02.06 Concept- Movement Patterns — Transcript
02.06 Concept- Movement Patterns — Transcript (English)
Section titled “02.06 Concept- Movement Patterns — Transcript (English)”Summary: View Summary
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Section titled “Transcript”When someone experiences Baseworks practice for the first time, they usually notice that a great majority of time is dedicated to things like drawing the shoulders down or tractioning the legs away from each other or trying to guess whether the spine is straight while there are no mirrors in the room to provide any visual feedback.
We refer to such actions that are repeated over and over as “movement patterns.”
The Baseworks movement patterns concept is one of the key concepts to understand our method.
Similar to how a checkerboard pattern can be applied to a shirt, a bag, or a cup, we apply Baseworks movement patterns to different macro movements and positions of the body.
For example, the pattern “draw the shoulders down” can be applied when we’re upright, when we are almost upside down, when we are upside down, when we’re lying on the floor.
Or the “extend the ankles while pressing through the balls of the feet” pattern can be applied when one leg is in the ear, when both feet are on the floor, when we are sitting on the floor.
Many movement patterns, including “draw the shoulders down” and “extend the ankles while pressing through the balls of the feet”, are done in order to create the state of Distributed Activation.
Other movement patterns are defined through the position of different points of of the body in space and are related to the principles of Gridlines and Symmetry.
For example, we’re trying to follow a movement pattern of “straight spine with the pelvis and the rib cage stacked” in the following tasks.
When we sit on the floor working on the hip flexion, when we stand on the floor working on the hip flexion, when we work on hinging with symmetrical leg foundation, when we work on hinging with asymmetrical leg foundation, when we sit on the heels, when we’re in a plank, and so on.
A very important point about the Baseworks movement patterns is that they are applied ‘simultaneously.’
Because of this, in almost every position of the body, just about all the muscle groups are active, and not only those traditionally viewed as the target muscles in a particular physical activity.
Let’s look at the following example.
The macro position of the body here can be defined as something like: feet wider than hip width, arms extended to the sides and palms forward.
We then begin to apply the Baseworks movement patterns to this form.
We’ll be simultaneously doing the following things.
Drawing the shoulders down, spreading the fingers, imagining that somebody is pulling our arms away from the torso, bringing attention to the arms being precisely at the shoulder height and wrist and shoulders aligning in a straight line, pulling the legs away from each other, keeping the spine as extended as possible, which for most people will result in having to pull the ribcage slightly back and slightly tuck the pelvis, and also slightly moving the neck.
What is the merit of doing this?
Consciously contracting a muscle will make it easier for the muscle to be relaxed later.
Contracting a muscle brings more blood to the muscle.
Contracting a muscle makes it easier to have conscious sensation of that muscle. to align different points of the body, especially those on the trunk, with imaginary 3D gridlines improves spatial awareness and sensory resolution.
We are training our attention to alternate between multiple objects in a stable way.
In more complex forms, superposition of certain simultaneously applied movement patterns also allows to better control the movements, and much more.
The primary ‘focus’ of this form in our system is STRUCTURE.
By applying Baseworks movement patterns to this form, we work on establishing a baseline visceral experiential knowledge of the body’s symmetry and grid lines.
We can then use this visceral knowledge as a reference point in more complex forms.
For example, we’ll try to maintain the same relative position of the pelvis spine and rib cage when the upper body is tilted with with the leg position being symmetrical, or when it’s tilted with the leg position being asymmetrical.
So to summarize in a few keywords, the application of Baseworks movement patterns to this form helps us to work on spatial body awareness, sensory resolution, and relaxation.
If we strip this form of all the movement patterns, then we’re just standing with our arms extended to the sides and we’re no longer doing Baseworks.
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- Date: 2026-02-03