The Five Movements Every Runner Should Master Before Anything Else

Why most gym time doesn’t transfer

If the gym is the first thing to go when life gets busy, there is usually a reason: it does not feel connected to anything. You sit down, you push a machine, you sit down again. Meanwhile you are sitting at a desk all day and then sitting on a bike or hunched into a run with nothing underneath it.

I work with a lot of people who are already active. They run, they have got a gym membership, they show up. But when I ask them to do a simple body weight squat or a walking lunge, most cannot do it well. Not because they are unfit, but because nobody ever taught them to. They have spent years in machines that sit them down and isolate one muscle, and none of it taught their body how to move through space, brace through the middle, or fire the muscles that actually carry them through a run.

The five movements underneath everything

Almost every exercise you will ever do in a gym comes back to five fundamental movements:

1. A squat
2. A lunge
3. A hinge
4. A push
5. A pull

That is it. If you have got those down properly, you have the raw material for genuinely useful strength work. If you do not, everything built on top of them is compromised before you have even added weight.

Why I spend weeks here before anything else

Whether someone is training with me one-on-one or entirely online, they go through the same process: weeks, sometimes what feels like forever, on these fundamentals before we load anything meaningfully. That is not overcaution, it is the whole game.

For online clients especially, I spend a huge amount of time describing how a movement should feel: what the glute should feel like when it is actually doing the work, what bracing through the core feels like, because most people have never been taught to feel any of it. They have been taught to complete three sets of ten and go home.

The muscles that matter for endurance

For runners and cyclists specifically, this really comes down to glutes, hamstrings, and hip abductors, along with genuine control through the midsection. These are the muscles that stabilise you stride after stride or pedal stroke after pedal stroke, and they are exactly the muscles that switch off from a day of sitting.

This is where it gets tricky, because form can look completely correct from the outside and still miss the point entirely. Someone can hit every checkpoint a coach would look for from across the room, hips level, knee tracking, spine neutral, and still be doing almost all the work through their quads and lower back while the glutes and hamstrings stay switched off. Good form is necessary, but it is not the same thing as the right muscle actually firing under load. That distinction only shows up when you are coaching someone closely enough to ask what they feel, not just watching what they look like.

Why leg extensions and leg presses come later, if at all

If you cannot do an unweighted squat or a basic lunge with control, you have no business loading a leg extension or a leg press. I will make an exception for someone coming back from a serious injury under close supervision, but for almost everyone else, those machines teach you nothing about body awareness. They let you move weight without ever learning to move yourself.

Skipping the fundamentals to chase a heavier number does not get you further ahead. It just means you are building on a foundation that was never poured properly.

This is about time, not perfectionism

Everyone I coach is busy. You have got kids, a job, and running is the thing you are actually trying to protect time for. So strength work has to earn its place, which means it needs to be efficient and it needs to actually work.

Progressing properly through the fundamentals first is what makes that possible. Skip it and you waste weeks of gym time that produces very little, which is exactly the outcome a busy person can least afford.

What to expect early on

Some muscle soreness in the first few weeks is normal and even a reasonably good sign. It usually means a muscle is finally being asked to work that was not before. Glutes, hamstrings, and the muscles around the hip are common spots.

The key is knowing the difference between productive soreness in th

Proof: What This Looked Like For Parvin

“I was going to the gym. I was not training.”

Parvin

MorrFit client · fat down, muscle up in 8 to 10 weeks · 2kg lost

Parvin had been going to 6am group classes five days a week for three years, with no real change to show for it, and at times even putting weight on. The missing piece was never effort. It was that nobody had ever taught her the fundamentals or asked her to listen to her own body instead of just following the class. Once we started from scratch, properly building her movement patterns and pairing training with real rest, everything shifted. Eight to ten weeks in, she had the visible change she had been chasing for three years: fat down, muscle gained, and 2kg lost without dieting.

Read Parvin’s full story