Process on Body Movement

The Z plane is a play off the mathematical third plane (besides X and Y) and is my process on body movement. This is a concept I self-titled to build a mental model that was outside of the very limited view that I formed from consuming platonic information from the mass fitness population. I am a practitioner, and this model is formed from a practicing perspective. The Z-plane is both an idea of physical body movement and a mental model to provide clarity for movement ques and for the reader to reflect and build upon.

Introduction

I've spent most of my adult life with the hobby of training the body through lifting weights, running, and athletics. If it's body movement, I've almost certainly tried it. Everything outside of the truly spectacular like gymnastics, I've at least dabbled in it. It's the first real process that I've fallen in love with. For a decade, I couldn't wait to get out of bed in the morning and hit the gym. It was a beautiful time, but that has passed. I still stick to a regular routine, but I've stopped romanticizing lifting and moved into other pursuits. Ironically, it's my greatest idea that led to this decoupling from the training obsession. The Z-plane mental model.

Once I was able to formulate what I was feeling into a mental model and then apply I started to drift away from the obsession. I'd figured it out. What I figured out wasn't what I was expecting, but it was what I needed. My body taught me that there is no end game to fitness, it's a process. It's an everyday necessity of going through phases of a lifecycle. I'm now in my 30's and my extreme growth phase of my 20's is over. I no longer lift for 2 hours a day and no longer care to think about lifting or training at all. I'm at a point where I'd much rather pay someone for a program, so I can focus on refining my mental model. This was freeing. This release of thought burden was thanks to the Z-plane. I am now able to turn on and off my physical ability in an instant. When I start to feel pain in some part of my body, I can rely on my mental model and reorient into healthy movement.

I want to share what I've learned.

The Problem Set for a Process on Body Movement

There have been countless attempts to convey lifting or proper movement to people. The most common is visual and verbal ques, but these aren't really effective. The visual ques only go so far as our conscious brain can process and are more geared towards short term body manipulation versus actual real growth. The issue with mental ques is we mistake the visual representation of the movement with the source of the movement. In reality, most information we receive from the environment is a result of an underlying process undetectable to the observer. Also, if there's a loss of integrity anywhere along the movement chain, then a visual que will only make things worse by compounding the poor movement as the person looks to overcorrect for various imbalances.

The Z-plane mental model helps create efficiency and consistency in movement by using what we can consciously control to put our bodies in the position to operate as intended. The Z-plane is a basic inherent function. The best part of this process is your body already knows how to move; your conscious mind is just getting in the way.

We can start to build this mental model with understanding of the Z-plane.

The Fourth Plane of Movement, the Anti-gravity, the Z-Plane

After breaking my lower back and losing core functionality, I realized there's a slight tension that is holding the body up that doesn't fall into the three planes of movement. There is a fourth plane of movement that is largely unconscious, driven by the core, and necessary for efficient movement of the body.

High level concepts:

There must be a mechanism that counteracts gravity. A flow of movement that generates (slight) upward momentum to keep your body weight from collapsing joints prematurely. (For example, knees are built to handle a certain limit, but not make up for weight your core should be supporting). This is the basis for the Z-plane. To discover ways to properly engage this anti-gravity mechanism.
Every movement needs a counteracting stability. There are always movers and stabilizers when moving the body. Recognizing these is key to training. We can consciously control stabilizers much easier than movers. If we can even control movers at on any adept level at all. This is difficult to comprehend because we want to think in isolated movements. But when moving, there are tons of micro movements throughout the body that we use to balance and lift the weight properly. It's too exhausting (and perhaps impossible) to control all these micro movements so focusing on stabilizers is the key. This is evident with athletics. The training one goes through creates an unconscious "feel" for the sport.
Weaknesses compound throughout the movement chain and throughout time which causes a breakdown somewhere. An overuse injury is rarely (maybe never) isolated to the injury. In my experience, most breakdowns start with poor hip and core mobility or strength. Coincidently, these two groups are central to the Z-plane.
The point of training is to move your body freely throughout an environment, not to move the environment around your body. This is easier to understand with running or walking versus lifting weights. When we are running, we don't expect to move the earth around our body but in the gym, we rarely take this view. When moving weights, we try to move the weight around "the way our body moves." The biggest clue to the existence of this nuance is the excuse, "my body moves different than others." Bodies do feel different because imbalances but moving different is our attempt to work around these imbalances instead of fixing them.
Moving the body should be pain free and relatively uneventful. We should be as calm and relaxed as possible during movements, and many take the opposite approach. Trying to get a pump or overthinking during training leads to over engaging certain muscle groups leading to tightness, overuse, and poor movement habits. I compare this to running a car constantly on redline or dry firing a bow. If there's no reason for full power, we shouldn't be using it. You'll see this most commonly when powerlifters are warming up on bench; they brace their body as if they're lifting 300 pounds when warming up with 50% or less of the weight. When this occurs, you're training your body out of its natural ability to operate.

"Lifting requires brainwork, too." – Arnold Schwarzenegger

The Body is a Complex System

Your body knows what to do, you just need to let it. The body is a complex system, and that means there is an interdependence among variables. Individually, we are mentally fighting the noise from all these different body movement ques from hundreds of observations while having no real way to know if we're moving towards truth or destruction. The hard thing is that we are all right in our own way because of our unique imbalances. Unfortunately, everyone's imbalances are going to be different.

