playing in college, proudly sent us a video of his daughter deadlifting over 300 pounds during her college strength and conditioning program and receiving congratulations from her teammates and coaches. Our first thoughts were, “I sure hope she doesn’t injure herself,” and “What does a one-repetition maximum dead lift have to do with the very aerobically demanding, multidirectional game of lacrosse?” The lack of correlation between an athlete’s maximum strength in the Olympic or power lifts and performance on the lacrosse, softball, baseball, football, etc. field is not necessarily the main concern. The greater concern is that too much emphasis on these lifts could take time away from more multidirectional movement training and potentially hinder athletic performance.
One of the body’s adaptations to performing a high volume of sagittal-plane exercises with extremely heavy loads is the development of great protective stability (stiffness) for those exercises. This stability can potentially restrict speed, fluidity, range of motion, and power in other planes of movement. Imagine if a professional golfer followed a six-month powerlifting regimen, gained ten pounds of muscle, and increased his squat, bench press, and dead lift by 50%. It is quite possible that his golf game could actually decline instead of improve.
This does not mean that athletes should not perform heavily loaded sagittal-plane exercises. However, such exercises, if utilized, should not necessarily be the mainstay of a golfer’s exercise program. Does this mean that the golfer (golf being a transverse-plane, rotation-dominated sport, with a very light load [golf club] and extremely high velocity [swing speed]) should never do heavily loaded sagittal-plane lifts? Some might argue that. Others might argue that the posterior-core strengthening, hormonal stimulation, explosiveness, muscle building, and numerous other benefits of these lifts make them valuable components of a golfer’s strength and conditioning regimen.
The purpose of this article is not to profess that we have the definitive answer to this question. However, at a minimum, we hope it is apparent that a strength-training regimen that overemphasizes sagittal-plane training could come at the expense of multidirectional training that may provide even greater value. If our golfer is to include sagittal-plane lifts, we should also make sure he includes at least as much transverse- and frontal-plane strength training, in addition to static and dynamic flexibility work and plenty of swings (skill-specific practice).
The same principle holds true for the vast majority of us who exercise for health, fitness, and performance enhancement in the game of life. Most of what we do every day—walking, running, reaching, turning, lifting, placing, and every other movement or combination of movements—involves lateral or rotational components. For this reason, at 1TO1, all of our clients, from youth and adult athletes to senior citizens and everyone in between, train in all directions—the way the body was meant to move and in ways that will keep them strong, agile, mobile, and safe, no matter what physical challenges life brings.