The First Four: Stand, Walk, Run, Throw

Functional Patterns trains four movements before anything else: stand, walk, run and throw. They're the four things a human body did for a few hundred thousand years before anyone built a gym, and nearly every other movement, lifting, climbing, kicking, swinging, is built out of them. At Kinetic Blueprint they're also the four things we measure, because a pattern you can't measure is a pattern you can't prove you changed.

Key takeaways

• Stand, walk, run, throw. Everything else is a combination.
• They're first because they're oldest. The body's structure was built around them.
• Each one shows up on an assessment: posture, gait, running mechanics, the throwing chain.
• The point isn't to do them. It's to re-test them and watch the numbers move.

In this article

• Why four, and why these four
• Stand
• Walk
• Run
• Throw
• Why the order matters
• Who this is for
• Where this piece comes from

Why four, and why these four

Functional Patterns calls them the First Four, and their piece on the subject makes the case from anthropology: permanent bipedalism is one of the defining features of our species, it freed the hands, and the body that resulted is organised around standing upright, walking and running on two legs, and throwing with the arm the legs freed up. The movements weren't chosen by a coach. They were identified from what the human skeleton is built to do.

We'd put the practical version this way. If you're going to train anything, train the things your body does ten thousand times a day whether you train them or not. You can skip the squat rack. You can't skip walking.

Stand

Standing is the base. Where your head sits over your ribcage, where your ribcage sits over your pelvis, and how the feet load the floor. Get it wrong and every other pattern starts from a lean.

That's why AI posture analysis is the first measurement in every assessment here. It gives us the stack from the front and side, at rest and under simple movement, so we know what the other three patterns are starting from. And it's why posture correction at Kinetic Blueprint isn't a list of cues. Standing is a result of the three patterns below it, so we train those and watch the standing change.

Walk

Walking is the most repeated movement in a human life, and the one with the most evidence that it matters. A pooled analysis of nine cohorts, 34,485 adults over 65, found that walking speed predicted survival, with lower mortality for every 0.1 m/s of gait speed, and that gait speed with age and sex predicted survival as accurately as a panel of chronic conditions and clinical measures (PMID 21205966). How you walk is a health number.

It's also where most pain lives. Hips that don't extend hand their job to the lumbar spine every step. A pelvis that doesn't rotate makes the low back rotate for it. Gait video catches all of it in slow motion, which is why it's in every tier of our assessment.

Run

Running is walking with a flight phase, and it exposes everything walking hides. The ground force roughly doubles, so a hip that drops a little when you walk drops a lot when you run, and the knee underneath it knows.

The good news is that running mechanics change with training. A 2022 review found that gait retraining in distance runners reliably changes mechanics, raising step rate and lowering the impact loading rate on the body (PMID 35128941). That's the pattern we build on our run performance track, and it's why we video runners rather than lecture them.

Throw

Throwing is the pattern that ties the legs to the hands. The back foot drives, the hips turn, the trunk rotates, the ribcage opens, and the arm comes through last carrying energy the legs made.

Sports medicine calls this the kinetic chain, and a 2012 framework paper lays it out: force in an upper-limb task builds from the ground up, proximal to distal, so a deficit in the legs or trunk shows up at the shoulder (PMID 22666599). That's why our shoulder pain work starts at the feet and why the swing and throw track exists. You don't need to play a sport to need a throw. You need one every time you reach, carry or push.

Why the order matters

Functional Patterns argues that people with chronic pain or plateaus should master the First Four before chasing anything else, because the other movements are derived from them. We agree, with one addition that's the whole of our method.

The four are also the four things you can measure. Standing has a posture score. Walking has a gait video. Running has a step rate and a loading rate. Throwing has a chain you can watch from the ground up. So we don't just train them. We measure them, train them, and measure them again, and the number moving is how we know the pattern did.

Who this is for

If you've trained for years and you're not sure what any of it was for, this is for you. Four movements, each one measurable, each one the base for the next.

The Complimentary Consultation is $0 and includes a movement analysis. The Foundational Assessment at $279 adds gait video, AI posture analysis and an InBody scan, with a plan built from your numbers. You can read more about how Functional Patterns works in Austin before you come in.

Where this piece comes from

This article builds on Functional Patterns' piece "FP First Four: The Foundations of Human Movement". Functional Patterns is the biomechanics system every practitioner at Kinetic Blueprint is certified in, and the First Four are their framework. The measurements, the research references and the Austin studio are ours.

Kinetic Blueprint does not diagnose, treat, or cure any condition.