Hey Athletes! Do you know what the three planes of movement are? Listen to this week’s AMA to find out!Â
Episode 18 of Ask Me Anything is Up!
Three Planes of Human Movement…?
In this week’s episode of Ask Me Anything, Jerred and Joe go over the three planes of human movement. They explain what each one of them and how training each one can benefit you!Â
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To becoming better!
Jerred
Transcript:Â
AMA 18: Three Planes of Human Movement…?
[00:00:00] Jerred Moon: Welcome to garage gym. Athlete asked me anything. It’s pretty simple. I’ll be answering questions from the thousands of athletes that follow our daily programming. If you have a question or topic you want submitted, go to dot com slash AMA let’s get started.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the garage gym athlete podcast. Jared moon here with Joe Courtney. What’s up Joe? Hey man. Hi. It sound like you kind of said, Hey AMA.Â
Joe Courtney: Hey,Â
Jerred Moon: yeah, well, we are doing an AMA, uh, as, as we do. So this one, it’s kind of a question. It was like very open-ended. Uh, it was straight up just.
Planes of movement, period. Benefits from how to training each. So they want to kind of know what are the different human planes of movement and how do we [00:01:00] train them? What are the benefits of such. And I would love for you to know, I’ll, uh, I’ll, I’ll kind of jump into some of this stuff. So we’ve got, uh, three human planes of movement.
So there’s the frontal plane, the transverse plane, and the sagittal plane. And the best way to think about this or, you know, a way that’s helped me is if you were to take a, uh, like a. A board, you know, like a big, uh, lifting board or something like that. You know, I, I’m trying to think of the actual, like a floor board, you know, something just a big rectangle, if you will.
I, everything’s in lifting terms to me and not what it would actually be called a plywood. There you go. A big, big piece of plywood, sorry for the idiot moment there. But if you were to take that plywood piece of plywood, uh, and you were to put it down, like split in between your eyes. And so the boards out in front of you, that would be your sagittal plane.
And so [00:02:00] what you have to think about is like, okay, at the, at the front of that board, what movements could you do? So you could do a barbell movement. You do like a barbell clean, a dead lift and things like that. That would be your sagittal plane. Now, if you were to take that board and lay it flat and let it cut you through the waist.
Now, where’s the edge of the board? The edge of the board is all around you, so you can do movements that are on the edge of the board. So that would be twisting and turning. That’s your transverse plane. Now, if you were to cut your, you know, move the board back up and cut your like in between the ears down like.
Uh, in half, you know, right down through the shoulders. Then you would have your frontal plane and you know, frontal plane movements, anything that same, anything that can be done on the outer edges of that board. So whether that is a, a lateral raise, side, lunges, whatever it is, things that are done for the outside.
That’s how my brain thinks of it. I don’t know if that helped anybody. Um, but so you do have frontal transverse and sagittal. So sagittal. Movements that occurred in forward and backward motion. Anterior posterior, things like squat, [00:03:00] gastric calf raises, frontal plane movements that occur in the side of the body, lateral medial, and then transverse plane rotational movement.
And that is, I mean, those are the planes of movement. And it’s important because a lot of the times where people end up getting injured is, you know, it can be for a number of reasons, like too much volume or whatever. What I see a lot of the times is. A lack of focus on these, these planes of movement. You know, and it’s happened to me in the past when it’s real easy to only train that sagittal plane.
So we’re only doing, we’re only running and we’re only doing dead lifts, and we’re only doing press, and we’re only doing. You know, squat, things like that you could do, you could honestly only ever be in the sagittal plane and have like a pretty solid fitness program, but what you’re developing are a lot of weaknesses that are, or imbalances that are going to be a problem later.
And that’s why people like I hurt my back. I’d say tweak, tweaked my back, not a real hurt my back after, only probably having trained in [00:04:00] the sagittal plane when I just like reached down to pick something up. But there was a twist involved with it because I was never really doing any transverse movement.
And I’m like, how could, like, how can I deadlift 500 pounds, you know, run a, you know, five 30 mile. But then my back hurts when I twisted sideways and picked something up. And that led me down to a lot of study of just the different planes of movement, cause they hit it in a lot of these certification courses and whatever.
But unless you’re like. You know, a real, like a doctor of physical therapy. You don’t get into in depth training on this stuff and basic fitness certifications, no matter which level of certification you’re trying to get. So anyway, they’re really important too. Uh, really minimize those imbalances. Um, anything else to say on that stuff, Joe?
