Exercise selection - how will this exercise transfer to my sport/daily movement?

Along with the right intensity and volume, choosing more targeted exercises can have a big impact on how productive your workouts in the gym are.

It's so easy on social media to find dozens of cool-looking / novel / interesting exercises nowadays that the difficulty comes from filtering all those exercises to focus on ones tailored to yourself or your sport, rather than the difficulty being finding 'new' exercises to try.

When I first started working out, I was also tempted to keep trying new exercises every week or every 2 weeks and rarely saw very productive results from doing that. While it's true that your body needs new stimuli to adapt to in order to keep progressing, small tweaks to the volume / intent / intensity / range of motion etc. are already enough of a stimulus to prompt adaptation. If you're changing the exercise itself every time you step in the gym, then there's nothing to adapt TO as you're not giving your body enough time with that certain exercise.

So - how to go about selecting the right exercises? I usually think about it in terms of:

• Movement specific exercises (exercises with similar movement patterns as your sport or daily movement)

• Muscle-tissue specific exercises (exercises which train the muscles involved with your sport or daily movement)

If we take running as an example, the exercises in these videos are ones that have similar movement patterns to running.

In videos 1 and 2, I'm working on elasticity, or 'bounciness', which is what you rely on to run efficiently. In Video 2, we're also practicing pulling the heel up along with that bounce (check out Pose Method for more running-specific drills and information.)

In video 3, I'm working on control + full ankle range of motion in a single-leg stance (emphasis on a soft knee here!) Since your ankle moves through most of that range with each step of a run, you want to have ACTIVE control over the entire ankle movement.

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As for more muscle-tissue specific exercises, the purpose of these are not to specifically practise the movements used in running (for example you wouldn't use the single-deadlift movement while running), or to train to use that range of movement in running (you obviously wouldn't be holding your knee at its most flexed angle during a run).

Instead, you're training the muscle tissue relevant to your sport to be more resilient.

In this case, you can tell I'm focusing on hamstrings and obliques with these exercises. It's a safe bet of what most runners need to work on, but as always, what muscles or ranges of motion you need to strengthen really depends on each individual's history and needs.

- Supported single-leg deadlifts

The focus here is more on strengthening the hamstrings/glutes rather than on balance. The hamstrings are what mainly 'pull' your leg from the ground while running, so you want to make sure it's strong enough to support repetitive pulls for, say, 30 minutes or more of running.

- Copenhagen side plank variations

When it comes to core training, obliques (down the sides of your torso) rarely get as much attention as rectus or transverse abdominis (the front of your torso). Because the obliques attach to your pelvis, though, they are an important connection between your torso and legs while running, as it helps to stabilise your upper body against rotation and/or sideways flexion while your pelvis/legs are moving. That's why we're doing isometric holds here, to train our obliques to be able to resist AGAINST rotation or side-bending.

- Foam roller bridge holds

This is a (painful) gem from Markow Training Systems that give you the worst DOMS afterwards... fair warning! You're not training to become better at holding your knee at one angle for a long period of time, of course, which is why this isn't a movement-specific exercise. Rather, we're strengthening resiliency at the end ranges of your hamstrings and calf muscles here.