Recently I got a question from a member of our community that I thought was a good one and would lead us in a great direction in terms of understanding the concept of planar training.
The question is below:
"I was on the website looking through the articles and I found the article on Planar Training to be very good
(http://www.fitnessanywhere.com/resources/article_planar.php )
My question is regarding this article- It states in the list of exercises that a chest press is in the tranverse plane and I thought that was sagittal.
Am I wrong? I just thought the article was so well written and I want to make sure I'm understanding it correctly. Anyway you could answer this one
for me? I am always drilling myself on these planes when I put together client's programs and sometimes I get confused on certain exercises. This article helped me with that."
The planar training concept is quite revolutionary and takes some time to wrap your head around but once it becomes second nature the benefits of this approach to programming are tremendous.
While some movements are quite straightforward others are more complex as they move through angulations that seem to be a combination of planes. Still others like the chest press mentioned in the question above are just plain tricky.
I view a standard chest press as a transverse plane motion because of the action at the shoulder joint. In most chest press actions the movement begins with the arm in an abducted position and the motion is essentially horizontal adduction which occurs in the transverse plane.
My view of the motion changes if we perform this exercise starting with our elbows at our side . In this case the action at the shoulder joint is flexion which changes its planar classification to a sagittal plane movement.
The key is to look at the movement of the shoulder joint which will tell you what the planar classification should be.
I hope that this helps clarify things and I am looking forward to more discussion around this.