Joe Courtney: So it reminds me of, uh, I always like to bring lacrosse into this, but, you know, with our programming stuff, we do a whole lot of running, just regular, regular running forward running. But as soon as I step onto a field, I’m doing a lot of lateral running and going sideways. And. After even just like one regular, like 30, 30, 60 minute game.
My, uh, [00:05:00] adductors and groin are way more sore than I’m ever used to because I’m going sideways and twisting and, and, you know, doing that lateral movement. So the different, using different planes that I’m not used to because I’m not just for runningÂ
Jerred Moon: forward. Yeah. And I think, I think the way you’re training it is.
Like the preferred method, in my opinion, because what we do and how we program it is, you know, we’ll put a Russian twist in the programming and some other things just to make sure we’re getting enough transverse plane. You know, we’re, we’re doing things out to the side, so we’re getting frontal plane, like we’re kind of doing it via checklist and it helps, don’t get me wrong, it definitely helps, but what you’re doing is dynamic.
You know, you’re like real, like. Fast movement side to side and all these things, and there’s only really one way to train that, and that is to do things like playing sports. So I think using your fitness, this is my main point. Using your fitness is really important. Whether that’s. Going out in the backyard and you know, throwing a football or playing football or soccer with your kids, or going to play lacrosse doing these things, that’s what’s really going to help a lot of these areas take [00:06:00] care of themselves.
The training is important and I think that they all need to be hit because we’ve audited or I’ve audited other programs and seen like. 20 to one. And as far as the ratio from like, I’ll just count a bit. Okay. Sagittal sagittal statutes and then like, Oh, here’s a transverse on the third week of the program on the third day.
Like you guys finally got there. You know? And so we, we try to put that in to the programming a little bit more. But like I said, that what you’re doing is the more functional aspect of it. And I think that, you know, being, um, being able to play sport and having that movement practice beyond just what you do in training is really important for keeping you injury free.
Yes.Â
Joe Courtney: Apply them. Extras can be good to add in for warmups. I mean, cause of warms, you’re not doing anything heavy, you’re just kinda, you’re just there for balance, for, for different kinds of movements, which is really easy for, for warmups. And getting into that also get, I’ll get your arms right up.Â
Jerred Moon: And the second part of the question was really, what’s the.
What are the benefits to this? And it’s not necessarily like training energy systems where each energy system does a different thing and it has a [00:07:00] different, um, role and helps you with different activities. You know, like you’re going to be strongest in the sagittal plane. Like that’s just fact of the matter.
And then a lot of the accessory movements operate in the other two, two planes. Now I, someone could argue with me that that’s not true and I’m not trying to like say that’s only ever how it works, but that’s a lot of how it works. No, you can do a strict press in the sagittal plane, and then you could do a lateral raises in the, in the frontal plane, and then you could do, you know, around the world or whatever, the kettlebell and just go full of transverse plane there.
But anyway, like a lot of the progress is made in the sagittal plane and it’s super important. And all these other things are more accessory work to make sure that we’re gonna keep you injury free, but they’re not like these magical, if you hit these planes and movements, you’re going to see this huge increase.
It’s basically. How we get in some accessory work and how you, like I said, you prevent some injuries, but other than that, they’re not super sexy. And that’s about all there is to it.Â
Joe Courtney: Yeah.Â
Jerred Moon: Um, I will say for [00:08:00] further research on this stuff, uh, where if you go to industry three, fitness.com/body-geometry or just Google body geometry into three fitness, we can provide a link as well, um, in the show notes, wherever this is being published.
And, uh. You can see our full article on body geometry and there are multiple tenants to our body geometry, so that’s progressions. Contractions and balance and balance is the third piece that we have there that talks about these different planes of movement. Now also important are the progressions and contractions.
And so those are something that we can get into in later videos. Also, you can go read that article, but it’s all very important to incorporate into a training program. And although those three things together, we call body geometry, geometry, so definitely go check it out. Anything else Joe?Â
Joe Courtney: Nope.Â
Jerred Moon: All right guys, thanks for the question.
Hopefully that helped, so thanks for listening as well. If you’re listening via the podcast and if you enjoy the AMA, please five star view. Positive comment really helps the show out. If you’re on [00:09:00] YouTube, hit like subscribe, leave me a comment. Let me know what you think of the content, where we can keep progressing.
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