How the week is built
Movement patterns
Updated 6 August 2026
Movement patterns are the basic ways a human body moves under load. Squat, hinge, push, pull, carry, and rotate. Nearly every strength exercise is a variation of one of them.
Good plans are built from patterns first and exercises second. Cover the patterns and you have covered the body, whatever equipment you happen to have.
The patterns
Splitting pushes and pulls by direction gives the working set most plans are built from.
- Squat. Bending at the knees and hips to lower and stand. Back squat, goblet squat, leg press.
- Hinge. Bending mostly at the hips with a fairly still spine. Deadlift, Romanian deadlift, hip thrust.
- Lunge. Single leg work. Split squat, step up, walking lunge.
- Horizontal push. Pressing away from your chest. Bench press, press up.
- Horizontal pull. Pulling toward your torso. Row in all its forms.
- Vertical push. Pressing overhead. Shoulder press.
- Vertical pull. Pulling down from above. Pull up, lat pulldown.
- Core and carry. Resisting movement rather than creating it. Plank, suitcase carry.
Why build from patterns instead of exercises
Patterns are what your body actually adapts to, and they survive changes in equipment. If your plan says "horizontal push" rather than "barbell bench press", then a home gym with dumbbells, a busy commercial gym, and a hotel with nothing but floor space all have a valid answer.
It also makes gaps obvious. It is easy to build a week that looks busy and contains no hinge at all, which is how people end up with strong quads, a weak posterior chain, and a sore lower back.
Balance across the week
Pushing and pulling should be roughly balanced, and so should the front and back of your legs. The default drift is toward the muscles you can see in a mirror, which over months creates real imbalances at the shoulder and hip.
Ordering matters too. The pattern that leads a session gets your freshest effort and usually the most sets, so what you put first is a decision about what you are prioritising.
In your plan
How Ionik Coach uses movement patterns
Ionik Coach builds your week as an ordered list of movement pattern slots before any exercise is chosen. The skeleton carries the sets, reps, effort target and rest for each slot, and no exercise names at all.
Exercises are then filled into those slots from your available equipment and any movements your setup screening ruled out. Because the structure is decided first, changing gyms or losing a piece of equipment changes which exercise you get, not whether the week is balanced.
Common questions
Do I need to hit every pattern every week?
Ideally yes for the major ones. Squat, hinge, and both push and pull directions should all appear. Carries and rotation are useful additions rather than requirements.
Is a leg press as good as a squat?
For building the muscles involved, it is a perfectly good substitute. It trains less balance and core stability, which matters if that is a goal for you and matters much less if it is not.
What if an exercise hurts?
Swap to another exercise in the same pattern rather than dropping the pattern. There are usually several ways to load a movement, and one of them is often comfortable when another is not. Persistent pain is worth getting looked at.
Related terms
- Compound and isolation exercises Compound lifts move several joints at once and build the session. Isolation lifts move one joint and fill the gaps.
- Training split How you divide your body across your training days. Full body, upper and lower, or push, pull, and legs.
- Warm-up sets Lighter sets of the exact lift you are about to do, ramping up to your working weight. Different from a general warm-up.
- Training volume How much work you do for a muscle, counted as the number of hard working sets you complete for it in a week.