Most exercise content falls into one of two categories. The first is what I think of as gym bro programming — sets, reps, progressive overload, macros, a relentless focus on output metrics and the mirror. The second is the vague functional medicine platitude: movement is medicine, get outside, walk more. Both contain truth. Neither is the whole picture.
What I want to describe here is the exercise philosophy I have developed across 37 years of practice — as an athletics and boxing coach from the age of 18, through an MSc in Coaching Studies and Applied Physiology, and now as a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner working with clients whose health challenges range from complex hormonal dysfunction to post-surgical rehabilitation. The exercises I choose are chosen for specific reasons. Those reasons have nothing to do with how impressive they look or how much weight is on the bar.
The framework has one governing question: what does this exercise demand of the whole person, not just the muscle?
What a truly functional workout trains
The healthiest workout ever is not the one that burns the most calories, produces the most lactate, or builds the most visible muscle — though it may do all of those things as a byproduct. It is the one that simultaneously develops:
- 01Proprioception and body awareness — knowing where your body is in space without looking. The foundation of injury prevention, movement quality, and neurological health.
- 02Coordination under cognitive load — the ability to sequence complex movements correctly while thinking, talking, or fatiguing. This is a trainable skill and a strong predictor of long-term functional capacity.
- 03Psychological resilience — being asked to go again when you think you have nothing left. Not recklessly, but deliberately. The training of the quality that gets people through hard things.
- 04Nervous system regulation — the capacity to quiet down under physical demand. To perform skill when stressed. To dissociate from effort and stay present in the movement.
- 05Cardiovascular and metabolic challenge — genuine exertional demand that elevates heart rate, challenges the respiratory system, and drives positive metabolic adaptation.
- 06Musculoskeletal integrity — loading joints through full range, building the structural resilience that keeps a body functional across decades, not just seasons.
- 07The achievement of completion — the psychological experience of finishing something genuinely difficult. Not an optional extra. A measurable contribution to self-efficacy and future adherence.
No single exercise ticks every box. But a well-constructed session, using the right exercises in the right sequence, can address all seven — and leave someone feeling more capable, not just more tired.
The exercises — and why I choose them
These are not the only exercises worth doing. They are the ones I return to consistently because of what they demand and what they develop. Each one has a reason behind it that goes beyond the muscles it works.
Two kettlebells. One in each hand. The swing begins as a mini swing from the inside — one arm drives from inside to outside as the opposite outside arm swings to inside. Then hip drive accelerates the inside kettlebell while the outside arm stays controlled and still. The return is active, not passive — you control the deceleration to set up the exchange. One to two minute sets.
What makes this exercise is the continuous alternation. The brain has to manage which arm is where, what phase the hips are in, and what is coming next — simultaneously. Clients who arrive in a hurry, already three steps ahead of themselves, are stopped dead by this. You cannot rush it. You cannot do it on autopilot. You have to be here, now, in the movement — and that is the point.
The cardiovascular demand builds quickly. The breathing becomes a rhythm that anchors the coordination. By the end of a two-minute set, people who arrived jangling with the business of the day have been quietly forced into the present moment by the simple requirement of not dropping a kettlebell on their foot.
A standard kettlebell swing is excellent. The alternating version adds the coordination layer — the constant decision-making between arms, the proprioceptive demand of knowing where the exchange point is, the discipline not to let the outside arm assist when it should be holding. It turns a good exercise into a brain training exercise with a cardiovascular engine.
Start in a press-up position — hands on the floor, one foot on the Swiss ball, one foot on the floor. Lower into the press-up. As you press back up, swap the legs — the foot on the ball comes to the floor, the foot on the floor goes to the ball. As the leg lands on the ball and the other touches the floor, simultaneously lower into the next press-up. The leg transfer facilitates a deeper range. The effort to come back out is assisted by the leg position switch, which momentarily offloads the elevated leg. Continuous movement. No lockout. No natural rest point.
This is the exercise where clients discover they have more range than they thought — because the coordination of the leg exchange encourages the range that ego or caution would normally prevent. The absence of a lockout creates constant muscular tension. Lactate builds. The cardiovascular challenge becomes genuine within thirty seconds. And underneath all of it, the brain is continuously tracking where the ball is, timing the leg landing with the descent, and making the whole thing look less chaotic than it feels.
A standard press-up is a fine exercise. This version adds proprioception, coordination between upper and lower body, constant tension through eliminated lockout, and the psychological challenge of a movement that feels genuinely complex until the pattern is learned — and then feels almost meditative. It also quietly addresses range of motion resistance in people who habitually hold back.
Stand on one leg with a slight knee bend to engage foot and hip mechanics. Flex forward at the hip — the standing leg's glutes engage, the trail leg rises behind, and the arms extend laterally at shoulder blade height. The hip joint becomes the fulcrum. The upper body and the raised leg counterbalance each other. From this position — arms out like wings, body horizontal, one leg grounded — rotate left as far as you can maintain alignment, then right. Then return upright and repeat on the other leg.
