Why Aren’t Squats, Deadlifts, and Presses Enough Functional Fitness

It would be so awesome wouldn’t it, work on squats, deadlifts, and some presses of different sorts and you got a fitness program that will deliver on every level. You might not believe it, but I would actually love that! Why? That means we would be able to guarantee great functional fitness to everyone and we would be able to get results for everyone. That is what I am in the business of first and foremost so you would have me all on board!

In fact, I was on board for awhile. That was my general philosophy about 15 years ago. After going through some really intense corrective exercise courses that left me overwhelmed and no better of a coach to my clients, I swung completely the opposite way and was convinced NOW I had it!

Just in case you guys thought I never lifted “heavy” or was into barbells, or even had hair!

If we just focused on getting people to squat, deadlift, do some bench press, push-ups, heck, even pull-ups we will solve everyone’s needs. In all honesty, to a small degree it worked, well, it worked at the beginning of everyone’s program.

Establishing good movements is important for everyone and those foundations of squatting, hip hinging, and pushing are important! They are in fact essential to moving forward in your functional fitness training.

DVRT master, Cory Cripe, shows how important establishing the foundations of good hip hinging is in our training. 

The issue arouse when I only had a very limited path to move people forward. Either we were to do more weight, more reps, or do a novel new exercise.

So, DVRT was really born out of a need to solve this problem. If those worked, I would have had myself and clients lifting thousands of pounds over time, doing thousands of reps. As we know though, there isn’t a continual linear progression of those things and that is why people jump around from tool to tool, exercise to exercise, even method to method. They are searching for the “new” thing that will allow them to keep making progress.

I began to realize that the new thing was right in front of me, except it wasn’t new. What I discovered was I was training exercises, not movements. I thought I was training movements, until I realized that I didn’t even think about how we really moved in life. Not replicating what we do in life, but HOW we do it!

Functional fitness isn’t about copying what we do in life, but improving how the body functions. We can’t do that if we don’t understand how our body creates movement! 

Simple things, not even the complicated ones started to hit me in the face like a brick! Like what? Things I new like planes of motion. I knew from college that we moved in three planes of motion, but why wasn’t that in my functional fitness programs? It was because I was focused on exercises, not movements.

Great, you realize such a thing, but how do you teach it, how do you progress it, how do you make it accessible to other people? These were the questions that I asked myself in creating DVRT. Working with clients 10-12 hours a day for over a decade, I made a lot of the mistakes so that I could share with others the things that worked!

One of those big keys is not giving you more exercises, but better ones! Having people understand beyond “working their quads” or the like, how impactful an exercise can be to their fitness goals. If we understand that our body WANTS to work as one piece, then we better figure out how to keep putting the pieces together!

Check out how DVRT Master, James Newman, gives some great examples and progressions of these concepts so you can experience the difference and results of such a system. Functional fitness shouldn’t be complicated, but it should change the way we train!

Want to find out more about how we build success through the system of DVRT? Check our NEW Dynamic Strength workout program that takes you through how to build progressions and have greater purpose to your training. Best of all, get it for 30% off for a limited time with coupon “dynamic” HERE