All three relationships below exist in a complex system:

Temporal: A variable depends on its own past changes
Horizontal: A variable depends on other variables current behavior
Diagonal: Variable A depends on the past history of variable B

This concept implies that bench pressing affects squatting and deadlifting, and past habits formed on bench press affects today's bench press and will build further on future bench press evolutions. Not only that, but our past bench press affects today's squat and today's bench will affect tomorrow's squat. Our mistakes (or improvements) compound over time in a complex system.

Because of the complex nature, inputs to the system do not intuitively affect the outcome like we want to believe. This is why visual and verbal ques from outside sources are largely detrimental without a proper mental process.

Forget Visual and Verbal Ques

Or better yet, don't rely too heavily on visual and verbal ques. These generally accepted ques may be doing more harm than good. Not because these ques are inherently wrong, but because the meaning is lost over time or was never really understood in the first place. We humans want to simplify things into bite sized nuggets of information because it's easier to retain. Unfortunately, this brevity really impacts the ability to understand the wisdom of the movement. The Z-plane mental model is geared to fix just that. Here's why the movement ques from the collective are making things worse.

Watching other people lift is detrimental over time because we don't know what we are looking at. We are getting the wrong information. We want to que in on certain things we think are important like the hip hinge in squatting. We look at the hip hinge and think it's the source of movement instead of just the effects from proper core stabilization and the gravity pulling the bar down. We gather the wrong information from watching others lift. With this wrong information, we start treating the hip hinge as the source of good form, program this feeling into our brains, and then start taking this faulty programmed feeling into other lifts to try and "strengthen" our weak hip hinge. We never stop to consider that perhaps the reason our hip hinge feels weak is because we're treating it as a source of strength or baseline movement based on observations while it is a biproduct of some deeper movement truth such as a fully operating core and muscles attached to the pelvis.

The Z-Plane Ques

Below are baseline ques for building your own mental model and engaging the Z-plane.

Every Force Needs a Counteracting Force: Newton's third law of motion is the basis for the Z-plane idea. If gravity is pulling your body weight or external weight (i.e. a barbell) towards the ground, there must be an equal counteracting force to support this weight and move this weight. The three planes of body movement do not satisfy this requirement. If we lose the anti-gravity (Z-plane) mechanism, then our joints and bone structure are required to take the load.
Understand the body's center of gravity. The body's center of gravity is slightly in front of and above the belly button. This concept is central to all movements because we have a tendency to move like it's slightly behind our spine.
Movers and Stabilizers: The body operates with movers and stabilizers and one muscle cannot do both. Reflecting on what muscle groups are the movers during which movements is key to avoiding straining and other injuries.
The Core: The core starts at the bottom of your hips. The fulcrum of movement thus takes place at the proximal hamstring, not where the lats or abs connect (top of the hips/lower back). This subtle difference will actually fully connect your lower and upper body and eliminate your lower back from taking this responsibility
The Rib Cage: Our muscle structure is literally built to move our torso (rib cage) and our brain throughout our environment. This solid surface is central for breathing, core stability, and supporting the body.
The Sternum: The sternum is even more central and relevant for movement than the rib cage. They’re one in the same but the difference lies in the fact that you consciously control the feeling of your sternum being central. The ribs, in contrast, are moved mostly unconsciously through the movement of breathing, arm movement, and direction of the body.
The Spine: The spine is not a central mover or a mover at all. Our spinal position is a biproduct of proper core stability, not a source of. The spine should have proper support and remain relatively straight, but this will be an output from core stability. Manipulating the spine first when moving is a key indicator that your core functionality is broken down. (See figure 1 below)
Fatigue. Most of your problems stem from fatigue, more specifically core fatigue. Learn to recognize fatigue, scale down to rest, and build your muscular system sustainably.

Figure 1 (AI Generated)

The Process

Understand what type of athlete you are. We are all athletes, it's just a matter of framing your own situation. If you are in your 50's and want to enjoy pain free walks and work, this is your athletic situation. All movements require a form of athletics and it's important to realize where you are at in your journey.
Once you've discovered what type of athlete you are, it's important to follow a training program that suits this need. Every program should entail resistance training and cardio but how much and what type really depends on the kind of athlete you are and where you are in your own journey.
Manage your emotions. We all want to boost our ego, move fast to better athletic ability, and this is a main source of over exhaustion and ultimately leads to poor movement. Don't internalize your training as a deep part of your ego. Instead understand your own limitations and think strategically about building over time.
Understand the source of good movement and build a mental model of where your own tendencies lie to fall away from this proper movement. This is where knowledge of the Z-plane compounds proper movement over time. The body is forced to rely on good movement.
Eliminate noise in your environment as much as possible to avoid cognitive bias. Don't believe everything you hear from individuals or even what you observe in the environment.
Introspect on stabilizers and core throughout everyday activities. We have a tendency to become domain dependent meaning we behave and move in a different way while training then when doing chores. This shouldn't be the case. Lifting weights "form" shouldn't bleed over into everyday activities, and weightlifting shouldn't be treated as some completely different motion than the one outside the gym. The ultimate way to avoid this behavior is to focus on the core fundamentals we can consciously control which is the core stabilizer movements. Our "movers", over time, will adapt to the movement we are performing.

Summary

"You must unlearn what you have learned" – Yoda

Body movement is an inherent ability we are all blessed with and over time this is eroded by the trials of life. In the world, there is also a tremendous amount of noise and the erosion of body mechanics will progressively deteriorate without some baseline truth to filter out noise. The Z-plane is the building blocks for a mental model to filter out this noise, provide a baseline for introspection, and ultimately help you start drifting towards proper body movement.