All three glute muscles are working throughout: gluteus maximus for the hip extension pattern, gluteus medius for frontal plane stability, gluteus minimus for fine control of the hip joint. The rotation component is where the exercise becomes a test of stubbornness. How far can you turn while keeping both glutes engaged, maintaining spinal alignment, and not letting the trail leg drop as a shortcut? The honest answer for most people on the first attempt is: not very far.
This exercise requires a degree of determination that is genuinely character-revealing. The people who rush through it get very little from it. The people who slow down, engage properly, and accept that good form here is harder than it looks — those people are developing something that goes beyond the glutes.
Single-leg stance work is foundational and the evidence for it in fall prevention, gluteus medius strength, and knee/hip pain is strong. The rotation addition takes it from a stability exercise to a full proprioceptive and neuromuscular challenge — recruiting the rotator muscles of the hip and spine, demanding focus throughout the range, and training the quality of staying committed to a difficult position when the easier option is to come out of it.
Light weight. That is the first instruction and the most important one. The Turkish get-up is not a strength exercise in the way people usually mean that word. It is an integration exercise — an assessment of how well the core connects the upper body to the lower body and allows the frame to move from horizontal to vertical as one coordinated system.
The focus I give it: feel the integration of the core at every transition. From the floor to the flexed position, notice how the core is managing the relationship between shoulder and hip. In the lunge position — both knees at ninety degrees, pelvis neutral — pause and feel how vertical the elevated arm is. Not just held up, but stacked: wrist over elbow over shoulder, with a genuinely stable shoulder rather than a compensated one. Then the reverse — and the core as a brake on the descent, absorbing the transitions rather than letting gravity do the work.
Several minutes continuous. The goal is smooth — not clunky, not rushed, not rested between reps. A good Turkish get-up should look unhurried. It should also reveal immediately when someone's latissimus dorsi is short (the arm drifts forward as they rise), when shoulder mechanics are compromised (the weight wobbles on the ascent), or when the core is not truly integrated (the transitions are jarring rather than controlled).
There is nowhere to hide in a Turkish get-up. Ego has no role in this exercise. The person who picks up a heavier weight than their movement quality supports will tell you everything about how they approach challenge — and the conversation about why they did that is often more useful than the exercise itself.
Heavy get-ups train strength. Light get-up flow trains awareness, integration, and the proprioceptive connection between upper and lower body that most people have lost through years of sitting. Several continuous minutes makes it a breathing and endurance challenge as well. It also gives clients enough repetitions to actually improve during the session — which matters for the psychological experience of the workout.
Forward, reverse, lateral — and then the clock positions that demand internal and external hip rotation, adduction and abduction at both the hip and the knee. The knee learns its job: to bend in one plane only. The hip and core become the decision-makers for everything else. Once the knee understands this arrangement and the body trusts it, the exercise can progress.
The progressions are where this exercise reveals its depth. Lateral flexion — reaching to the side as you lunge. Rotation — turning the torso into and away from the leading leg. Forward bending — reaching toward the floor in the lunge position. And with a double-grip medicine ball, adding load that raises the exertional demands and focuses the hands and eyes. These are the movement patterns of throwing sports, of boxing, of anyone who needs a robust low back and upper back in real life rather than only in the sagittal plane.
I have used this with clients who initially could only manage a forward lunge without losing balance. Over time — weeks and months of working through the clock positions — they develop a quality of hip and lower body robustness that shows up in how they move through daily life: getting in and out of cars, navigating uneven surfaces, carrying things at awkward angles. The body gets better at the shapes it practises.
The body does not only move in straight lines. Standard forward lunges build quad and glute strength effectively but leave the hip's rotational capacity, frontal plane stability, and lateral loading patterns undertrained. The clock lunge develops the full three-dimensional capacity of the hip — which is what the hip is anatomically designed for and rarely trained for.
This one looks simple. Alternating leg lunges — forward, controlled, rhythmic. The sophistication is in how it is coached. Once a client has their eye in — moving smoothly, rhythm established, form running cleanly — I start a conversation. The TV. Sport. The weather. Something entirely unrelated to the exercise.
If the form collapses when they talk, that tells you something. It tells you the movement has not yet become truly integrated — it still requires conscious attention to maintain. The goal is for the lunges to continue without interruption, speed, depth, and alignment unchanged, while the conversation flows. When that happens, the movement has shifted from a skill being performed to a skill being expressed — the difference between reading the notes and playing the music.
Then I change the speed. Faster, then slower, then back to comfortable tempo — and watch whether the quality holds across the variation. Speed change under conversation is a genuine nervous system challenge. The clients who manage it well are typically the ones whose proprioceptive system has genuinely integrated the movement pattern. The ones who can't are not failing — they're showing you exactly what needs more practice.
How many lunges someone can do under ideal conditions of focus and intention tells you about their strength and endurance. How well they lunge while talking about last night's television tells you about the quality of their neuromuscular integration — whether the movement lives in their body or still requires their full attention to perform. One of those is a much better predictor of how they will move through daily life.
