Training Muscles vs. Training Movement

Picture two people carrying four bags of groceries up a flight of stairs.

The first person is a bodybuilder. He’s 42, jacked, trains five days a week. His biceps are impressive. His quads are developed. Every muscle group has been systematically targeted, fatigued, and grown. He grabs the bags, and you can see the effort. His traps hike up to his ears. His grip is white-knuckled. He powers up the stairs using sheer force, breathing hard at the top.

The second person is a dancer. She’s 58, lean, doesn’t look particularly strong by gym standards. She picks up the bags and something different happens. The weight distributes through her whole body. Her spine stays long. Her hips do most of the work going up the stairs. She arrives at the top barely winded, sets the bags down, and goes back for more.

Who’s stronger?

It depends entirely on what you mean by “strong.”

Two Models of the Body

The bodybuilding model, which has dominated commercial fitness for 50 years, treats the body like a collection of parts. Chest day. Back day. Leg day. Each muscle group gets isolated, loaded, and fatigued. The goal is hypertrophy: make individual muscles bigger and stronger.

This model works. It builds impressive physiques. It increases the force-production capacity of individual muscles. And for people whose goal is aesthetics or sport-specific power, it makes perfect sense.

But it rests on an assumption that doesn’t hold up in daily life. The assumption is that if you make each part stronger individually, the whole system automatically gets better.

It doesn’t.

Your body doesn’t use muscles one at a time. It uses patterns. When you bend down to pick up your grandchild, you’re not performing a “hip hinge with bilateral arm flexion.” You’re executing a coordinated pattern that involves your feet, your hips, your spine, your shoulders, your breath, and your fascia, all organized in a specific sequence, all happening in about half a second.

If one part of that sequence is missing or compensated, other parts pick up the slack. You can have the strongest hamstrings in the gym and still hurt your back picking up a toddler, because the pattern around those hamstrings isn’t organized well.

This is the fundamental difference between training muscles and training movement.

The Bicep Curl Problem

Let me use a simple example.

A bicep curl trains your bicep. You grip a dumbbell, you flex your elbow, the bicep shortens under load. Straightforward. Do enough of them with enough weight, and your bicep gets bigger and stronger.

Now think about every time you use your bicep in real life. Carrying a bag. Opening a heavy door. Pulling yourself up from a low chair. Holding a child on your hip.

In every single one of those scenarios, your bicep is part of a chain. It’s connected through fascia and connective tissue to your shoulder, your rib cage, your opposite hip. Tom Myers’ Anatomy Trains framework maps these connections beautifully. Your bicep doesn’t act alone. It acts as part of a line of pull that runs through your entire body.

When you curl in isolation, you’re training the bicep to fire without its context. It gets stronger, sure. But it doesn’t necessarily get better at participating in the full-body patterns where you actually need it.

This is like training a trumpet player by having them practice their part alone in a soundproof room for five years, then putting them in an orchestra and expecting them to blend seamlessly. They can play the notes. But can they listen, adjust, respond to the other players in real time?

What “Functional Training” Promised (and Partially Delivered)

The fitness industry recognized this problem about 20 years ago. The “functional training” movement emerged as a response to the isolation model. Instead of machines and curls, functional training emphasized multi-joint movements, unstable surfaces, exercises that mimicked real-life activities.

This was a step in the right direction. And some of it was genuinely good. Squats are more functional than leg extensions. Deadlifts teach hip-hinging in a way that leg curls don’t. Carries, pulls, pushes performed standing rather than seated. These things matter.

But functional training, as it played out in most gyms, had a problem. It changed the exercises without changing the fundamental approach. Instead of isolating muscles on machines, people were now doing complex movements with the same compensated patterns they’d always had.

Bosu ball squats don’t fix a squat pattern that’s dysfunctional at its root. They just make it wobbly.

The exercise selection got more “functional,” but nobody was asking the deeper question: does this person’s body actually have the organization to do this movement well?

What I See When I Watch Someone Move

When a new client walks into my studio, I don’t start with exercises. I watch.

I watch them walk. I notice which foot lands heavier. I notice whether their rib cage moves with their pelvis or against it. I notice where their arms swing freely and where they’re locked. I notice whether their spine undulates naturally or moves as a rigid block.

