The Secrets to Exercise Analysis
Learning to analyse exercise is not easy.
Part of it is the baggage. The fitness world hands us a cartoon version of how movement works, and most of us haven't had to "see" a force since high-school physics.
The bigger problem is that bodies don't hold still. A block on a slope stays put while you study it. Your client is already in the next position before you've finished reading the last one. Analyzing live movement is like trying to paint a portrait while sitting on a speedboat.
So simplify it. Hit the freeze button.
Photograph the top and bottom positions of a rep and run your analysis on those two stills. Working from someone else's video? Take a well-timed screenshot at each end. In almost every case, the start and end positions tell you what's happening in between.
A Turkish get-up might lose some detail that way, but a Turkish get-up isn't an exercise in any useful sense. It's a weighted dance routine.
Once you have still images, the work gets much easier. You can picture, or even draw, the forces acting on the body and the angle at which they meet it. That alone points you to the muscles doing the work.
Want to go deeper? If your anatomy is solid, sketch the line of pull of the muscles in that position too. The ones aligned with the resistance are opposing it, which is where the stimulus lands. The rest are still involved, but their job is managing the joint rather than moving the load.
Coach Benny Demonstrates Spine & Trunk and Hip Exercise Anatomy to Personal Trainers
There is a LOT of learning and understanding that goes into effective exercise analysis and design.
Seasoned coaches can eyeball angles on the fly, but that isn't how anyone learned to do it, and it isn't how the best of us crack the genuinely tricky cases. We still freeze the frame.
So don't throw yourself in at the deep end. Pause it, then measure up.
This way of looking is the foundation of everything we teach on RTS Level 1.