Natural Movement

Nick | 10/28/2013 | 6

We spend a lot of time crawling, moving around on all fours and just exploring movement here.  This might seem like an afterthought or something just thrown in to torture you before we get to the real work.  In my opinion, as much as anything else we do (and maybe even more so for some of us), these natural movement pattens are where the real work gets done.

Rather than have you read through another one of my rants, I figured hearing it from someone else might not be a bad thing.  So today I’m referencing a quote from Erwan Le Corre, a fitness professional for whom I have much respect and take much inspiration.  (Look him up at movenat.com).  It’s long, but well worth the read.  He starts with his retort to another fitness professional’s view of squatting.  Again, these are all just opinions, but interesting things to think about none the less.  If nothing else, I hope it inspires you to continue exploring new movement in and outside the gym.  Enjoy!

STR:

Pull volume training

EMOM 20

*each round finishes with either 5 hollow rocks (odd minutes) or 5 supermans (even minutes)

WOD:

6 rounds

10 1-armed kettle bell cleans (one arm per round)
25′ front racked kettle bell carry
75′ shuttle sprint
25′ bear crawl sandbag drag

_”What is Your approach to rebuilding the squat pattern in persons who have lost that pattern?”

_”Squat more, squat as frequently as you can, and stop mentally jerking off about it. Consistency is the key.

Practice all the many other moves that deserve much attention too, and that support overall mobility: kneeling, half-kneeling, lateral bent sit etc,.

Stop believing that, if you could improve your range of motion in the squat, then you’d have addressed and solved the problem of your lack of mobility for good.

Understand that you are not fixing the squat by just fixing the squat,; you are fixing the squat, and all the rest of your functional limitations, by a comprehensive approach to movement practice and lifestyle. You certainly can see mobility as a supplemental training, another task to your long to-do-list of fitness tasks. But here’s the deal: mobility is first a birthright, and then the outcome of a healthy natural movement behavior; and if you have lost a lot of your original, natural mobility, it is simply, and primarily, because you have not been attentive to maintaining a healthy natural movement behavior.

Restore a healthy natural movement behavior and you will restore mobility. I am not saying that specific strategies, or therapy, won’t help, of course not, both can be extremely helpful…but both will fail to last long-term in the absence of the proper movement behavior. The proper, healthy, natural movement behavior is that, just like kids do, you are going to squat, kneel, crawl, sit in many ways, and move in many ways, very frequently and every day. That is the secret. Mobility training a few minutes every day is helpful…but it is like drinking ginseng thinking it will fully compensate for your industrial diet…it won’t. You keep thinking of the less than 5% of movement activity that will make a difference…and I am telling you that you are still missing the 95% that are lacking in your life. So think “range of motion” not just in term of how much mobility you have, but how many movements you are practicing regularly. Embrace movement, movement as whole, and not just one particular movement pattern because you were told that this particular pattern is the end all and be all of mobility.: it is not.

Restore a healthy natural movement behavior and you will, on top of mobility, develop, or restore, and then maintain stability, coordination, balance, elasticity, strength, power, endurance, spatial awareness, peripheral vision, alertness, responsiveness, breathing control, postural integrity, mindfulness, will, courage, fortitude, relaxation,…whatever particular adaptation, physical and mental, and which you need for real-life physical competency.

If you are not isolating muscles, that’s already a GREAT start. But don’t isolate movements too much either. Don’t compartmentalize movement: here’s the mobility compartment, here’s the strength compartment, here’s the metabolic compartment etc… Again, compartmentalization can certainly be helpful and effective sometimes, but do not compartmentalize too much, if not systematically and exclusively: muscles don’t work in isolation…movements don’t either.

Last, keep in mind that a practical path of movement practice is, in essence, adapted and adaptable to varied environmental and situational demands. Keep movement in context both physically and mentally. If you’re squatting just for mobility, then mentally it becomes a chore that is performed with a different mindset than the original mindset that precedes most of human movement: practicality. Now if you are squatting because it is a fundamental, practical, useful, natural human movement, and practice ALL other natural movements for the exact same reason, then your movements, and yourself doing the movements, become an expression of your human nature, of who you are as a being. Doing pull-ups? You are climbing…and there’s more to climbing, hell yeah, much much more. Squatting? You are stalking, hiding, resting, working on the ground, eating, pooping…not doing a “mobility drill”. Apply this reasoning to every movement skill. Try it, try keeping such an approach in mind whenever you are moving or training anything physically. It is a powerful mindset that generates a profound sense of relevance, meaning, purpose, usefulness, and satisfaction as you perform the movement. Movement is not just something you believe you “have” to do any longer, it is who you choose to be, a behavior that reflects the breadth and depth of your ancestral, biological, animal human nature.”

– Erwin Le Corre