The M.A.P.P.S. System, Part 2: The Movement Map: How to Classify Every Drill You'll Ever Use

Here's a question I ask every intern on their first day:

Where does a goblet squat live?

Most of them look at me like I asked something trick. It's a squat. It's a goblet squat. It lives... in the squat section of the program?

That's not wrong. But it's not enough.

If you don't know exactly where an exercise lives in a movement taxonomy, you can't make smart decisions about what else belongs in the program around it. You end up repeating patterns you didn't mean to repeat, neglecting ones you forgot to train, and writing programs by feel instead of by design.

The movement map fixes that.

Every movement falls somewhere

At the highest level, movement splits into two categories: Gait or Locomotion and Stationary.

Gait is everything that involves the body moving through space. Running, crawling, shuffling, skipping, rolling and tumbling. It's biped (two feet), quadruped (hands and feet), or any other pattern that allows you to move from point A to point B within your environment.

Stationary is everything the body does while positioned in place — and it breaks into three types:

Ballistic — jumps, hops, bounds, throws, slams. High-velocity, high-demand movements where the goal is power output (can be extensive or intensive). Although, many jump variations can also facilitate locomotion, they will live here in my movement breakdown.

Dynamic/Integrated — your foundational movement patterns. Squat, hinge, push, pull, carry, core. These are the movement skills that transfer everywhere.

Isolated — individual muscle or joint work. Leg curls, hip flexion, shoulder external rotation. Lower transfer, but specific purpose.

Why this matters for program design

When I write a training block, I'm not just picking exercises. I'm making decisions about movement balance across all of these categories.

Am I training enough gait work relative to stationary? Am I balancing push and pull? Am I hitting ballistic patterns or only grinding through heavy loaded work? Am I using isolation where it's appropriate — not as a default, but with a reason? What does a specific athlete need as they rehab from an injury?

The taxonomy forces those questions. Without it, you're flying blind.

Take a "leg day." Most leg days are almost entirely hinge and squat — stationary, dynamic/integrated, bilateral. They miss: single-leg work, knee flexion, gait patterns, ballistic lower body, training the ankles and often any stationary work that involves the hip in the frontal or transverse plane.

This approach lets you write training program for any population. It’s not just athlete specific; the system can help you write programs for return to play, rehab, athletic development, strength development, aesthetic development or any other goal. Exercise is used to enhance movement and the system helps you understand movement.

The map doesn't let you forget what you're missing.

The Naming System

The taxonomy isn't just a classification tool — it's also a naming system.

Every exercise I write in a program follows the same order:

Setup → Equipment → Surface → Position → Grip → Direction → Movement

You don't include every field. You only include what changes the exercise. A push-up is just a push-up.
A single-leg trap bar deficit deadlift tells you everything you need to know about that exercise from the name alone. These are the variables that allow you to create exercises for any situation. Don’t have a piece of equipment, no worries, use another implement. An athlete is unable to feel the appropriate muscle, no worries, manipulate their surface or stance to help them perform the exercise to enhance the movement.

This matters for communication. When a coach or intern reads the program, they shouldn't need to ask what you mean. The name is the instruction.

It also matters for planning. When you name exercises consistently, you can look at a training block and immediately see the distribution of movement patterns, loading strategies, and demands across the week. The program becomes readable — not just executable.

The Exercise Name Generator

I've built a tool that puts this into practice. You select the fields in order — setup, equipment, surface, position, grip, direction, movement — and it generates the standardized name and shows you each component as a color-coded token. In some cases, it will pull up a video (if I have it in my library) with coaching cues.

It sounds simple. But when you use it consistently, every coach and intern on your staff is speaking the same language. No more "the one where we use the cables and you lean over" — it has a name, it has a place in the taxonomy, it has a purpose.

Coach B’s Exercise Name Generator

Next week

We've covered the paradigm and the map. Next week: Prescription — how to use exercise and program variables to individualize training without reinventing the wheel every time you write a program.