Feet on the Swiss ball, hands on the floor. The sequence: press-up — prone jackknife — push and pull. The push: extend the arms to push your straight body back until the hips approach the ball (depending on starting position, ball size, and client). The pull: with a straight torso, draw the body back to start. Then repeat — press-up, jackknife, push, pull — to a degree of genuine exhaustion. Not form breakdown. Not recklessness. The exhaustion of having genuinely committed to something difficult and seen it through.
This is the finisher concept applied properly. The finisher exists to show a client something about themselves — that they have more left than they thought, that the point at which they would normally stop is not the point at which they have to stop. There is a particular quality of effort that comes when someone is genuinely tired, genuinely challenged, and chooses to continue anyway. That quality — call it determination, stubbornness, resilience — is trainable. This exercise trains it.
By the end of a set, there is usually a sense of quite a lot happening simultaneously — brain and brawn working together at the edge of capacity. The sense of achievement when it is done is not incidental. It is one of the reasons I use this exercise. People leave that session having done something genuinely hard, and they remember it. That memory is part of the programme.
Most workouts taper. This one peaks at the end deliberately. The psychological experience of finishing at maximum effort — and completing it — is different from the experience of finishing at reduced effort. The body remembers the last thing it did. Ending on achievement rather than fatigue changes the relationship with the next session.
On going quiet
There is a coaching choice I make consistently across all of these exercises — and it is possibly the most important one. Sometimes I talk a client through an exercise to help them dissociate: the narration provides external focus, pulls attention away from discomfort, and allows the movement pattern to run without interference. Other times I let them talk. And other times I make clear that this is a no-talking moment — full focus, full presence, nothing else.
The distinction matters because talking during a complex movement almost always degrades the form. Not because the client is weak or careless, but because the prefrontal cortex cannot fully manage both complex verbal output and precise neuromuscular coordination simultaneously. When they stop talking, they can often suddenly do something they couldn't do a moment ago. The nervous system quiets down. They tune in to the requirements of the movement. And in that quiet, even someone who considers themselves physically untalented can produce genuinely good movement quality.
"It is always easy to work hard and apply effort. Calming the nervous system down, going quiet, and being fully present has a different quality of benefit — a kind of quality over quantity for a healthy, functional body."
The ability to perform skill under stress — to do the difficult thing well when the circumstances are not ideal, when you are tired, when there is noise and pressure and the temptation to revert to habit — is one of the most transferable capacities a person can develop. It applies to sport. It applies to work. It applies to the acute and chronic stressors of a real life.
A word about Diana
I want to tell you about Diana.
Diana is 86 years old. She weighs 46 kilograms. In her medical history: double hip replacement following hip fractures, stroke, cancer, a broken neck, pneumonia, and half her thyroid removed. That is not a typo or a dramatisation. That is her history, told matter-of-factly by a woman who has the strongest spirit I have encountered in 37 years of working with people.
I asked her about it once. She thought for a moment and said, with complete equanimity: "I only do the big things." She was not being dramatic. She meant it literally — she is normally well, and when she is not well, it tends to be significant. And then she gets back up. Every time.
Diana punches focus pads. Not gently. Not symbolically. She has worked up to moving and punching — combinations, varying the punches, changing direction. She hits hard. Once you have seen and felt and heard how hard Diana can punch when she has learned the mechanics and practised the timing, you do not easily entertain the idea that someone is too old, too damaged, or too fragile to train properly.
Every biomotor ability is required in pad work — strength, speed, power, endurance, coordination, agility, balance, and reaction time. Diana uses all of them. She is also, without question, one of the kindest people I have ever met — someone who, in the middle of a session where she is working as hard as she can, is thinking about other people.
I include her story here not to make a dramatic point, but because I think most people dramatically underestimate what the human body is capable of when it is trained with intelligence, patience, and appropriate challenge. The body does not stop being trainable at 60 or 70 or 80. Diana is one of my heroes. She has earned that title many times over.
What this means for your own training
You do not need a Swiss ball and a set of kettlebells and a boxing coach and 37 years of experience to apply these principles. You need the governing question: what does this exercise demand of the whole person, not just the muscle?
If the answer is "not much beyond the muscle" — if the exercise requires no coordination, no proprioceptive engagement, no psychological challenge, no breathing focus — it is not a bad exercise. But it is probably not the healthiest exercise you could be doing with that time.
The exercises described here can be scaled down, simplified, and adapted for almost any body. The Turkish get-up with no weight at all is still a profound whole-body integration drill. The stork stance without the rotation is still developing the balance, the ankle stability, and the glute engagement that most adults are lacking. The alternating lunge without the conversation test is still a fundamental movement pattern worth owning well.
Start where you are. Train what is missing, not what is already easy. Go quiet when the movement demands it. Finish hard. And if you can arrange to be inspired by someone like Diana along the way, all the better.
Understand what your body is actually doing
Exercise is one input. Your lab data tells you how it is landing — whether your cortisol rhythm supports the training load, whether your mitochondrial function is keeping pace, whether your recovery capacity matches your effort. The TDG Five-Test Programme looks at all of it together.
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