I watch them reach overhead. I notice whether the movement comes from the shoulder blade sliding along the rib cage (it should) or from the lumbar spine arching to create the illusion of overhead reach (common compensation).

I watch them breathe. I notice whether their ribs expand laterally or whether their shoulders lift. I notice whether the exhale is passive or forced.

None of this is exercise. But all of it tells me how this body is organized. And organization determines everything about how it will respond to load.

A body that’s well-organized can take a basic squat pattern and distribute the force beautifully. The feet ground, the hips hinge, the spine stays neutral, the breath supports the movement. Add weight, and the whole system bears it together.

A body that’s poorly organized will squat by bracing, gripping, and efforting. Certain muscles will overwork. Others will stay silent. Add weight, and the compensation gets louder. Add years of weight, and something breaks down.

Side by Side: The Difference in Practice

Let me show you how these two approaches play out with the same person.

A client comes in with hip pain that started about a year ago. Active, plays tennis or pickleball a couple times a week. Their trainer has them doing hip strengthening work. Clamshells, banded walks, single-leg deadlifts.

The training approach: Identify the “weak” muscles (usually glute med, hip external rotators), prescribe strengthening exercises, progressively load them.

The movement education approach: Watch them walk, stand, reach, squat. Notice that the rib cage is shifted laterally on one side, compressing that hip. Notice that one foot turns out significantly more than the other. Notice that when they squat, the pelvis shifts and one knee dives in.

The hip strengthening exercises aren’t wrong. The glute med probably is underperforming. But the reason it’s underperforming is that the whole system is organized in a way that makes it almost impossible for that muscle to do its job.

The rib cage position is altering the pelvis position. The pelvis position is altering the hip mechanics. The hip mechanics are shutting down the glute.

Strengthening the glute without addressing the rib cage is like mopping up a flooded kitchen without turning off the faucet.

Movement education turns off the faucet. We work on rib cage mobility, breathing pattern, the ability to shift weight evenly. As those things change, the hip starts to organize differently. The glute wakes up not because we did 100 clamshells, but because the conditions for it to work finally exist.

Then, if she wants to strengthen it further, the strengthening exercises actually work.

The Body Is a System, Not a Collection

Tom Myers, whose Anatomy Trains framework informs a lot of my work, puts it simply: the body is not a parts catalog. It’s a continuous web of fascia, muscle, and connective tissue that functions as an integrated whole.

When you pull on one part of a web, the whole web responds.

This isn’t metaphorical. It’s anatomical. Your plantar fascia on the bottom of your foot is physically continuous with the fascia running up the back of your leg, over your pelvis, up your spine, and over the top of your skull. Pull on it anywhere, and the effects ripple through the entire system.

This is why an ankle sprain from twenty years ago can contribute to current neck pain. This is why jaw tension relates to pelvic floor function. This is why a “tight hamstring” often isn’t actually a hamstring problem.

Training individual muscles in isolation ignores these connections. It treats the body like a machine with replaceable parts. Movement education treats the body like what it actually is: a living, adaptive, interconnected system that organizes itself around the patterns it uses most.

This Isn’t Anti-Gym

I want to be careful here, because I said something similar in my last post and I’ll say it again: this isn’t about being against the gym or against training.

Strength training matters. Especially as we get older, loading our tissues is one of the most important things we can do for bone health, metabolic health, and functional independence.

But how we load matters as much as how much we load.

If your gym work is going well and you feel good, keep going. If your body is organized well enough to handle progressive overload without pain, you’re in great shape.

But if you’ve been training consistently and something still doesn’t feel right, it might be worth looking at the patterns underneath the exercises. Not instead of your training. Alongside it.

The dancer and the bodybuilder from the top of this post both have something the other needs. The bodybuilder has raw tissue capacity. The dancer has organizational efficiency. The ideal is both. Strong tissues in a well-organized system.

That’s what I’m after. And in the next post, I want to tell you about the strongest people I’ve ever met, and why most of them don’t look the way you’d expect.

If this is landing for you, if you’re recognizing yourself in any of these descriptions, let’s talk. I’d love to take a look at how you move and see if there are patterns worth addressing. It might change what your training can do for you.